Ep. 2996: How To Grow Your Revenue Using Webinars

All right, so we're going to talk about how to grow your revenues using dinners, webinars, and live events. So Neil and I, we've been throwing these dinners, these webinars, these live events, and yesterday I actually joined your webinar a little bit on YouTube. I saw it streaming.

Nice.

I was like, oh, he has a lot of viewers. So I clicked on it and there's, there's all these subtle nuances, but if, especially if you're in B2B, these are the things that continue to work over time. If you're thinking, oh, what type of old marketing still works today, still crushes it today, it is absolutely these types of events. And I look at webinars as a live event. I look at in-person as a live event. Dinner, I look at as a live event as well. Happy hour is also a live event. So maybe we can start from the easiest first and then go all the way to hardest. And I actually think webinars would be easier place to start because you don't have to worry about real-life logistics.

So my webinar yesterday, before we dive in, was on the Great Google Reset. I actually have the numbers from my teams. 11 total registrations.

11,000?

11,000. They're rounding when they give me these numbers, but you can see it here on my phone. 5,000 US, 6,000 international. US bottom of the funnel, they didn't send me international bottom of the funnel. US was 20 DCs, 2 pitches, 1 contract set. Keep in mind, this is before the webinar even aired because this was at 6:24 AM. I log in at 7:45. Our start time is at 8.

Oh, you log in early.

Yeah, 15 minutes because the other speakers are there, just making sure everyone has transitions down, audio's good. So we do just a few checks beforehand because sometimes some people's internet just sucks. So then we'll switch who's presenting and managing the deck, but that's not that bad. 20 potential pitches or 20 potential solid, not leads, 20 people who—

Who got pitched, saw the webinar.

Or no, 20 people who didn't even see the webinar who we're talking to already and based on their company size, budget, et cetera, they're already qualified. So those are our discovery calls, but they're already pre-vetted before they go to a call.

Yeah.

Okay. And that's before the webinar. I don't have the post-webinar numbers. It's usually much larger post-webinar, but this is just people who are registering for the webinar and opted to talk to us before we even hosted the event. Yeah.

And it makes sense. It's one of the most scalable ways to build trust. And the other thing is, if you're looking for an agency at some point, you get to meet some of Neil's team. You know, some people will know Neil already, but it's, it's cool that you get to see the founder and you get to see the team and you get to see the dynamic. And if you like the information, then it makes it way easier to want to get on a phone call. And the fact that you're doing these webinars actually shows that you're going the extra mile. And if you look at how you do it, you have these little scans on the side, these QR codes on the top right and then on the bottom right, and then you guys are bantering with the team. I think it's a really nice way of showing your team off without being too salesy. Yes.

And if our favorite part about the webinar, and this is where we collect the majority of the leads, is actually during Q&A. So we try to hold at least 10 minutes for Q&A. People ask questions, you answer them. We have a guy named Colin who vets the questions and picks the ones that are popular and that are good quality that he thinks would represent the majority of the people on the webinar. And what we found is if you pick the right questions that are applicable to a lot of the people on the webinar, And they're technical or there's something that a lot of people have top of mind and you give an answer that shows you're good at what you do, you're smart without trying to brag, it ends up generating a lot of QR code scans.

Everything in sales is a trust-building exercise and webinars are one of the best ways to build trust. And same thing with Q&A. If you can answer it well, you're building trust. Every little bit that you're doing is building trust. And let me ask you this, with these webinars, are you mainly, I'm assuming most of the attendees or registrants are coming from your email lists, which a lot's driven from SEO. Are you still driving paid traffic to it?

No, we don't drive any paid traffic to webinars.

But you were spending a couple thousand bucks each webinar before.

We did test that out. We were generating leads from it. It looked like it was profitable, but what we found was more profitable was just sending an extra email to our email list saying register for the webinar.

But also, I mean, the context here is Neil has a couple million people on the email list.

Correct.

You clean it, right? Um, if you don't have that, I think it still is profitable to drive traffic. And you guys did mostly Meta, right? And I'm assuming the CPAs were like $10 a pop, $15 a pop.

Uh, no, it was less than $10 a pop for Meta.

$8 a pop?

No, it was less than that.

$5 per registrant?

I don't know the number, but I know we were paying less than $8 a full registrant on Meta. So as we scaled up and fine-tuned, at the very beginning, it was costing us an arm and a leg. At one point, I know we were paying over $20 a registrant, but we quickly fine-tuned the campaigns. Yeah.

So, okay, let's call it $5 or so. If you're trying to get 2,000 registrants, then you might be paying $10,000. And then your show-up rate's like what, 30%, 40%?

