Webinars: Marketing Strategy Gold to help Close More Deals (Video)

S1 00:02

Hello and welcome to this AnyMeeting webinar. My name is Costin Tuculescu. I am CEO and founder of AnyMeeting. And today, I’m joined by Andrew Bermudez, CEO and co-founder of Digsy AI. He’s actually a good buddy of mine. I was in his wedding. We’re going to have a lot of fun here today. It’s noon here in California. But it could be afternoon where you are. It could be morning. We often have an international audience. So thanks for joining us. Couple of quick housekeeping items. Want to make sure that you guys are well-aware of all of the interactivity features. At the very top of your screen, we really have two key things that we want you to focus on. One is the emoji panel, where you can tell us exactly how you feel and how we’re doing. So, right now, everybody seems to just be in the default state of a smiley face [laughter].

S2 00:54

[crosstalk].

S1 00:56

But already see somebody gave us a thumbs up. So feel free to use that for thumbs up. Heart eyes. Thumbs down. Applause. We love the feedback. Let us know how we’re doing since we’re essentially just talking at a computer. Sorry. For those of you that are only on the phone, you won’t have that feature. Apologies for that, but we’ll work on it. And then, we also have the Q&A feature that is at the top there. So if you want to send questions in, that we will address towards the end of the presentation, we’ll be happy to do so. Use that Q&A feature. Write up your question. We’ll get them in a nice list and we will address them. So the topic of today’s webinar is how to close more deals (using webinars).

S2 01:46

Yeah.

S1 01:46

And Andrew here, given his sales background and marketing background, he will walk you all through how Digsy uses webinars to grow their leads and close more deals and through some of the best practices in the industry. So, real quick, we want to give people just one or two more minutes to get it locked in and settled in. So we have a poll prepared for you. So let me go ahead and bring that up. And it’s a very quick yes or no poll. Have you used webinars to generate leads? So I’m going to kick that off here. And there we go. Have you used webinars to generate leads? And the votes are coming in live, folks. And I’ll go ahead and share those results with you guys. So, right now, it’s skewing more towards no. Okay. So that’ll certainly help us cater our conversation. So that’s very helpful. Thank you, guys. And looks like we’ve got about half of you have voted. We’ll wait just another minute or so. Then we’ll bring up the slides that we prepared for today and get that going. So, just keep in mind, you can always give us a thumbs up, thumbs down, applause, laughter, tears. I think there’s this wow emoji up there. Get creative with the emojis, folks. We love seeing those throughout the presentation. We’ll go ahead and close the poll. And as you can see the results, it’s about one-third to two-thirds haven’t used webinars to generate leads, so hopefully your content will really help people take advantage of that. Go ahead and close the poll and let me pull up the slides here. And, Andrew, why don’t you take it away. Should we get off the camera at this point so people can–

S2 03:44

I think so.

S1 03:44

–focus? All right.

S2 03:46

Yeah.

S1 03:48

All right. And let’s kick it off.

S2 03:50

Great. Thanks everybody for coming to this webinar. I know if you’re a business owner, or an entrepreneur, or in sales marketing, you’re extremely busy. A little background on myself. I’m Andrew Bermudez, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Digsy.AI. Basically, what we do is we make sales software that is very, very easy to use and very powerful. The most common complaint from sales teams, and entrepreneurs, and business owners is how hard CRMs are to use, and we solve that through Digsy and we make it really, really effective for people to generate sales, track leads, and things like that. So I’m going to focus on how we at Digsy use webinars to drive business. And [this?] came out of necessity. So the one thing that most people try to do is outreach, and direct prospecting, and things like that, putting ads, etc. But, this came out of having to do demos and show the software to different people and how it applied to their use case. Actually, I think, Costin, you had suggested doing webinars. So we started trying it. We had an email list of about 12,000 people in a specific industry that we wanted to go after in an industry of sales, and we were able to find quickly that we were able to generate 250 attendees for our first webinar, and out of those attendees, we got a ton of people who were interested in the product. But, the interesting thing is, throughout that whole webinar, we weren’t talking about our product. We were just sharing content that is valuable to the audience, like yourselves. We want to find out how you can use webinars to generate leads. I’m going to show you that today.

