Forrest Leighton, SVP of marketing at Chatmeter, on the webinar stack

As for the webinar functionality itself, I've never done anything that advanced. It's more like, “Do I have a clean video? Can I share my presentation? Can I share video footage? Are there ways that we can manage the communication inside the webinar chat question and answer? Can I show it sometimes if I want to? Can I hide it other times if I don't want people to see?” 

Sometimes you get 100 people on a call and nobody asks a question for 40 minutes. You don't want to make it look like nothing's happening, so you might want to shut that piece down.

That's a lot of answers, but that's what important in the webinar—being easy to use, integrating with your other systems, flexibility, and running seamlessly.

What are your workflows like post-event? Do you work with the registration and the data generated in the webinar, communicate with those people later, do something with the recording, or create snippets?

Webinars, at the past four or five companies I've worked at, have been a great sales tool to drive real engagement. 

At CB Insights, it was great because we could have one of your analysts on and they’d talk about a topic and then you could also follow it with, “Oh! And this is how it works on the platform.” 

It was a way to put the platform in front of this audience that was interested in the data but now all of a sudden brought them to, “Oh! Wait, this could work for me.” How do you bring them along? That follow up becomes a critical component to it. 

What do I know about those people leaving at the end of that webinar? What do I know that can inform sales, who might be more interested, who is more engaged, the engagement level throughout the webinar? Do I get information on that? Do I know who asks questions? Do I have an easy way to bring that down? Polls inside the webinar—Is it easy for me to get the data out of a poll? 

That's a great way for a rep to follow up, "Hey! You answered the question that you were interested in x, y, and z. I have some examples I can share with you on that." It makes it a very relevant conversation and not just, "Hi! I'm a sales guy. Want to get on a demo?" It's a little warmer and just brings them along. 

We’ve definitely seen challenges with both Zoom and GoToWebinar, which may be user challenges. For example: how easy is it for me to get poll information afterwards. I had one webinar and one of the poll questions was, “Would you be interested in learning more about Chatmeter?” 20 people put their hands up, but we ended up losing the information on which 20 that was. What do you do now? How do you know how to follow up? 

The technology has to look good from a video standpoint, but then what’s the information to me as the marketer? I want to drive revenue out of that. I want to make that a machine for getting real engagement with the prospects that maybe I haven't gotten engaged with before and there's tons of stuff that's happening in that 30 minutes or 45 minutes that could help inform me and I could use from a sales follow up and outreach or even just marketing outreach following the webinar.

After a webinar, you focus on the most engaged attendees. If 800 register and 100 attend live, the recording often gets 3-5X more views later on. Sharing snippets further expands the audience. Is this a relevant factor to consider?

Webinars live and breathe for a long time. For the marketer always under pressure to deliver more for sales, there's the immediate, “Who engaged? How do I follow up? How do I get meetings out of that?”—there's that piece. 

But what you're saying is 100% relevant—once it's done, it's not just done. You can take that, you can replay it, you can have it on your website, you can make snippets of it that you can use on social. That's video content. You can take it and make other content out of the webinars and perhaps have one of your content guys write a really quick blog post on it. There's tons of stuff that you can do with that following and it should live and breathe.

Webinars in many cases would outperform some of the actual reports because you could get—and it depends on the audience—and always meet them where they are. At CB Insights, there were a lot of readers. So, I'd say a lot of our audience liked the detailed report—they wanted to dive in—but for a lot of our audience, they didn't want to read. They wanted a video and to hear the analyst just telling them, “Let me just click it on.” 

I'm one of those people. I'd rather see the video. I'm not going to read a hundred-page report ever, but I'll certainly click on the webinar and be able to hear the analysts tell me, “Oh! Okay. I learned something new and I can take that.” So yes, there's plenty of multi-use for it. 

There's the immediate, “How do I get folks in the sales funnel that are interested?” Then, “How do I nurture the people that may not be attending?” So, let's just take your example—800 people registered, what's your average? Maybe 30% will show up for the thing. They have all these other folks that showed engagement, but they never actually saw the webinar. That's a great opportunity to put it back in front of them again or to put other nurture content in front of them as well, in addition to using it. 

