Speaker 0: Hello, ParDreamin, and welcome to the great webinar Bonanza. For those of you joining us for the first time today, we’re so excited that you are here at ParDreamin. My name is Kate Godley, and I work with Sercante. And I’m here to introduce Jaime Lopez while he discusses how to maximize marketing efforts using webinars to generate leads. Welcome, Jaime.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Kate. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. Uh, good afternoon, good morning, good evening to our audience wherever they are. My name is Jaime Lopez, and I am today speaking to you from the Finnish heartland, a village called Isokyrö, which has one of the most interesting whiskies and gins you can find. Uh, but today, I’m going to be talking about webinars, and, um, I’m going to show you what I learned scaling up last year from one to 20 or over 20 webinars per quarter. A tiny bit about myself, um, I right now work as a director of marketing operations at Aiven, which is a software service cloud infrastructure provider. Um, but up until recently, I’ve been working at Wärtsilä, which is an industrial giant company that I’ll talk more about. Uh, I’m a Salesforce Marketing Champion, uh, since the inaugural class, and I’m by by training an engineer. And after that, I’ve learned machine learning at Stanford, at MIT, and still try to keep myself sharp in those topics. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can follow me on Twitter, and, um, I’ll be very happy to share the deck with you afterwards because it has some details that might be useful for you to go back to. So where I work today, um, you’ll see it on t-shirt as well. Aiven, the company with a cute crab logo, we make database, especially infrastructure based on open source, and we manage it for you so you don’t have to. So now that you’ve been inspired by some of the amazing sessions here in ParDreamin, uh, for example, some, uh, of the ones from from Kruse or from Stephen Stouffer, and you want to build microservices or really cool applications, you need a database or you need an event streaming platform, we can provide it for you. I encourage you to try it out for free. If you just need, like, a Postgres or an M3 or a Kafka service or MySQL, um, we can provide and manage it for you, and just it will be very easy and convenient. But the work I’m going to talk about today was mostly done while I was working at Wärtsilä, which is a company with a name that’s horrible to pronounce for anybody who’s not Finnish. But, basically, what it does is it provides solutions for the marine and the energy sectors. Think very large ships and very large power plants. So close to €5 billion in sales, uh, worldwide presence, 18,000 people. And if you go to your local harbor, your local port, deepwater port, or even a a a canal or lake, roughly one in three chance that the vessel you see is powered by engines manufactured by Wärtsilä. Uh, think about of these like engines for ship engines the size of a bus, uh, and even bigger chance that the vessel is serviced by Wärtsilä. And on the power side, approximately 1% of the worldwide installed capacity, power-wise, is provided by our engines from the middle of the jungle to the desert. So, as you can imagine, this being a large industrial company in these sectors, this is how our salespeople are used to selling. This I found this picture in the internal picture bank. It absolutely encapsulates the a sales conversation, in this case, for a marine customer very, very nicely. So, we get together, we maybe have lunch or dinner, some coffee, we go through the blueprints of the project that you’re going to build, this very, um, like brand-spanking-new ferry that’s going to serve British Columbia. This is what they were used to, but then, you know, we had a more historical event called COVID-19, uh, at the 2019, beginning in 2020, and our salespeople who are majoritarily traditional, suddenly, this is the kind of sales meeting they were having. So sitting in the at home, maybe even on the toilet, just looking at a webcam, making a phone call in their in their hoodies, um, not something they were used to. Suddenly, all their and our sales and marketing weapons were were inadequate. We’re completely out of touch with the world. So, what can we offer to both our salespeople and our customers to, let’s say, maximize what they can get out of their time now using different tools. And, uh, something we had partnered in the past, we had used sparingly, uh, was webinars. So we decided that, okay. Seems like we need to give, um, a better forum or a better tool for salespeople to interact with their customers, to educate them, and to to reach audience at scale. And webinars seem to be a a tool capable of doing that. Luckily, we had prepared for this. Um, we had a state of constant readiness when it comes to martech, and, uh, and we prided ourselves on that. So when we were hit by a buzz, metaphorically speaking, with COVID, we were ready. We had a tool, we had a process. We only need to push the gas pedal down. What does pushing the gas pedal down look like? Before COVID, we were running approximately four webinars a year, once one a quarter. They were a huge undertaking. In 