S2 05:32

The most important thing that we found, I’m not sure that you can attest to this, Costin, but is, how do you drive traffic to your webinar attendance? What we found the most effective is email. So, wherever you can capture an email, either on your website, or if you’ve got a database or a CRM of emails, always try to capture the email for your existing customers, prospective customers, etc. Over 75% of all of the attendees on all the webinars that we’ve done come with email and a follow-up email to them as well. So, we’ve tried Google Ads, we’ve tried Facebook ads, we’ve tried social media, and they just do not yield even close to the results that email does. So that is your best channel to get word out about your webinar. The next thing is, we just touched on this, which is important to build your email list, and that’s pretty much the first commandment of putting together these webinars is to build that email list. So, in order to attract the traffic, it’s not only having that email list, but you have to have powerful content. Is the content that you’re going to provide compelling enough for your audience to attend, your prospective customers, your prospective leads, your prospective partners, and what, really, the driver of that is driving value. So it just depends on your business. If you guys have questions, put them on the Q&A on how it applies to your business, but who is your audience? Are they growing their businesses? Are you a sales software company? Are you a recruiter? Are your customers or prospective customers concerned about attracting and retaining talent? If you’re providing some sort of manufacturing efficiency, things like lowering cost, increasing profitability. So, that is your angle, things that are really important to that specific individual who is going to make the decision to buy your product or service. You want to make sure they hit what drives value, and share valuable content with them.

S1 07:41

And just my two cents on that is, you almost want to be overly generous in the content that you provide this audience. Anything that you’ve learned through hardship and whatever, that’s the really valuable stuff. Helping people learn from  your mistakes so they don’t have to repeat them, and it helps establish you as a thought leader, and that’s really what that content can help you achieve.

S2 08:08

That’s well said. I would definitely agree that being overly generous with the content is phenomenal. We’ve gotten so many prospects and customers that have said, “Hey, you know I didn’t think of doing business that way. You guys share great content and I became a customer because of it.” So the important thing is when you are reaching out and trying to attract traffic to your webinars, make it super easy for people to register for the event and add it to their calendar. No back and forth. Remember that 60% of the emails are read on mobile devices. So if I can’t get it on my phone and add it to my calendar on my phone very quickly, it’s going to pretty tough. And luckily, AnyMeeting makes that really easy for us. So, for example, when we get the email announcements, great text, great graphics, a lot of white space, not a lot of text there, and the call to action is really easily seen at the bottom. So I’m able to click that and then I’m able to choose my time zone in case I’m outside of California and I’m able to just, as soon as I register, click the link and I’m able to add it my Outlook, my Google Calendar, etc., so that’s very important. We’ve tested that before at Digsy, and not putting the link, it does have a dramatic drop in attendance. The other thing too, is if you’re putting webinars together, make sure to always record them. By default, AnyMeeting records them, which is great and then sends them to the attendees, but you can you use that content. How we use it at Digsy is we’ll take little snippets that we’ll promote on YouTube, social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we’re able to repurpose those things to either share with prospects or just have it meandering in the Internet or put it in a blog post, etc., to attract more people that are looking for that specific content. So what you’ll notice is if you try to Google Digsy.AI, you’ll find videos about sales tips, you’ll find videos about using technology, making life easier for somebody to generate more meetings and close more deals.

S1 10:10

And just a couple of data points, being a webinar company here, what we’ve seen is your live webinar really only gets about 30% attendance of all the people that registered, right? That’s kind of been the statistics. So, therefore, through your recording, you get this very long living body of content that you can, as you mentioned, leverage on multiple sites. What we do is we turn our webinar recordings into a blog post. We can also post it on YouTube, although we have been doing it ourselves personally. But yeah, now you basically have this asset, and how you leverage that asset can just deliver continuous value.

S2 10:56

Right. And when you have it on YouTube and you different things and you’re promoted on social media like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook fan pages, things like that, LinkedIn works great for this. Sharing the video on LinkedIn and groups. It regenerates it’s long tail, right? Because what you’re doing, if you have 30% attendance, now you’ve expanded reach to people that didn’t attend, and look at the recording and derive value from it. What you can also do is, you can share that information in snippets. So the content you generate once, you’re going to do that webinar anyways, but now you can use it as kind of a passive lead generation asset, like what you were mentioning.

S1 11:35

Yeah. And I love the snippets idea too, take that– a couple minutes here, a couple minutes there because some people don’t really want to sit through a whole 40-minute webinar.

S2 11:43

Yeah. We should probably [crosstalk] with this part.

S1 11:45

We should do that with this. Let’s make a snippet of us talking about snippets.

S2 11:49

Yeah [laughter]. We should do that. So make sure to record your webinars, that’s very important to do so. The next thing here, let me see if I can move the slide. All right. Is here’s something interesting that’s been working very well for us. So, a lot of times when we’re chatting about a specific topic in a webinar, it’s very important for you to gauge the interest of a potential customer. So a lead that attended your webinar. So, a neat thing would be is when you’re generating content, like for example, we’re going to be sharing this presentation with you after the event sometime in the next few days.

S1 12:29

Yeah. And I’ll actually also go ahead and share it now because we got that feature. Boom. So now, there’s the download link so folks can actually download it live.