So we had 11,000 registrants simultaneously. We usually have between 4,000 and 5,000 people at any given moment watching the podcast.

And a big chunk of that's YouTube because I saw 8,000 people simultaneous yesterday.

Oh, so 8,000. I didn't check yesterday, but It's not actually YouTube. YouTube is where everyone's driven through. So what you're seeing, whatever program we use, it streams it on YouTube. So all the counts go through YouTube, even if it's not, even if you're logging in through whatever app.

Your high point yesterday was 8,600. That's what I saw.

Got it.

Yeah. So anyway, I think, look, this is, it's, and even Jason Lemkin from SaaStr, he founded EchoSign, sold it to Adobe. It is the gift that keeps on giving. And in fact, more people should be doing it. I don't know why more people don't do it. Like, you know who does a really good job with it? I think, I think I think you do a pretty good job with it. I think Nathan Latka does a good job with it. And so his is, you know how like Tony Robbins has all these screens behind him and you can see people's faces and stuff and he's like on a podium. So he has that and he'll like pull people, hey, come on over here. And it's like this, it's like, it's your— he's constantly changing. It's like a spectacle, right? You know, okay, we're going to switch over here. Okay, Neil's going to come on for 5 minutes over here and share his best growth tactic. And then it's going to go over to Noah over there and then this, and then it's like goes for the whole hour and then it's done, right? And then I was on Adam Robinson's webinar last week and he had I saw the thing, it was about 11,000 registrants. And so a couple hundred people showed up. So not as many people as yours, but it's not nearly as dialed in as yours, which I want to talk about the software that you use in a second. But his was basically, he starts 5 minutes, he picks someone random from the crowd, they get to pitch their product or whatever it is. Then it goes into like a Q&A with me where they're interviewing me, and then I'm doing some screen shares here and there. And then there's maybe 10 or 15 minutes for Q&A afterwards. But that's how it works, and that works well for them. So you have to decide what format works for you. Yeah. But I think what's helpful is not enough people do what you do with the, using Restream. And I think that's a lost opportunity. So go ahead, feel free to talk about it.

Yeah, so I can talk about the Restream, but I think there's one important factor that I think most people get wrong with webinars is people think it's about how you promote, it's about the ads, it's about how you sell during the webinar. What we found is the most important thing, and this is going to be silly, It's, can you have a presentation on very timely-based content? So for example, my webinar yesterday was about the Great Google Reset. I forgot what the rest of the title was, but that was the start of the title. And when you look at like the Great Google Reset, everyone's wondering right now what's happening with Google with AI mode. Okay? And we talked about how Google's changing and all the new features they're launching and what marketers can leverage to do well in Today's new climate with AI overviews and AI mode and all the changes Google's making to YouTube, as well as paid media and all the settings and all the cool functionality and software. You guys, you, you get the point. It doesn't matter if I do the same promotion and we do the same types of promotions and we use the same process each and every single time, but if the topic isn't good, you're screwed. And it's not about like, is my title clickbaity? Is it catchy? It's really Are you hitting a topic that's on people's mind right now? Like our next webinar. And when we do a webinar towards the end, we showcase our next upcoming webinar and the date, scan the QR code. And we use QR codes for everything on our webinars. They take their phone, they scan the QR code.

What percent register?

I don't know. I don't have that data. My team definitely does because they track it all. And I know this because when we were using QR codes, one time I swiped my own QR code. I'm like, what the heck is this transferring? This is taking too long. And like, oh, we have all of this done for tracking purposes. But my next webinar is on—

Dude, where's my traffic?

That's what I wanted to call it. I think my team called it like, where's my traffic? Like how to recover something with AI or whatever. But I wanted to call it, dude, where's my traffic? You know, and I was vetoed on that one. I thought that was clever though. But yeah, I think the timely piece is super important and that's the biggest mistake companies get wrong. You can't just do a webinar on like, dude, you do ABM. And when you do ABM, you know, ABM's been beaten to death. You are smart. You wouldn't do a webinar just calling it ABM.

I don't think I've ever talked about ABM stuff on its own. And it's funny, right? Because my team has come up with a lot of these ideas and it says ABM. I'm like, and then all my ideas are more related to yours because you have to talk about what's on people's minds. And then if you wanted to float in the ABM piece here and there, you can do that creatively and it'll get them interested in it anyway, but you can't lead with it because that topic is It's kind of old.

So not, not just old. You had a LinkedIn post that went viral related to your ABM product.