Another use case we're doing—we're trying this right now—is where we have people that have engaged through our paid media channels whether that's Google or LinkedIn, and we're starting to build lists of people that have engaged to re-target. A great thing to re-target them with, is a webinar—either a live one or a recording. It's a way to provide value to the prospect where you're not just like, "Hey! I want to sell you something" or “Sign up for a demo.” It's just a way to bring them along to that next step.

There's always tension in software between ease of use and configurability. How do you think about accepting the fact that there are trade-offs and you can't always have the best of both worlds?

I’d probably lean—it's got to be able to do the basics for me—towards ease of use. Whatever the software, I want to be able to run webinars on a regular basis. I want to have a machine of 3+ emails that are going to go out ahead of time, we're going to do some advertising around, it's going to post afterwards on the website, and we're going to drive traffic. It just becomes this repeatable machine through which I can measure output. 

“How many meetings am I getting? How much of my TAM have actually engaged? From an awareness standpoint, how is it helping? From a demand gen standpoint, how is it helping?” So ease of use becomes really, really important in that case. If I can't have it that every time I want more of a rinse and repeat. I don't want to recreate the wheel every time we do one of these. I want enough functionality that I got it integrated. 

Once it's integrated, great! I shouldn't have to touch it again. Once I have my understanding of what the follow-up emails look like, great! I shouldn't have to touch it again. What's getting sent from the system versus what maybe my other systems are sending, get it all. But that should be like it's the same motion every time. It's not like, “Oh! In this one, I want to make sure that I'm sending this way.” And “In that one…” It is literally a rinse and repeat on that. 

So, it's all about functionality—get it set up once and then, the ease of use over time must be such that I can tell my junior level person, “Okay, we're going to run two a month. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. You know what you got to do. Here it is. It's all set up. You got the templates, go do it.”

Does that flow through to the integrations, too? How important is it to have a very seamless loop between whatever you're using for webinars and your marketing automation platform?

It's key.

A lot of it comes down to where you’re starting. If the starting point is a mess, then, it doesn't matter how good the web technology is. If Salesforce and HubSpot were never set up properly, then those poll questions can come in, but it’s not going to work.

Let's just say, we fast-forward three months from today. And three months from today, we'll have fixed hopefully 80% of the technical issues. And then, if I am going to take the platform, it's going to be a lot easier to know where the starting point is, of that. It's going to be about “Let's get that configuration set up.” Even if I have to have a more technical ops person in the beginning, it's fine. I can do that. But same thing like your poll question, what happens, what's the action every time that brings that poll question in? Is it just something I download in an Excel spreadsheet and then I just got to upload that into my HubSpot or just figure out a way to associate it? 

It’s not the ideal flow right in. But for that to happen, I got to figure out how to marry it in a different process. If your tech is a mess, anything outside of that is not going to be doable. If your tech is solid, then you might have the, “Hey! I'd really like this to come into HubSpot and marry to that name that's in there.” Then, the email that's going to go is going to pull that as a variable field in. 

I would say, the majority of organizations are not sophisticated enough to deal with that. So it's all a level of where the stack and the tech is from a sophistication standpoint and how sophisticated the organization is.

While webinars are great for marketing and giving salespeople high quality leads, what are the downsides? What do you put on the other side of the equation when you think about, “Hey, I should do two webinars a month?”

To do a webinar, I need multiple people that are involved inside the organization—there's ops people, content writers, people who're going to be on the webinar and host the webinar. Do I have a customer on the webinar? How do you prep the customer for the webinar? 

There's a whole series of effort outside of even just the tech and getting the tech right. In fact, the tech piece of it is actually probably the easier piece of it once you get it set up and it's working. It's like I know I'm going to get an invite. I already have the invite built. I just got to change a little bit of the language. The content person takes five minutes and they do it. It’s like a 30 second activity to do that. 