S2 12:38

Great. So, one thing that we can see is you can create– for people that didn’t attend the webinar that don’t have this download link, you can create a landing page and then people who actually download the presentation or let’s say, for example, they want to view a recording and they didn’t attend. You kind of are able to capture their contact information and that gives you insight into who’s highly engaged with you. So make sure that you create a landing page. You can do it in multiple forms, you can do it on Unbounce, collect their email, or their contact information, phone number, whatever your business really commands that you need information for and you can post the files in the download just on Dropbox or Google Drive. I mean, AnyMeeting has great ways to do this easily just from one technical solution. But what that does is it actually enables you to be able to gauge the interest of things. So, a person who comes back after the webinar or somebody who goes and submits their email and contact information to view it, has a high degree of interest in that topic. Otherwise, they wouldn’t go through that. So, somebody that just attended your webinar is less likely to buy than somebody who came by and actually revisited the materials, downloaded them, etc. So, in the email page or in the landing page, it’s really good to have, for example, an email capture form and that leads them to the downloads and the handouts and a good thing is, hey, promote your business in that landing page as well. So for example, we have a YouTube video and then you can download the presentation materials below it but then we have a call to action, a CTA, at the bottom for the product. So, I would definitely do that, make it easier for somebody to book your time or schedule a demo, etc. These are things that work very well for us and [laughter]–

S1 14:35

I think [inaudible] [laughter].

S2 14:37

Yeah.

S1 14:38

Just as a quick little feature information because we record the entire webinar, we actually host it on behalf of our customers. You can actually have your recording collect the name and email before it’s able to be viewed, so we sort of automate everything that you just described but what I wanted to do with that–

S2 14:59

By the way, let me interject, that is actually my favorite feature about AnyMeeting is not having to create a Google form and not having to create a landing page and still be able to see, okay, who’s interested in my contact app.

S1 15:12

My favorite feature is the emojis [laughter]. But real quick, what I wanted to ask about, so you have this screenshot on the slide here of a real nice landing page, which I assume is behind an email collection form, right? So your first step is to get the email address.

S2 15:32

So that’s the previous slide. So right here is the– before you get to that page with the content–

S1 15:37

You get this one, right?

S2 15:37

–I get this. Yeah.

S1 15:38

So what do you guys use? What do you guys use to create this page?

S2 15:41

This is made in Unbounce.

S1 15:43

Unbounce. Okay, so–

S2 15:43

Unbounce.

S1 15:44

And then, where does Unbounce send the email address to?

S2 15:47

It’ll send you an email and it’ll– in the page, you have a lead capture form and it’ll keep a list of everybody’s–

S1 15:55

So Unbounce is keeping the list of emails that I’ve shown?

S2 15:57

Yeah.

S1 15:58

Okay. And then–

S2 15:58

And you can save it with mail [inaudible] and other things and I think they might be able to integrate with AnyMeeting as well.

S1 16:03

Sure. Of course, of course. So you got your– you’ve got this page built through Unbounce, you’re collecting the emails there, you’re probably putting them in some kind of CRM, and then Unbounce then takes you to this page. Is this page also built in Unbounce?

S2 16:16

Yes. Right.

S1 16:18

Okay. So there’s a secondary page and you’re basically using Unbounce as a real, nice, and easy landing page [crosstalk]?

S2 16:23

It’s a template. Yeah. So, for example, I could tell my mother and my mother could go on Unbounce and create a landing page and–

S1 16:30

The old mother test.

S2 16:31

Yeah. It’s just Wiziwig so what you see is what you get. So they have designs and things like that to make it super easy for somebody who’s not as technical as some others [crosstalk].

S1 16:41

And then let me ask you, so if a lead ends up on this page, right? So now you know– do you know that they filled out the first one and got to here and then do you know that they downloaded the presentation and the email and the call or–?

S2 16:54

I do not. No. We could do that if– we’d have to go a little bit more [crosstalk].

S1 16:58

But somebody downloads all three versus somebody that just downloads one, there may be different lead quality indicators for a [crosstalk]?

S2 17:05

Exactly. Exactly. But that would be interesting too, sort of as a next step but the first step is trying to see who wants to download the information. Those download links that we have right there are actually just links to a Dropbox.

S1 17:18

A Dropbox?

S2 17:19

Mm-hmm.

S1 17:19

Okay. So, right now, your process is mostly you get the email, right? But probably the next iteration on this would be to know, then, which of these they’ve downloaded, how many of them, one or three, and all that. So, think back to kind of for our audience, is all these different levels of lead quality, right?

S2 17:41

Yeah. It’s lead scoring.

S1 17:43

Lead scoring and depending on the amount of effort you want to put into it and the resources you can spend on it, you’re going to be able to qualify it as leads and score them.