It's gotta be new though. That's a new thing for ABM.

Yes.

Yeah.

But you had 2,000+ comments, was it?

1,300 comments, 700 likes or something like that. Okay.

So it was a lot. Yeah. 1,300 comments is a crap ton. Excuse my language. What was your angle to that post? Because ABM's beaten to death. Yeah.

I think the headline was LinkedIn doesn't allow you to run ads like this. ABM ads like that, like, like this, um, or run personalized ABM ads until now. And then, then you have to click more to see more, right? And then it shows the thing and it shows a picture. I'm like, oh, if you want this, comment now so you can run your ads within minutes instead of weeks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was really timely because a lot of people were interested on how they can run personalized ABM ads on LinkedIn. It's been an issue for a long time. People pay a ton of money for software. Some of your competitors are generating well into the 9 figures in revenue. So it was like, Cool. But if you just talked about like, here's a cool ABM strategy that you guys should check out, I don't think it would have done well.

No. You know what sells? Fear sells too, right? So the, oh, SEO is dead, or like, where's my traffic, or things like, like, it gets people to click and then you, but, but you got to make sure you deliver. And if there's anything I think we've done well over the years, even though we're very different people, is skating to where the puck is going.

Yes.

And that's what people are looking, again, people, it's hard to find people who are consistent over the years. And I was thinking about this the other day. This is like a little tangent. If there's anything, I think I said this to someone, I was like, you know, I might not necessarily be the best marketer in the world, but I'm consistent, right? And that's the same thing with, at least you're very consistent. I'm not gonna say whether you're the best or not. I don't think you're the best.

No, I agree with you.

You wouldn't say you're the best either, right? And so it's like, but if you look over the years, like all these people who have started podcasts and things like that, they're just inconsistent.

Yeah.

So that's all it is. Just be a little more consistent and you're good to go. But that's the webinars piece. You want to add anything else? You're using Restream. What else? You're getting there 15 minutes early.

We don't use Restream anymore. What do you use? We use, I'll have to pull up my calendar invite because I did a webinar this week. They make me go to StreamYard. Oh yeah. StreamYard's good. And it, it, it wasn't because Restream is bad or anything like that. It was just buggy on, I forgot which portion was buggy, either connection or audio or QR codes or something. There was something that was buggy on it. My team couldn't figure out how to fix it. And we kept having issues when we were going live on the webinars. Or, oh no, I think it could have been the connections. Like sometimes it would show that we're connected to LinkedIn, but it wouldn't stream on LinkedIn and people would be pissed off being like, we signed up, where is it, and then our team would have to do things like toggle it on and off again.

So StreamYard's more reliable, but Restream had more of the peak features, I think, right? Because it had that cool little QR code scan.

We have that on StreamYard too.

Oh, okay.

So, but it doesn't have the counter. Okay.

Yeah.

I haven't seen the counter yet. Maybe it has that feature, but I have not seen the counter. Yeah. Restream, the quality for me was better. It was just buggy when we're streaming to all the platforms. Yeah.

Well, look, so, okay. Is there anything else? I mean, you sent an email 7 days before. And you send 24 hours before?

No, we start 2 weeks before.

Okay.

So we won't do a webinar within 7 days. We do 2 weeks before. So if we're leading up to a webinar, we do roughly 4 emails.

Yeah.

You know, 2 in the 2 weeks prior, 2 within the week of the webinar. And for the people who are registering, when the webinar is about to start, they also get an email that it's about to start. If we have their phone number information and stuff and opted into all this stuff, we will notify them through SMS that, hey, it's about to start. That's how we get High attendance rate. But here's the kicker. Like you saw, how many people did I have live, Rafi?

8,600 concurrent.

So it's, those numbers are skewed. And the reason I say it's skewed, even though I had 11,000 registrants, it's also leveraging my YouTube profile. It's also streaming live on LinkedIn. Those counts won't show up on YouTube. So people can just go on LinkedIn without registering. Same with X, same with, I think Instagram we stream as well. I think we stream on Facebook. I know we stream on TikTok because I keep sending them my code every 2 weeks. So I don't know how many people are watching live, but it's probably more than the amount of registrants we have, but it's a combo from both.

And then each time, so you have a couple thousand people show up, how many discovery calls does it lead to?

For us, if we don't get at least 5,000 people to show up, it's a failure. And I would say in total from a webinar, I don't know the number of discovery calls, we're aiming for at least $400,000 in revenue. Okay.

That's $400,000 in new pipeline generated, right?

I don't know what you mean by new pipeline generated. Are you talking about potential? Are you talking about closed contracts?