It's more all of the other things around it—getting the people, getting it scheduled, making sure everyone knows what they're going to say, getting the presentation together, coming across professionally—there's just a lot of steps to get there to do that. So I think that's probably the biggest downside of it. 

The juice has to be worth the squeeze. You’ve got to be able to come back and have the metrics around it to show that it's having an impact: like that people who joined a webinar were 4X or 5X more likely to buy, 80% of all closed deals had attended at least one webinar, those kinds of stats.

What would make you think about a new webinar tool?

Today, I have pain because of GoToWebinar, because it doesn't work the way I'd like to. It feels clunky to me. The way they send emails doesn't work. 

If I have the pain right now, if somebody was to come up with a better solution, I’d say, “Let's just go to Zoom. I know it works. I don't want to keep fighting with this thing.” I think it's all about the pain. 

If it's working and it does all the things you need it to do, it's a high cost to switch. Today, if what I have doesn't really work well, it would be a lower cost in my view.

Zoom comes to mind because a) you've used it in the past and b) presumably you're using Zoom for other stuff?

Yes, we're mostly on Google Meet, which is interesting. I've always been more of a Zoom person, but almost all my meetings are on Google for the most part. I think we have some Zoom accounts, but with Zoom, I know it works. I've done it. 

How much would you value enhanced aesthetics in a webinar?

Look at what we're on, right now. The world is used to this view, so, I guess I'd have to see what they're talking about to know is it something that's going to move the needle? Is it something people are going to get off and be like, "Man, what an experience. The visuals were amazing!" 

To me, it'll be like, “What's the needle moving stuff?” It would have to be something that was going to be, “My webinars look so much better” and they get on and they think,”Wow.” I've seen there's other tools out there, there's ways to chat, and there's ways to engage with the audience. There's a whole bunch of other things. I'm sure we use even the tools we have to a very minimal degree with just the basics, but it's kind of “Where I am in the maturity of the organization?” But yes, it would have to be something really compelling. 

For me, it's about, “Does it make a material difference to the experience that the person has attending the webinar? Is it just that it looks better?” It would be a really hard one for me to buy into that that's going to make a real difference but I'm the metrics marketer, so I look at everything as what's the outcome and where's it going to go. A lot of people have a different view of it and that it's all about the brand and we're going to look better than everybody else. I have a hard time with that.

What about your ability to brand things as Chatmeter? I don't know how that works in GoToWebinar, but how important is your ability to basically make everything look Chatmeter-y and customize in terms of your own branding?

Maybe I'm missing something, but if I think about it, if you're going to show anything like slides or whatever, it's going to be branded. I can put a background that's got a big Chatmeter logo on it, or put it down in the bottom corner, or wherever. It's relatively easy to brand yourselves in those things without even using the tool itself. So that part has become relatively easy.

Companies in the virtual event space, in particular, also do bigger events where they sell generative AI features that'll help create all these derivative content products automatically from the webinar and assist in that post-event content loop. How do you think about that? Is that the future of webinars?

I think it's worth exploring. It is not one that today I'd say I put a big bet on. But I put it in the bucket of like, “Yeah, let's look at it.” To me, with generative AI, there's still so much that's not clear and it's funny, we're selling marketing technology. 

You go to these conferences and at every conference, every marketer is there because they were told by their CMO or CEO, “Go figure out what our AI strategy is. Go, get some.” The presentations at the events are so pie in the sky, the use cases are just few and far between. It's changing so rapidly. 

I just think there's so much BS and there's just still so much buzz around it. It's hard to know what's real and what's not at this point. So, I think, people are still figuring it out. The marketers are really good at jumping on the next buzz-y thing. It’s just always the next thing everyone's got to be doing. A waterfall funnel is dead now. Everyone's got to be ABM now. ABM is dead now. Everybody's got to be AI. That’s the next one. So now you're going to have four million content people creating content using generative AI. The market's going to be flooded with more stuff that's just written by someone that's not a human. Sorting through all that garbage is going to become a lot more difficult. 