S2 17:53

Yep. And AnyMeeting makes it really easy for me to see if somebody has viewed the recording, so I could just use AnyMeeting. I don’t need to go to a landing page but we just like designing our own landing pages [crosstalk].

S1 18:06

Yeah. And these look great andthey’re branded and all that stuff. So, very cool. So now that you’re kind of understanding your lead quality, right? Based on, okay, here’s– so do you guys also score them on let’s say people who registered but didn’t attend?

S2 18:22

Yes.

S1 18:22

People who registered and attended and viewed?

S2 18:26

Yes. So I’ll give a little bit of color because I think that’s important. So, if somebody registered but didn’t attend, we consider them cold. If somebody attended, we consider them warm. If somebody attended and downloaded and viewed the recording or downloaded the materials, we consider them warm hot. So, what we’ll do is, when they download it we’ll immediately follow up with them saying, “Hey, I’m happy that you checked out the information, blah, blah, blah, and we’d love to see if you need any help with managing your leads that you’re generating and all of that.”

S1 19:06

Okay. And we’ve got one quick– I’m just going to reply to this person in chat. Try refreshing. All right.

S2 19:18

So what we–

S1 19:19

So, I think this line here is kind of basically, to sum it all up, people who download the content.

S2 19:25

Right. So, basically, what we just went over is people who download, who interact with your content after the fact are more engaged, which means they’re higher likely that they’ll buy and that allows you to prioritize. So, let’s say if you have 100, or 300, or 1,000 people attend your webinar, you’re not going to have time to follow-up with everybody. And you don’t have as– I hope you don’t have as many sales reps to attend to everybody but I guess it allows you to prioritize the ones that are highly likely to convert first.

S1 19:50

Exactly. And you want to call those people right away.

S2 19:53

First, yes, yes.

S1 19:53

Okay. So we’re at a point where we have a couple of polls for you folks. We got two quick polls. One, what CRMD is. So we’ll go ahead and fire up that poll and let’s see what people say. We’ll get on camera here just while things are happening. We’re just looking at the results coming in. And sure, there’s a lot of– there are a lot of solutions out there. Salesforce, obviously, is one of the biggest ones and I expected a lot in the other bucket.

S2 20:35

Yeah [laughter].

S1 20:37

The other bucket. And, folks, if you’re voting in the other bucket, why don’t you go ahead and use the chat feature to just kind of let us know what you’re using. What other CRMs you’re using out there. It’d be great to see what falls in that other bucket. Act! Okay. Daylite, Contactually. Awesome. Very cool. So, yeah, Salesforce really not all that popular with this kind of SMV audience that we tend to cater to.

S2 21:07

Expected.

S1 21:08

It’s expected, yeah.

S2 21:09

Or spreadsheets [laughter].

S1 21:11

Spreadsheets. Yeah. Yeah. And it really depends. I mean, if you have a high volume business, you definitely need some sort of software but if you have a high deal sized but low volume business, you can get away with spreadsheets.

S2 21:24

Right. [crosstalk].

S1 21:25

All right, cool. All right. Great, guys. And then we’ve got one more poll for you, which is really– we want to understand the size of your sales team. So let’s go ahead and bring that up, okay? I like what Douglas said, “Our own brew of database goodness [laughter].”

S2 21:45

I love it.

S1 21:45

I would like to sample that brew.

S2 21:46

Love it. It’s a craft brew.

S1 21:49

It’s a craft brew of database goodness, high IBU content. All right. And, looks like, again, we’re skewing on the smaller side, which is great. That’s exactly our SMV audience, and very, very helpful.

S2 22:06

Right. Thank you guys for sharing that information. So, as you’re generating leads from these webinars, you’re going to have hundreds of attendees, so–

S1 22:17

I think we keep the video on.

S2 22:18

Yeah, that’s fine. So make sure it’s lightweight. I mean, if you already have a solution that works for you, fantastic. But when you’re going to be touching and following up with people who have downloaded the content, but then you want to move down the funnel, or up the funnel where you’ve already worked those leads, but then you want to work people who didn’t show any engagement afterwards, but they might be a potential customer. What I would suggest is you need something that’s very, very lightweight, easy for a sales team or yourself to follow up. And it is a shameless plug, but at the same time, that’s exactly what Digsy.AI helps you do. You can snap a picture of a business card, and it’ll transcribe and put into Digsy.AI for you. Also, what you can do is that it connects directly with your email, your Gmail, or your Outlook 365. So any interactions that you’re having with those prospects are automatically logged to the contact record. For example here, it doesn’t matter whether I use my iPhone, or I use my Apple Mail, or Outlook, etc. The integration is actually at the service level. So I can, for example, see here that any replies or emails that I send get logged to that contact record.