2020, we ran, um, if across the whole business, most of these facilitated by my team, over 100 webinars. We didn’t need to hire any additional personnel. We didn’t need to use any external help. We did this all in-house with our people and our process. All in all, we put out of there for our customers 72 hours of video content that wouldn’t have existed before, three days straight. And for you to have, um, a rough idea, how do these look like? Um, they’re not just a Zoom call where we randomly talk about whatever topic or sales call. They’re closer to the experience our salespeople would have in a seminar where they would be seen as thought leaders. And they have a number of engagement elements like you can see. Also here in ParDreamin is used in polls. So high quality, highly professional, interactive, short, treated, and to the point. This is a screencap from from a real one, where we have external experts also talking, and we interact with our audience quite frequently. So, what changed? Before COVID, as I mentioned, each webinar was an enormous undertaking. It was an artisanal process, it was like making a huge bronze statue, detail by detail. And we were very, let’s say, inwards focused on what we wanted to say. And we would normally have external agency or partner putting up the whole scaffolding of the production, the scripts, talking tracks, teleprompters, whatnot, which meant that the data was not owned by us because it was an organizer platform we owned and because of lack of data we couldn’t learn from what we had gotten. When we decided to move radically towards webinars, the first decision we made is to own this and make it easy so that any salesperson who had a real reason or topic, they wanted to put out in the form of a webinar and they had researched their audience or their topic, we had the process ready. This was made as cookie-cutter as possible. It’s a production line. These are the ingredients. This is the process. This is the time. This is the end product. And we focus on what we can learn from our audience and our partners and what we can share with them, very thought-leadership oriented. Fully owned and run in-house. We have webinar tool. We have no external help. Everything was done by our people, which means that they could learn and develop the competence. All data was owned by us, which meant that we were constantly, after each of those 108 webinars, running analysis on what worked, what didn’t, and optimizing tweaking the process. What are the keys for the ramp-up? Things that I learned that I want to share with you if you want to apply this to your own company. First, that tech readiness. Always be ready with your tech stack. Always have a process in place in case this happens. Um, best case, nothing dramatic happens. Your process can be fine-tuned. We’ll help your people do things with minimal cognitive load. Worst case, something dramatic like COVID happens, you’re ready to ramp it up. Productize things, production line mentality, cookie cutter. If you happen to be Spanish speaking, this is what in Spain we say la maˊquina de hacer chorizos [the machine that makes sausages]. You put the same thing in, you press you press the same thing, comes out the other end. It needs to be low cost, otherwise it’s not scalable. Otherwise you cannot go from four to 100 uh, with reasonable resources. And we decided to make it for our marketing operations team a core skill hosting and organizing webinar that everybody from me, the team lead, to the intern need to learn and be able to do when needed. We have webinar sometimes running on America’s West Coast time zone, on Australia time zone, and always somebody is ready to do this. And if you go into productizing this, uh, a bit more in detail, how do you do this effectively? Something that worked for us is to have standard requests via form, in our case, an Asana form, where you need the topic, the speaker, the date, audience, promotional channels, rough content, standardized timeline. So it means that everything needs to be ready $x$ days before the webinar. It is the same for each webinar. On day D minus 14, we do these things. D minus 10, we do these things. D minus seven, we do these things. Um, the same for the structure. Um, the thing with iterating and running many of these is that, as I said, you can try and test many things. If you test these many things, it will invariably lead you to an optimal structure. In our case, it was 45 minutes of speeches, 15 minutes Q&A, and um, no more than three speakers. No more than $x$ slides also. So we condense this into documentation. There’s guidance for the organizers. There’s guidance for the speakers, how to speak effectively, and we coach these speakers as well. To show you a bit like how does this look like or did look like in practice, these are some screenshots of our process like how long it intros, how many sessions there are, where when and where and how many polls do we have, how long is the Q&A, and and the same for the timeline. Like, in this week, we prepare the landing page and the emails. On this other week, we do a dry run. On on this other week, we send out the reminder. So everything was very standardized, which meant that, again, any