Oh, so from each webinar, you're expecting $400K in closed contracts?

At least that's our goal. If we don't hit $400K, we look at it as a failure.

Got it. Great.

So, but I don't, I don't know what that means for top of funnel on total number of leads, total number of calls, and then pitches. And I I just get a number from my—

I'm trying to think if there's any other nuances. You're texting them as well?

I'm texting them as well.

Yeah. Ahead of the call. And then post-webinar, is your team look— they're looking through all this because we do this, right? Remember, we've spoken at conferences and when they give us the attendee list, we'll send them the slides and say, hey, book a call with us. You do that after, right? Post-webinar, or your team will look through the attendee list and look for ICP fits.

I know. I don't know if we send them an email with the deck and say, hey, book a call. I do know that we look through the list and look for ideal customer profile.

Yeah.

That I know we do. And then they start building relationships with those people. A lot of those sales cycles, call it, are 6 months plus where you're building relationships. So when I'm talking about like $400-ish grand close from a webinar, I'm talking about we do a webinar, within 3 months we're looking for at least $400 grand.

Yeah.

The relationships we build with enterprise brands that take longer, that's cherry on the top, but a lot of that revenue doesn't kick in until a year later.

Yep. Okay, so that's webinars. Now the next hardest one.

Oh, and one really quick thing. I'll give you an example of the enterprise one. I was in Latin America. Lady's like, I really wanted to work with you. And she's like, I brought you into, you know, she saw a webinar. That's how she first learned about us. She speaks perfectly great English. She runs all of LATAM. She, at whatever current large global 5,000 company she was at, She tried to get us in to do a pitch and work with us. They didn't have the budget, so didn't work out. She then went to Oracle. She then tried to get us included. She, we, we did not win the contract, but she really wanted to work with us even though she was running all of marketing. There's other people involved that vetoed her. And then she now is company that's one of the largest. I don't even know what category they're in. They're in a lot of different categories, but let's call it the founders are.

Hmm.

On the, I would say not even Forbes list, but Forbes 100 richest people in the world, right? So they're up there and we got a contract, but you're talking about from watching a webinar to roughly a year and a half to 2 years. And I'm not really more than that.

Maybe 3.

Probably 2 plus, because you have to think about switching of the jobs. Yeah, probably easily 2 plus years.

And here's the thing, it's, this is not even for sales deals, but when you look at really valuable recruits too, sometimes it takes 2, 3, 4 years to bring someone that you really want to bring in too. So this is a very long game.

And guess what the contract value was?

Millions?

Starting off was, what was it called? Like, I'm trying to convert the currency. $370,000, $380,000. Test project, one division. We did really well. And now we're talking about scope that is around $1.1-ish million USD. And then if we do well, we would get more regions, more divisions. This is just for LATAM. I think we can globally grow the contract to $5, $6 million.

Yep. So guys, the reason we're— we haven't even moved on to dinners and live events yet, but this stuff takes time. And but when you win this deal, it compounds and it expands and it becomes 10— it becomes worth tens of millions, but it takes a long time to get these going. That's why you can't be in a rush. You really can't rush any big deal. No, no.

Yeah. You can't. The big ones just take a long time, dude. When you look at your Care ABM solution, What's your average sales cycle for a large enterprise hitting you up? Not a startup. I'm talking about an enterprise company that does at least $100 million, because that's probably your ideal customer. They have a lot of people, they're willing to spend a lot of money.

I'll give you 2 examples, actually. So initially it was like, hey, we'll come back when the timing is right. And then when I was gone during the last couple of weeks, when I was kind of inactive, but still active, 4 people came back and closed on their own. 2 were companies, one was publicly traded and one does over 9 figures a year. Um, but the sales cycle on that one, you can call that, they talked to us in freaking December.

So the first part you said is, oh, I'll come back when the time is right. Was that your team saying that or was that them saying that?

They said that. Yeah. They're like, we really like this, but the timing's not right right now.

That was all those deals?

Yeah.

Okay. And then go back, go back with the number count.

Yeah. So 4 of them came back and auto-closed themselves basically. And this is to, to a pilot.

What, what do you mean auto-closed themselves?

So we already had sent them, we already sent them the pilot information like months back, right?

Including proposal?

Yeah. Including proposal. Yeah. And so they just came back, 'cause it's a pilot, there's not a lot of risk there, right? But it did take them, we're talking, yeah, close to 6 months to get this deal done. But usually it would take them even longer. But keep in mind, Caret's only been around since like last November, December.

Yeah, it hasn't even been 1 year.