S1 23:31

And it’s Air & Ground. We’re trying that now.

S2 23:33

Yeah. Air & Ground.

S1 23:33

So just make sure she sees the seminar.

S2 23:34

Oh, that’s right. Yeah.

S1 23:36

We’re actually switched to trying it because we’re [crosstalk]–

S2 23:37

Oh, really?

S1 23:38

–thought she was very cool.

S2 23:38

Yeah, she’s great. She’s also a customer. So, for example, setting up a follow-up date, usually you have to do click, click, click on creating an activity. I mean, if you’re using Act!, you’re probably familiar with that, or using Salesforce. You just click it, drops in a calendar, and then there’s a follow-up date that they have. You get an email that you’ve got a follow-up due, and then literally, you could just click that follow-up button and it automatically creates an email for you to follow up. So it makes it really easy for you to just crank through those. You can pick up the phone, you can do a lot of it, but it’s really lightweight for a lot of things like that. So I would like to summarize some of the things that we’ve talked about. So, webinars can drive leads, and they can help you grow your business. Two things, that you’re able to develop authority with your audience, especially the more webinars you do on a specific topic, the more the people will trust you, and you can use that content to have it constantly market on your behalf on the Internet to drive even more leads. So it’s an investment more than anything that pays off dividends over time and you can repurpose snippets to the content. So it’s a very powerful marketing tool. The second thing is that throughout this whole process, we’ve talked about holes, we’ve talked about being able to download the materials, being able to do things, and AnyMeeting’s a perfect example of being able to easily do that without having to piece different things together. So I can use AnyMeeting for– I mean, some of you on this webinar are already customers of AnyMeeting. So if you don’t use that feature, I would very much use it in the sense that those are the people you want to go after first, and share high-quality content, make it very easy for you to touch base and follow up, and integrate with your email, or you’re pursuing those leads, and use holes, because what’s happening is all this information gets recorded, right?

S1 25:30

Sure, yeah.

S2 25:31

So, I can actually view, as a user, I can view everybody who’s using Salesforce, not using Salesforce. And follow up who’s not using a CRM or a spreadsheet and now I’ve got those. And those holes are customizable. So, let’s say for example, if I’m a financial planner, I can ask the people in the audience. I can have a great piece of contact which is how to minimize my taxes and become a millionaire in 10 years. Fantastic, right?

S1 25:54

Right.

S2 25:55

So, I can actually–

S1 25:56

You don’t ask them how many– like, “How many of you are making more than 100K? How many of you are making less?”

S2 26:00

That’s right.

S1 26:01

And then you’re essentially qualifying your audience, right?

S2 26:03

Exactly. Exactly. So you’re able to qualify the audience. What you’re also able to do is you’re able to get more information like, do they already have a financial planner? Why are they afraid of financial planning, etc., etc. So, it’s a great way, and you have it all one system. So a lot of the times with different platforms, we have to kind of piece things together. This takes a lot of time and energy so that you can focus actually converting leads rather than piecing information together and analyzing that.

S1 26:32

Yeah. So I think one aspect was in the title of the webinar that we should just explore a little bit more is like once you have, let’s say, a highly qualified lead, what do you do with that lead, Andrew? And I think we’re going to diverge a little bit because we’ve gone through the slides and let’s just talk about that a little bit. I would love to hear your– and you’re a salesman, salesman. I’ve known Andrew for a while and this guy is incredible. So what are your top three tips?

S2 26:59

Sure.

S1 26:59

You’ve got a hot lead. What are you going to do with that?

S2 27:01

That’s great. So one thing is we experiment through different processes. We do have a process. So if somebody attends a webinar and downloads something–

S1 27:09

Don’t bang the table.

S2 27:11

Oh, I’m sorry.

S1 27:11

It’s shaking the camera.

S2 27:12

Yeah, I can see that [laughter].

S1 27:13

Okay.

S2 27:14

It looks like an earthquake.

S1 27:15

Yeah, I love it. Well, it is California but it’s not quite that bad.

S2 27:19

We do have a process. So, if somebody registers and downloads, we immediately reach out to them via email and we’ll say, “Hey, thank you for downloading stuff,” and ask them a question, “What CRM are you using? What sales platform are you using?”

S1 27:31

How quickly do you get back to them once you get that [heads up?]?

S2 27:35

Usually, we do it– not to be greedy. If it’s an inbound lead expressing interest, if they landed on the page and on the call to action like, “Hey, do you want this supplier to–“

S1 27:44

Reach out to you.

S2 27:45

If somebody actually asks for information specifically about our product with interest we follow-up within– in less than five minutes.

S1 27:53

Five minutes. Got that.

