How Webinars Can Bring Sales and Marketing Together

How Webinars Can Bring Sales and Marketing Together

Todd Earwood, Founder and CEO of MoneyPath, joins the Content Experience Show to discuss the union of sales and marketing, plus surprising findings on webinars.

In This Episode:

Todd Earwood

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Full Episode Details

Evergreen Webinars

When it comes to creating long-term content, few marketers will immediately throw out the idea of a webinar. After all, isn’t the point of a webinar to create an experience for a single moment in time?

According to Todd Earwood and the studies he has conducted at MoneyPath, webinars can and should be so much more than a single event! In his words, a webinar done well should be a factory for evergreen content.

By following some of Todd’s strategies, like setting up your webinar in the Buzzfeed “listicle” style and pulling highlights, you can create multiple videos and audio recordings to re-purpose throughout the year. In this way, you’ll add greater value to your content while also gaining sales leads from those who attend and those who engage after the fact.

In This Episode

  • How MoneyPath went deep on email analysis.
  • Email’s shift from being standalone content to a delivery system for other content.
  • How to use webinars to bring sales and marketing together.
  • How to create webinars that can serve as long-term content.

Quotes From This Episode

“We can’t be oil and water. We have to work together.” — @earwood

“If we’re going to really look at the metrics for a webinar, we’ve got to get past this registration- and attendee-only model. It’s not just the live event.” — @earwood

You create a webinar once in a great way. Now you have a content factory model to repurpose multiple times. Click To Tweet

Resources

Content Experience Lightning Round

Bourbon or Fried Chicken?

Fried chicken.

Ice cream or pie?

Always ice cream!

Basketball or football?

Basketball.

See you next week!

What Great Brands Do That Good Brands Don't in Content Marketing

Okay content is easy. Killer content is hard. This nifty eBook shows you the difference, based on our real-world work with dozens of brands. A must-read!