of us can do it in any circumstance and with minimal cognitive load. This is how our checklist look like. I will share it with you when you get the deck. I will obviously not read every item in in detail for us not to, um, run over time here, but this is something that will be available, uh, for you afterwards. And there are details. These are particular to our company, Wärtsilä, about emails, about the imagery, which sizes they need to be, um, for different channels, who to reach out when, um, about registrations and thank you page, coaching for the presenters, data that we need from them, titles, pictures, um, how to build a campaign in Salesforce, which, um, statuses to use, and and so on and so forth. So, uh, feel free to use this at your at will. If this helps you set up a process in your company, I’ll be enormously happy. If you want to tweak it, copy with pride and and tweak it. Also, one thing that helps us is that these tasks are created automatically by Asana rule when you request a webinar. We limit the communication created to webinar to Asana, one channel, all tasks are created automatically. It’s a way to not forget anything and not allow anybody to try to hijack the process. Very important part of it for us, as I’ve said a couple of times already, measure and iterate. Some people say that I’m a data radical, I’ll take that with pride, but we measure everything we can measure. For example, response rate of participants, um, also qualitative feeling of the owner, of the speakers, and compare it to similar webinars. And always we do a retro, so we figure out if we can learn something from these webinars to apply to the master process. This is how it looks in in in reality. We have a dashboard based in Power BI, so the data is collected from, in our case, GoToWebinar and Pardot, uh, and it’s sent to to a data lake, in our case, Azure Data Factory. And from there, they still calculate it brought to a Power BI webinar where you can filter by date and compare your webinar to other webinars, uh, in terms of engagement minutes, score, MQL generated, and so and we can see the same like, this is a one webinar detail view. Um, things that are important to us are response to polls, question asked, whether people drop off or not by time, and and what was the the attendance percentage, and interest, and attentiveness. These three numbers up here are quite important to us. This allows us to to compare apples to apples and to be able to say, like, well, we think that you had too many speakers. Maybe we should have two or three instead of five given the time and so on. The same for Q&A poll responses. Every session for us needs to have a Q&A where we can, um, get that pulse from the audience and actually discuss topics that are important to them. Um, the same that we will do here in about a few minutes, we will do a Q&A, and I’ll very happily take your questions to answer them. This for us was very important to build a report with our salespeople that we’re not here just to make things that look nice, but also to provide you sales leads and enable you having that conversation with your customers. What was the result in this? So we saw that, um, looking at two-year moving averages, uh, 2018, 2019, pre-COVID time, the influenced revenue as in in between marketing analytics for the webinar channel was a little bit less than $10$ million USD. And when we ramped it up, we saw that it jumped to $733$ million. It was like an 80-fold or 78-fold leap, which was even larger than the increase in in webinars by number. So there were more, and they were more impactful. And it suddenly became our second most important channel at a very small expense. So this is an example of showing where is the money. Us being able to do this not only feels good, but also puts money in the top line of the company. And to summarize, if you want to join the Bonanza and ramp up your webinar production in a way that will not drive your team crazy or burn them out. My three pieces of advice here today are, at all times, whether it’s for webinar or something else, have your stack ready, Have an agile team of process. You don’t know what’s the next piece that’s going to fall in the Domino’s. Be ready for it. Um, my favorite thing to do, standardize and productize your marketing delivery. Make it so that people can do processes, the most common ones, with a minimal cognitive load. That will also go a long way towards preventing burnout and will free up their time to do actually creative rewarding exploration work and learning. Last but not least, extreme data drive. If if they also call you a data radical after this is implemented, um, I’ll buy you, uh, leverage. So that’s the only true and trusted path to optimization and improvement. And with these three nuggets, I’ll be happy to say thank you and continue with the Q&A.

Speaker 0: Thank you, Jaime. That was an amazing session. Uh, it does look like we couple questions in the chat, so I’m going to go ahead and push a couple of those to screen. The first up is a question from Frankie Gray who asks, um, could you please discuss webinar platform integrations like Zoom to Salesforce and the efficiencies they bring to creating campaigns and creating registrants?