No.

And, and you said, was it 1 or 2 of 'em were publicly traded?

2 were publicly traded. Yeah.

With good market caps. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great. So you can have expansion opportunity.

Yeah.

And have any gone through the pilot yet?

Yeah, actually, there's a couple. So there's a couple, now we have them on MRR. So they're like paying. And so it's cool. But what we've realized from this, and we can talk about this later, is that ABM itself is a nice hook in, but they actually wanted to, a lot of these people spend on like Meta and LinkedIn and they want to do more general marketing. And so they're like, can you just enlarge it and let us do more besides ABM? And we're like, yeah, because they like running the ads in there. I'm like, oh, okay. So.

We'll see how they like running them or do they want you to run them?

They like running the ads in there themselves. If sometimes it's their paid media manager and sometimes they're like, dude, can you just do it for us? So we actually have a couple of managed services deals that we're proposing as of, as of this week, we started proposing managed services. So it flows back into the agency. Yeah.

So it all fits together. Yeah.

And you want it to do all your things fit together. You were talking about Ubersuggest at the end of it. I don't know if you want to talk about some of the new Ubersuggest features coming out before we move on to How to Crush It with Dinners and Live Events, which I think I'll probably be talking more there, but go ahead.

Yeah, so I would say within the next 30, maybe 45 days, I hope no more than 2 months. I'm really pushing for 30 days. We're changing up Ubersuggest in 2 main ways. The first one is if you're a business, technically you should be a business or have a website if you're using Ubersuggest. But the first main way is if you want to actually track your business on these LLM platforms like ChatGPT, where You can put in your URL. We'll suggest your brand name. Like if you put in ubersuggest.com, it'll automatically fill in Ubersuggest because we assume that's your brand name. You can change it if you want. And then we'll suggest the category that you're in. So it could be like marketing tools or SEO tools. If you put in ubersuggest.com, if you put in Nike, it would be apparel or shoes or something like that. You can change the category as well. It will then give you prompts and It can give you 10 prompts, 20 prompts, 100 prompts. The list can keep going on and on, and it'll tell you how many times you're mentioned versus your competition. We're adding an intent on those keywords, sentiment. Are you positive or negative? It's also running that prompt multiple times because if you run it once and then you run it again, a lot of times you get different responses. If you run it 10, 20 times, you can see what companies and competitors they're really mentioning on average.

Yeah.

And then you can see how you're doing and stacking up versus your competitors. And what are some of the areas and prompts that they're getting notoriety in or mentions that you're not? So that's all on the brand tracking side. And we can run those reports for you automatically on weekly basis or monthly, and you can remove prompts or add prompts, of course. And then we're also making changes to the keyword research report because our main usage of Ubersuggest is someone goes to ubersuggest.com, puts in a keyword, they get tons of data on SEO data. But we all know that Google, even though is, the big, you know, 1,000-pound gorilla or whatever the phrase is. We know that people are using AI versions of search like AI Mode, ChatGPT. So what we're going to be changing to the AI overviews is adding in data for LLMs and then traditional search.

Hmm.

And my team started sending me stuff and I don't know what they're going to add in the first version, but Some of the stuff is like, let's see, prompt intent, you know, like what type of prompt is it? Informational, transactional, et cetera. Trend data, if the prompt's growing over time or if it's decreasing, the difficulty to get mentioned in that prompt, like how difficult it'll be. A brand ranking description, brands that appear most frequently, total number of unique brands mentioned within those prompts. So you know how likely you are to get mentioned. There's visible triggers description. I don't know what that is. Output type, breakdown description. That's like the format type could be like step-by-step guides or definitions or any of that. Let's see, related prompts, content gaps, of course, when it comes to prompts and recommended descriptions and even like data on how you can rank. But these are just some of the things that they already have included along with like things like sentiment that I also talked about.

And this competes with like the Profounds of the world, these other tools, right?

Yeah, but you'll just get a lot of the data for free without creating an account.

So you can get, there's a free option and you have a $9 option, right? That's going to be—

no, it'll be free, non-logged in. Then you get more free stuff if you log in, so you can get more usage and more data and more prompts. And then you can upgrade if you want even more data on top of that.

This is great. See, the thing is, these other tools are charging hundreds of dollars.

$499.

Yeah. $499?

A lot of them are $499.

There's a $499 and there's a $399, I think, or $299 for the other one. But you're coming in lower, which I like. We have a mutual friend that does the same thing as well with his products.

Yeah, I know who you're talking about.

And it works well for him. All right, guys. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, leave, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.