Webinars as Repeatable Demand Gen Machines
Forrest Leighton, SVP of marketing at Chatmeter, on the webinar stack
The real value of webinar software is not the live event, it is the ability to turn webinars into a standardized demand gen workflow that a small marketing team can run every month. In practice that means prebuilt invite emails, registration data flowing into HubSpot or Salesforce, poll responses attached to contacts, recordings posted to the site, and clear reporting on who engaged and which webinars turned into meetings and pipeline.
-
At Chatmeter, the hard part is not fancy webinar features, it is getting the basics to run cleanly every time. Leighton describes repeatable emails, ads, website posting, and follow up as the core machine, and says lost poll data or broken email flows can kill the sales value of the program.
-
This is why ease of use beats maximum configurability for many B2B teams. Once the workflow is set up by an ops person, the goal is to hand it to a junior marketer who can launch two webinars a month without rebuilding templates, exports, or follow up logic each time.
-
The broader market is moving the same direction. Wistia’s pitch for webinars is not just hosting a live session, it is combining registration, lead capture, recording, clipping, publishing, and analytics in one product, because marketers buy webinars as an ROI tool, not as standalone video software.
The next wave of webinar products will look less like event tools and more like campaign systems. Vendors that can make registration, attendance, post event video, and CRM follow up behave like one continuous workflow will win, because that is what turns webinars from occasional projects into a durable pipeline channel.