Speaker 1: Definitely. Yes. So, um, the platforms, each of them are a thing of their own. My preferred alternative would have used with really good results is GoToWebinar. Uh, the reason for the choice is that there are relatively few platforms that have a native connector with Pardot. It’s GoToWebinar, WebEx, and ReadyTalk maybe. And and that is a guarantee that it’s going to work with minimal headache. You mentioned Zoom. Uh, I have to say I do not have a good experience with it recently. I know there’s an integration provided by Zoom very haphazardly cobbled together, very unstable. However, I have heard around the grapevine that some really cool people who organize ParDreamin are soon to come up with a better integration. So, that might be a good moment to reevaluate that. Creating campaigns. I have created campaigns directly via an Asana integration. So the moment my webinar project gets created in Asana, there’s a trigger or webhook that creates a campaign in Salesforce with the relevant statuses. So that for me was part of the process. Always, I would create a campaign for each webinar and even campaign for some of the assets related like emails that are being sent in. So creating registrants as contacts, I personally wouldn’t do it. I would create them as prospects in Pardot and if so leads. With creating a registrants context request that you create an account, you may or may not have that info and you may or may not make your CRM admin very angry at you for creating a thousand random contacts. I hope that answered the question.

Speaker 0: As a former CRM admin myself, I can say having a thousand random contacts in there would certainly frustrate me. Uh, thank you for that answer. We’ve got another question from, uh, Dinko here who asks, um, about how you deal with shy salespeople or people who may not be as tech savvy, um, and how you get them up and running with this sort of approach.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That’s, um, that’s a really good point, um, especially in a technical world, the people who have the most to say are the ones who want to say the least or the least comfortable in front of a camera. So we would normally pair them up. Um, if we have three speakers, we would normally want to have a very technical, like, here’s what I have to say person laying the the groundwork, then having a very extroverted, very communicative person of the same competence area, and if possible, an external party, like an external customer. To give you an example, when we talk about decarbonization in maritime, we have an expert in emissions. She’s a brilliant doctor who knows everything there is to know about emission abatement, But we also have a person who had worked commercially in in selling these services, and then we also have an owner of a ship who had this this, um, equipment on board. So pairing them up and trying to balance them so it’s not all uh, very cold or not all very in your face would work well for us.

Speaker 0: Awesome. They also asked if, uh, the webinar increase helped align your marketing and sales team.

Speaker 1: Very much so. Yes. Um, it it did show them that our reason for their success, is helping them succeed and and increase the top line of the company. The only minus point I can I can highlight there is that since we own the whole process and we try to make it very easy for them, it’s also a very or encourages a servant mentality? This department is here to serve me and to give me a soapbox to talk on my sales points, um, and that’s not what we wanted. So that’s something that we know we have to, um, polish a bit and require a bit more effort so that they have to spin the game as well.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much for that answer. And then it looks like we’ve got one more question here from Cecilia who is just asking if you will be able to provide some more information on the dashboards.

Speaker 1: There is another ParDreamin presenter. She presented on Wednesday as part of a session in data science. Her name is Sujata Karan. I wholeheartedly encourage you to get in touch with her. Or if you want to get in touch with me, I’ll connect you as well. She is a brilliant marketing data analyst.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Thank you for that. It doesn’t look like we have any more questions right now. I do just want to give a quick plug. Uh, I know Jaime mentioned this briefly, but Sercante is working on a Zoom to Pardot integration. Our own Adam Ertischek gave a demo of that on today’s demo jam this morning. So that is in the works. If that’s something you’re interested in learning more about, definitely reach out to someone at Sercante. We can definitely provide you with some more information on that integration. And with that, and if there are no other questions, we will go ahead and conclude today’s session. I want to thank you all for joining us and give a special shout out to our sponsors for their support. Without the sponsors, ParDreamin would not be possible. So make sure that you pop into the sponsor booths to learn more about what they do and get some points to win some cool prizes. I hope you all have a great rest of your Friday and a good rest of your ParDreamin. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much, everybody, and thanks, Kate, for hosting. Yep.