S2 27:54

And that’s a phone call or email. Phone call first, we immediately follow-up via email, and then we continue to follow up. Usually, a sale requires bet five to eight touches of follow-up. And those are sales statistics. Now in 2017, they’re expecting that it’s going to move to 8 to 12. So, just keep that in mind. You’re a salesman–

S1 28:14

And is that touch attempts or is that actual conversations [crosstalk]?

S2 28:19

Touch attempts and conversations.

S1 28:20

Okay, got it. Got it, got it.

S2 28:22

So it takes–

S1 28:23

So just, my background is more less sales guy, more technology [inaudible], and I’m learning right now. So one key thing is you guys follow up right away?

S2 28:34

Yes.

S1 28:34

You don’t let that lead sit whatsoever? So, five minutes, boom.

S2 28:38

Their sales statistics have showed that if somebody inquires about your product and service, I think it’s a high percentage is over 50%, I to say, is most likely to go to the vendor that calls them back first. And then there’s also the five-minute rule which they’ve done studies. I mean, universities have done this on their sales statistics, that if you don’t follow-up within five minutes, the moment it starts going into minute 501, etc., that the ability for you to reach that contact and make a sale drops over 90%.

S1 29:11

Wow.

S2 29:12

Yeah.

S1 29:12

Wow. So follow-up.

S2 29:12

So we want to make sure–

S1 29:14

Number one, follow up right away.

S2 29:15

So the process, I kind of bake in the process. So, if somebody lands in the page, downloads information, and request information in Digsy.AI, five minutes we call them. And then we basically shoot them an email right away. If we get a voicemail, then we follow-up two days later with an email and then if they don’t get that, then we basically have sort of a cadence where we combine email and phone calls over a period.

S1 29:36

And what is your cadence? What’s your cadence?

S2 29:39

Phone call.

S1 29:41

Phone call.

S2 29:42

Immediate.

S1 29:42

Immediate phone call and email.

S2 29:43

Phone call and immediately follow-up with email if we don’t get them on the phone. Then the following day–

S1 29:49

Next day.

S2 29:49

–we’ll log another email, right? And we’ll reply to all to the initial email, so that they’ve got context. Maybe they missed the email or something. And then what we’ll do is three days later, if they didn’t respond, we’ll also have a call, and follow-up with an email right after the call. And then what we’ll do is over the next few days, every three to five days, we’ll log a phone number or we’ll log a text message and/or email.

S1 30:17

Oh, so you guys use text as well?

S2 30:18

Yeah.

S1 30:19

Okay. Just to quickly summarize–

S2 30:21

Actually, 99% of text messages are read.

S1 30:23

Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

S2 30:25

And roughly 20% of emails are read.

S1 30:27

Oh my God, that’s huge. We could probably do an entire webinar [laughter] on leveraging SMS to close more deals. I want to summarize on the cadence and the key thing is day zero, boom, you hit them up right away within five minutes. Day one, you follow up and then three and then five and five. And then when do you guys give up, quit?

S2 30:52

Usually, we’ll try, like I mentioned, it takes about 8 attempts. So, between 8 and 12 attempts, we’ll give up. Unless somebody just says, “Hey, I have no interest.”

S1 31:01

Right. Yeah. It’s like Helena in Spain is having some picture problems. Sorry, Helena. Try refreshing your browser? We’re keeping this super organic here.

S2 31:12

Yep. So, that’s one thing. And then the lead scoring from day one is very important. So that kind of says, “Okay. Who do I follow up within five minutes? Who do I follow-up within, let’s say, a day?” Which would be possibly– you have more leeway with somebody who’s just downloaded the webinar content. Whether it’s a we’re sharing this presentation or we’re sharing something else, it makes it easier for us to kind of have somebody going, “Hey, downloaded the presentation.” Now, they haven’t expressed interest in our products, so what we say is we just open up the conversation going, “Hey, wanted to see if you got any value out of it? By the way, what are you using?” If I’m a financial advisor, “By the way, have you had a financial advising consultation, a free one, in the last three years,” or something like that.

S1 31:55

Got you. Got you.

S2 31:55

So you can do that.

S1 31:57

And then we got Ken and I have a feeling that’s our head of sales, Ken, to say, “Don’t be afraid to call everyday.” And in fact, I actually had asked our head of sales to share [laughter] his top three tips on how to close more deals and here’s his three tips. Plan the work and work the plan. So, essentially, if you need to close, let’s say, 10 deals a month, you need to figure out how many calls does it take to make a close, and then how many tries does it make to get the call– does it take to get the call. So you really have to build your schedule around your target. Is that–?

S2 32:37

That’s actually one thing that I didn’t mention about Digsy.AI. So Digsy.AI actually monitors everything of the stage. So, how many calls and emails did it take you to land a meeting or a deal, and then we recognize a pattern. And then we’re going to say, “Okay. So if we only convert 10%, so if we’re trying to get 10 clients that means we have to actually have a [crosstalk].”

