EPISODE SUMMARY
Webinars are perhaps one of the most underutilized resources for SaaS leaders. Educating your prospects about your product or service and showing them precisely what they need in real-time can lead them into your funnel, eventually closing them.
In this episode, WebinarGrowth founder Kris Sharma talks about how webinars can help SaaS companies get a bunch of leads and close them as soon as possible with SaaS-Story In The Making host, Matt Wolach.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: SaaS-Story in the Making
Episode: 167, How to Generate SaaS Leads Using a Webinar
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor.
Guest: Kris Sharma, Founder of WebinarGrow
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
SaaS in Action
When presenting your product or service to your potential lead, the first thing you need to answer is “What do you do?” Sharma notes that many SaaS companies struggle with presenting what they do with clarity to their target audience. Sure, “we help you sell more” is an answer, but where’s the action in that? This is the part where you present your product via a webinar, taking advantage of the real-time interaction that you can share with your leads. This is your best shot to share your social proof and best practices, so you have a “back and forth at scale,” Sharma remarks.
Press on the Pain Points
Once you have clearly introduced your service to your leads, the next big step to take is to press on their pain points. Often, people don’t know they have a problem. They don’t realize there is an issue until they attend a webinar, and it shows them exactly what they should be solving. A webinar can be an excellent educational tool to share, Sharma says. “You’ve got a problem. There’s a thing that’s happening. You need to talk to us because we can solve it.”
Matt backs this up, noting that one of the biggest mistakes he sees with SaaS brands is when they get too product-focused. In reality, no one cares about your product unless it solves a customer’s problem and provides desired solutions. As Matt says, “that’s where the money is.”
Repurposing Goes a Long Way
Creating content may seem easy to do, but some SaaS companies struggle with producing a lot of it. Matt points out that it’s essential to know how to create a ton of content, and one technique he shared is having one pillar of content and branching out clusters from that particular topic.
Sharma recommends “squeezing as much content as you can” from one idea or material. When you talk about something great on a webinar, you can turn the same material into other forms of educational content like blogs or videos. It’s also necessary to note that people don’t have time to absorb every bit of content you have, so Sharma advises throwing a new angle at them, providing value in a different perspective.
Get as Granular as Possible
When Sharma says, “get as granular as possible with your audience,” he indicates narrowing down on the possible solutions. You can provide one step that can solve their problem, but look for new ways to address their pain points and offer your solution.
For Sharma, it’s unnecessary to reinvent the wheel every time, but it’s helpful to personalize your content. A way to do this is by researching what your customer is saying and throwing it back to them in a process Sharma calls “structured empathy.” This hack is convenient not only for webinars but any content.
Focus on one problem and create a journey out of it, eventually providing your audience all sorts of solutions they didn’t know they could do for the issues they don’t realize they have.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Holistic Marketing Works
Holistic marketing is how Sharma described the overall content solutions you can provide your customers with and those that can generate active and passive traffic for your company. Matt also highlights the importance of driving traffic to a webinar from different sources, such as ads and cold email. Furthermore, a call-to-action at the end of content, a blog post, for instance, makes a huge difference in generating leads.
“Don’t start with cold traffic. Start with what’s working and then expand on it,” Sharma suggests. Matt agrees on the huge importance of having a call-to-action, something for your audience to take as they get deeper into the funnel and go to the next step. Since they have committed to staying on the webinar, a little nudge with a sneaky CTA can close the lead in no time.
Be the Star of the Show
Webinars can get boring. To break the ice, Sharma tells SaaS companies to treat webinars like their own TV show or a Netflix show where customers can click away at any time. Keeping the intro short is a nice hack– usually, listeners wouldn’t want to hear about where you went to school, where you got your MBA and all those details that are not going to be helpful for them. Instead, tell your audience right away that you can offer something that can transform them.
Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
Presenting your product through a demo on a webinar bridges the gap between marketing and sales. Provide your audience with a clear benefit and show them how to do it. Show the value proposition and walk your leads through it. SaaS companies would sometimes refuse to do a live demo because their software might break amid the webinar. “If it breaks, that’s your problem. That’s something people want to see,” Sharma says. But by backing it up with the best practices and improving your software, you are letting your product shine, and that’s where “magic happens,” he stresses.
Matt adds, “The beautiful part of a demonstration is that you can show things happening, you can show the product working, doing its thing, living and breathing. And that is critical for a buyer to see and connect, that you can solve their problems that your solution delivers.”
Watch the episode for more great tips.
TOP QUOTES
Kris Sharma
[03:43]: “Nobody cares about your product… I want to care about solving my problem. So if you focus on those problems and those desired transformations, and then show how your software fits into that transformation, that’s where the money is.”
[05:56]: “If you have something, do it live, if you have the audience because you get that shot of connecting with them in real-time.”
[08:48]: “The easiest copywriting hack in the world is to take what your customer is saying and just say it back to them.”
Matt Wolach
[06:26]: “Not enough companies in SaaS understand how important that is and how easy it is to create a ton of content.”
[11:40]: “That’s genius to have multiple different things pointed at that webinars so that that can be kind of your hub to generating the lead getting people booked on the calls.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Kris Sharma and WebinarGrow, visit https://www.webinargrow.com/,
You can also find Kris Sharma and WebinarGrow on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/krissharmawriting/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/webinargrow.
For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.
As part of the founding team in his first SaaS product, Matt owned the sales & marketing processes. But he struggled to sell and gain traction for the company. It took years of learning and tweaking before Matt created The Perfect DEAL Process, an innovative yet easy-to-implement method for closing more software deals. To find out more, visit https://mattwolach.com/about-matt
