Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. Also this week, get up at 5am every weekday to grow your MSP, and before you do any marketing or sales, you MUST get these foundations right.

Welcome to Episode 347 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to use webinars to identify the hottest prospects

So have you ever thought of doing webinars to promote your MSP and if you have, what stopped you from actually going ahead with it? Were you worried that perhaps no one would turn up or worse than no one… one person would turn up? Or maybe you were worried about your own performance. Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them.

And let’s just address this right from the start. Yes, there is room in the world for more webinars. You might think there are too many webinars already, but that’s just because you’re inside the channel. Outside the channel, they are getting lots of webinars about the law or carpentry or manufacturing or whatever line of work your prospects are in, but they’re not hearing a lot from MSPs that are pushing technology and talking about the importance of cyber security.

There’s plenty of business out there to be won through webinars, but you’ve just got to approach it the right way.

Most MSPs think the goal of a webinar is all about getting the attendance numbers in. Get 50 people on a webinar, get big conversion rates. That’s not what it’s about at all. The real goal of a webinar is intelligence. It’s telling you something about the leads and the prospects that you’re talking to right now, the people who are in your CRM or who are connected to you on LinkedIn. I mean, even if you just look at who has done something, so who registered for a webinar in the first place?

Actually, you could take that back a step and say, who clicked the email link to have a look at the webinar that I’m promoting? Who then registered for that webinar? Who then showed up for that webinar? Who stayed for the majority of it? Who asked questions? Who booked a meeting or did something afterwards to say thank you? All of this tells you really interesting things about the leads and prospects that you are talking to. And it helps you to kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff. It helps you to show who are the hottest prospects right now and where should you be focusing all of your attention. I mean, the very fact that someone would attend your webinar or even register for your webinar that says something to you.

Now, you might know that with my members, I work either helping them to win B2B business, which is what most MSPs want, more business owners, or I help them to grow their co-managed business, so helping them to reach IT directors. And in both these instances, webinars can be a really, really powerful tool. It can help you to see who through their behaviour alone is worth me talking to. Who’s worth me following up, ringing them, sending more emails to them, sending stuff to them in the post in the mail.

Someone registering for a webinar and turning up for a webinar and being engaged with a webinar, it’s like their hand going up. These are buying signals that people are inadvertently sending to you and it’s great for you because you then know exactly who you should be following up and exactly who you should be talking to over the next couple of weeks. Now there are three, if you like, kind of three tiers of heat after a webinar. By heat, I mean, how hot is a prospect.

So the first tier is where someone has attended and they’ve asked a question or they’ve stayed to the end. So they’ve turned up, they’ve stayed engaged. In fact, if they’ve asked a ques...