S1 32:59

100 clients, standard, yeah.

S2 33:00

Yeah.

S1 33:00

Yeah. So, okay. And I guess that’s the AI part of Digsy.AI?

S2 33:06

That’s right.

S1 33:06

All right. All right.

S2 33:08

Now, we should probably move into questions. What do you think?

S1 33:10

I’m going to hit these two points. Point number two from Ken, it’s about relationships. So try to nurture and foster that relationship as you’re working towards your close.

S2 33:20

And as you provide webinars [crosstalk] you’re developing trust, by the way.

S1 33:25

Yep, yep. And then three, is don’t be afraid to push. Obviously, you have to do this with tact. And don’t overstep your boundaries, but I had noticed a lot of sales reps are sometimes intimidated to ask for the sale. To challenge whether or not the person has the authority to make the purchase, right? So I’ve seen situations where you can actually push a little bit. It’s like, “Hey, you have the budget for that. You’re the director of so-and-so. Why do you need authority from senior director whatever.”

S2 34:00

So, here’s a thing that we do that’s actually– I didn’t even think about this but that’s counterintuitive to our organization since we’re a sales platform. So, we have to sell, right?

S1 34:08

Yep, yep.

S2 34:08

So, as opposed to being pushy, what we’re trying to do, we’re actually trying to be pushy. We’re pushing for you to tell us, no, that you’re not interested. So it’s a lot easier if–

S1 34:21

You’re pushing for a no?

S2 34:22

We’re pushing for a no. Because we don’t want to continue to follow up with somebody and invest time and energy, resources on the sales team with somebody that’s not going to convert. And, it’s a lot easier for you to get a no than it is for people to try to pursue a yes.

S1 34:38

Interesting.

S2 34:38

So, I know that if they tell me, “Absolutely not.” And I’m just seeking out the no, “Hey, is this something that would actually help your business?” “No.” “Fantastic.” Hang up.

S1 34:49

Okay. Laying your–

S2 34:50

Move on. As opposed to following up, following up, following up, following up. It’s a lot easier, let’s say, if you’re single, right? It’s a lot easier to the bar and a lot less threatening to just picture going after every– if you’re a girl, going after guys; if you’re a guy, going after girls. And, basically, trying to get a no from everybody because that just makes you feel like, “Okay. I did my job. I got a bunch of nos but then that one yes. [It’s a win?].”

S1 35:16

That’s right. That’s right. So, yeah, getting the nos helps you filter out and gets you spending the time on the right prospects. Subpar [crosstalk], right?

S2 35:24

A lot of people waste time on things that are not going to work.

S1 35:29

Okay. So real quick here. Ben Stoltz here, I’ll pull this up. Ben Stoltz asks, “Can you give some more sample questions on how you push for no?”

S2 35:40

Absolutely. So one thing that we do when we get an inbound lead or, let’s say, we generate a lead any other method that’s expressed interest in Digsy.AI, is reaching out to them, and that’s just saying, “Hey, we’re just following up and we’re going to see if you’re still interested.” I would say something that– what we end up doing is we say, “Hey, I want to stop following up with you because I don’t want to waste your time. Can you tell me yes or no if I should follow up anymore on this?”

S1 36:13

Right. And, we have a few drip emails that are sort of personalized and I’ll tell you the biggest response rate is from the one that’s at the end of the cadence. It doesn’t matter if it’s the fifth one, the seventh one, or the third one, if you say, “Hey, I’m going to stop bothering you.” Or, like, “Hey, this is my last email because it doesn’t seem like you’re getting back to me. Just let me now if I’m wrong about that.” Right? That’s the one that gets the highest response rate. Really interesting.

S2 36:40

Yep. So, another great that we asked is after they’ve done a demo, or they’ve gotten anything like that done, where they’ve seen the product and expressed interest, is asking them to just tell us, “Hey, is this something that’s going to help out your business?” And, if they say, “Maybe.” Or, “I don’t think so.” I say, “Why?” And, what you’re doing is you’re prying them to– for you to make the decision whether that’s a prospect or not for you. You want to land at a no, but the benefit of having all those questions is you then just really cleared up half of an opportunity that’s actually a real opportunity that you should be investing the time in.

S1 37:21

Perfect. Perfect. So going through the Q&A here that has come in. Folks, feel free to send in your sales questions, your marketing questions, we’re going to do this for about another 10, 15 minutes. I mean, we’re doing great on time, it’s only 12:40, certainly don’t want to take more than an hour. But here’s a question from Michael Henry. And, Michael, thanks for joining us. He is a long-time customer of ours. And great to see you on here. So he asks, “If email is the best way to invite, how do you build that first list?”