Anything that helps make the experience more relevant and brings it home is going to be the thing that helps. I don't know what that is yet. Is that an event with the AI piece component to it? Maybe, but I'm in the “Let's test it. Let's try it. Let's see it” phase. I am not convinced one way or the other on any of it yet, to be honest.

People talk about digital fatigue and experimenting with live events, shifting a little from virtual events. Many are unimaginative when it comes to webinars. Where do you come on that debate—are you planning to lean into webinars or lean away from them or maintain what you've been doing with webinars. Why?

It's interesting. Coming out of Pursuit where we were selling legal software, I think it's a lot of the audience, too—that's who you're selling to. Lawyers, especially coming out of COVID, wanted to get together. So, the live events became a really interesting motion for us—both, industry events and then, our own dinners and lunches. We also did them virtually. They worked virtually as well. I don't feel like it's one versus the other. I think it's just figuring out based on your buyer and the audience you're after as to what the right balance is. 

In our case right now, the one thing I'm seeing working really well are webinars. If we take the sales motion or the marketing motion, people engage with them. I swear I thought webinars would've been dead ten years ago or five years ago. It still works. And it's still a really good engager. People want to hear the live stories. People want it. I am still betting on them and I'm still leaning into them until the data tells us something different. 

I also think that every company is putting out 1000 white papers and tons of content. If I look at what our competitors are doing, what's the thing that's going to set us apart from them? It's not a webinar. But if I can get a really good customer that tells a really compelling story and they'll do that online, digitally, or live, they're going to come to that because that's relevant, it's going to help them, and it's going to add value. So, it's all about the value-add piece of it. The webinar is just a channel to get it to them.

There are many pro and con voices in the context of Simulive. How do you feel about that?

I'm in favor of live. I've done those and they're okay. People generally don't really know the difference on it, but to me, the only reason to do or not do a live is if you're just scared of stuff going wrong. It generally has been the reason why people say, "Oh! We don't know this person's in a weird location.” “We don't know if the Internet's going to be okay." In that case, maybe it makes sense or something like that. But for the most part, I'd much rather do it live, advertise it as a live, make it live, and interact with the audience. In some cases, even just using the chat is an amazing way to interact.

The one thing that we know is that people want to make connections with others that are like them, meaning similar roles or that lawyers for example, want to talk to other lawyers. The general counsel wants to talk to other general counsel, marketers want to talk to other marketers. You can enable that type of engagement in a webinar setting. That's where the win is. It's about delivering really compelling content. But then, how do I get them to engage? 

I remember seeing that at Pursuit where someone would start with, "Oh! I'm so and so" and with a LinkedIn profile, and then, you'd see them one after the other, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was just amazing because they wanted to connect to each other. They didn't care about us. It wasn't about them connecting to the brand. It was about them connecting to each other. So, if we can enable that, great! I just think in the Simulive, you lose that.

An argument exists that one advantage of Simulive is that you can strip away some of the workflows, have them at different times and reduce the overall overhead of the webinar. What’s your take on that?

That's a good point. If you're selling in Europe and here or the West Coast and East Coast, there’s the issue of a three hour time difference. We had that a lot at Pursuit where if we ran it—you run it at noon and then, it's 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM depending on where. It didn't work. So yes, I think for that piece of it, there's something really interesting there of how to reuse that in different time zones in different ways. But that's a very fair argument.

Also when you think about the customer, just to lean into that piece a little more, customers are really, really difficult to get their timing. What's a good webinar? You want an executive CMO level, C-level person to be able to come and deliver their story from a major brand. Good luck. Their schedules, even if they're willing to do it, but now you're going to lock them in. We had that happen when I first joined. They had somebody who was signed up to come on and the day before some disaster somewhere happens and then, they can't do it. We got the customer success guy trying to tell the story of the person that was to be there, and that's a disaster. 

So that's a really good argument for that. Certainly, for time zones and customers in different places or trying to get the right people and then, if you can make it flexible for them like, "Hey! Listen. You can record this anytime. You tell us what works. We're just going to put it in." There's certainly a lot of value to that.

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