S2 37:52

Yeah. So you can get creative. Usually, you’ll have a list of customers. A great way is if you’re pushing out blog content, or you’re pushing out– you’re interacting on social media, etc. Does any part of your website have a capture? Subscribe to our blog. Anybody that’s signed up for your product or service. You can start with your own network and your Google contacts or Outlook contacts and invite your friends and family and ask them to share it. That’s the way that you can grow your email list. Because people who actually sign up, you can add them to your marketing list, right?

S1 38:25

Yeah, yeah.

S2 38:25

The second hack is partner up with somebody who has the same audience. For example, we’ve got 12,000 emails for our core audience. That’s not a lot, but we share the same audience for potential customers, so why not partner up with somebody who has the same audience group and help them create content for his audience and at the same time expose our product or service. So, Michael, I would definitely consider this a hack. Find somebody who you’re friends with or that you know or that you could build a relationship with that has that target audience, and offer them to do free content. A free webinar for them, etc., and piggyback off their audience. So I hope that answers that question.

S1 39:10

Yeah. There you said, great ideas. Thank you, Michael. All right, all right. So there’s a question here, if 3% show up or 30% show up for the web– oh, so that was more of a clarifying question by Stephen. I was talking about 30% of registrants usually attend the live webinar. That’s what I was referring to there.

S2 39:33

If you’re lucky you might get to 40. You’re really lucky is when you get to 60.

S1 39:37

Now, one of the best hacks, and this was shared on the last webinar we did with MobileCause. If you send an SMS right before the webinar, that shoots your attendance rate right through the roof.

S2 39:51

Oh, wow. See back to text messages.

S1 39:52

Back to text messaging. And that’s certainly a feature that’s going to be going on the AnyMeeting road map because right now we send email reminders the day before and an hour before and when it’s starting. And, yeah, I think sending an SMS is very, very powerful.

S2 40:06

That’d be [powerful?]. Yep. A lot of people forget.

S1 40:10

All right. We got another question, more of a product question. If we offer engagement scores. It is something that–

S2 40:17

In AnyMeeting.

S1 40:18

In AnyMeeting specifically. It’s something that we’re currently building, and we’re actually collecting data on what’s the most meaningful engagement score. And within probably two to four weeks, we will be releasing what’s called an engagement report. So the engagement report will show you everyone that has interacted with your webinar from registration to attendance, to recording viewership, and then basically their engagement level within your webinar, taking into account things like were they chatting, were they using the emojis, were they voting on polls, were they sending in Q&A. That will all be reflected in the engagement report, and I will personally follow up with you to get you that information.

S2 41:00

And in the meantime, what you can do is you can get the reports and people who downloaded content. Don’t let that stop you because–

S1 41:08

Yeah, you can [crosstalk]–

S2 41:08

–AnyMeeting has it baked in. So you’re able to quickly see who’s gone beyond just the baseline engagement with your content.

S1 41:18

Yeah. And today we’ve got the poll results, for example. So if you start asking questions like, “Do you need my product?” You’ll see who answered yes, and there’s no better way to qualify it in there.

S2 41:30

So definitely I would suggest that when you’re doing webinars, you should do them alongside somebody who can keep you on track. Like, for example, Costin and I have been collaborating through this webinar to make sure that the polls come in at the right time. That we’re able to [get to?] a lot of things. Makes it really fun and interactive. But if you look at it from our lens, right? If we just really just put it out in the open, what this is allowing us to do is this information is showing us who are potential customers, who we should follow up with, different things like that. What CRM are you using, have you used a webinar before? And I’ve got to tell you webinars work very well for us, so I would encourage you all to go ahead and give it a try.

S1 42:18

And honestly, folks, this was not meant to be a sales presentation for AnyMeeting because most of you are already AnyMeeting customers, but Andrew is such a sales guy [laughter]. He keeps selling you guys on [crosstalk].

S2 42:27

No, no. But I mean the webinar’s a great channel.

S1 42:29

Love it.

S2 42:30

I mean, it really is.

S1 42:30

Well, it’s the second-most– it’s the second highest most effective channel in content marketing. So at this point, I think we’ve gone through all the Q&A. We’ve covered all the content there. I want to see if I have a cool Star Wars video to share or something like that [laughter]. No. Nah. Got busy last night. Didn’t upload any videos. So I think we’re going to wrap up here.

S2 42:54

Sounds good. Thank you for having me.

S1 42:56

Thank you, Andrew. Good to see you, and everybody out there on the Interwebs, thanks for joining us and look for the next webinars on sales and marketing topics.

S2 43:07

Thanks, guys.

S1 43:07

Thank you very much. Take care. Bye.