Episode Transcript

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Anna Hrach: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Content Experience Show Podcast. My name is Anna Hrach with Convince and Convert, and I am here with the always amazing Randy Frisch from Uberflip. Today, we have a fantastic guest for you. We got to talk to Todd Earwood, who is CEO from Money Path. Now, Money Path is a company that helps companies marry together marketing campaigns and sales efforts while connecting their systems through custom integrations. And Todd is genuinely delightful to talk to. He's from Louisville, Kentucky, which everybody out there, just in case you're wondering, it is Louisville like no vowels. Todd Earwood: Not Louisville. Anna Hrach: Not Louisville, not Louisville, it's Louisville. But Todd was wonderful. And he gives so much amazing advice in this podcast. Randy, I mean what were your takeaways? Randy Frisch: Yeah. So first, I'm going to be honest with all of our listeners. I didn't know what to expect on this one. Neither of us knew Todd, but at this point I want to hang out with Todd. I want to go eat fried chicken with him and watch basketball, which you'll have to stay tuned to figure out where that comes from. But, honestly, he was a very genuine and honest guy. Took us through his career and the shifts that took him on this path. Crazy story about how he sold the company to HubSpot early in his career, which is just cool given the success of that company has had. We ended up hitting on a topic that is so important even to my marketing strategy in Uberflip. We're very focused on webinars, but we don't really think strategically enough about it. Right? We just kind of go about it, and I almost want to do a webinar on webinars now because I just felt like Todd shared so much insight in terms of where webinars need to play more strategically into our approach as marketers. Anna Hrach: Yeah. Webinars are massively overproduced. Yeah. It's under-utilized pieces of content and Todd makes some great cases and has some great tips on how to do that. Randy Frisch: So let me ask you, what is your best webinar style that you like to go to, Anna? Do you like more the panel of four people with not many slides or do you like kind of the one that feels like a keynote but you're in your living room? Anna Hrach: I am a big fan of some banter back and forth and definitely different voices. As Todd mentioned, there's nothing worse than just hearing one person read a PowerPoint. But yeah, I'm a fan of some humor. It's got to be entertaining. I mean, it's gotta, it's gotta have some value and some entertainment for me. What about you? Randy Frisch: In general, I'm not a big fan of panels, right? I don't like panels in person. I think everyone's just trying to like say their peace and they don't have enough time and they usually just all agree with each other. I agree. When there's banter and disagreement, then it gets fun. But it's so rare to get that, right? I love the provocative idea or take me through like a cool case study that'll push me to think outside the box. But there's so much that we can do with webinars and I think what you'll get from this episode is just some ideas to push your thinking and think about how you interject those, especially into your email campaigns. But you'll tune in from here. You'll listen to it all. Should we roll it? Anna Hrach: Yeah. Let's roll it. I think you brought Todd in, so let's hear what he had to say. Randy Frisch: Hey Todd, thanks so much for joining us. This is going to be a ton of fun on this episode because you've done some really cool studies on email and what that means for B2B marketers. So I want to get to that, but before we get there, maybe you can just for everyone's sake, give your path. What's your story, what's kind of like ... Up here in Canada we have TSN, it's like the ESPN equivalent and they always call it the TSN Turning Point, right? It's like what is that moment in your career that set you down the path you're in today? Todd Earwood: Yeah. Great Question, Randy, and thanks for having me. I have built software companies for 12 years. We built multiple products. We sold one to HubSpot ages ago when they were the little tiny company that no one knew. Then we built another marketing platform, and at the end of that company, I was an investor backed. I'm going around to meet with all my investors to say thank you for being involved and one guy says, "What are you going to do next," which was to me a very silly question. I was going to build software and he preempted that strike by saying, "Todd, I hope you're not going to go build software because I really don't think that's your best skill" which was like massively offensive to me. And instead he said, "You really should be doing that crazy sales and marketing stuff you've done." Like I have all these companies we invest in that don't know how to grow, but you've mastered that. Why don't you think about doing a services business? And I was reluctant to do that, Randy, but that was five and a half years ago, and he handed me my first client literally on a platter and said, "Here, these guys need help and they're receptive to it." And we've helped grow that company from $4 million to $24 million in revenue without taking any additional investor after this guy. So that gave me a lot of promise and now we're running Money Path, which is really a consulting firm. We're running those marketing and sales campaigns that help growth and then doing all the nerdy fun stuff on the back end, building systems integration to make companies scale. So that's what I'm doing today and that's how I got here. Randy Frisch: Okay. So first of all, that's one of the best TSN Turning Points I've ever. I loved that the guy just told you that your idea is terrible and you went with it, right? And look where you are now. Loving what you do. Anna Hrach: But not just that the idea was terrible, like literally your entire career path. Randy Frisch: Everything you thought you were, you are not that good at that. Todd Earwood: Listen. Anna Hrach: Just a nice, humble gut check. Like, "Oh, okay." Randy Frisch: I'm sure by now you've gotten your liquidity out of selling a business to HubSpot, but if you kept some stock, I mean, you'd be happier. Todd Earwood: Oh, man. Yeah. Randy Frisch: Their market cap I think went from like $1.3 billion to like $5.2 over the last couple of years. Just wild. Todd Earwood: Yeah, it is wild. And that was, again, they had less than I think 40 people when that happened. Randy Frisch: Wow. Todd Earwood: They were a tiny shop and we just had a personal connection to them and they said, "We're gonna buy this or build it, what do you want to do?" And we said, "Well, we're just messing around." And we had like maybe 10,000 users on this platform and moved on. So yeah. Randy Frisch: I'm just curious now, what did the platform do? Todd Earwood: Yeah, so this is when one of the major lead sources that HubSpot's built over the years is they're grader.com, their website grader. Randy Frisch: Okay. Todd Earwood: And we had built a Facebook page grader, and they at the time ... Now, they've consolidated all that big application or several applications into one, but we had built this Facebook grader that lets you authenticate in and we score you and give you tips on what you should do literally with almost no promotion. Like we had 10,000 small businesses do this because everybody's trying to figure out what to do with Facebook at the time. And maybe they still are, but that's how it worked. And so they said, "Well, you've got a way to attract people, small businesses. We want to find them and put them on our platform." And so in the greater suite of tools, we were the Facebook piece. Randy Frisch: Wow. That's very cool. I remember when those campaigns were rocking in for them. I was sitting on the other side just like purely jealous. Like trying to figure it out. It was like, "What can we grade?" Todd Earwood: Yup. Randy Frisch: So let's dig into this topic that you hit on, which is marketing and sales and how they worked together. You've dug into how people use email. I have a first question, maybe it'll start it off, and feel free to push back if I'm going into unchartered territory, but where I struggle these days is who controls what emails shouldn't say, right? Is it marketing or is it sales? Because you have there's all this new tech there, right? Like marketing, whether we're using HubSpot or Marketo or if you're B2C and you're using something like Exact Target. We've got the ability to kind of nurture people, but then at the same time, sales reps are using nurture software, like the SalesLoft, the Outreaches, or they're just sending their own emails. Like who's in control at Nearby? Todd Earwood: Sadly we all are. You nailed it. The problem I think we're having is you've got these two separate teams that, again, we're trying in our firm to really focus on how do you marry those two together. We can't be oil and water. We have to work together and I think it really depends, which is kind of a crappy answer. So I'm sorry, Randy, but I think the answer is really it depends. If you're doing account-based marketing, sales probably has more use of SalesLoft and Outreach and they're doing heavier email maybe at the top of the funnel. But I think for most organizations, especially B2B, definitely B2C, the top of the funnel still lands in marketing's area and probably middle of the funnel should too. And we started this research project because, again, having come from the software world, I was being told I was good at this and our initial clients were happy but I wanted to know more and that's kind of my MO is like when I don't know something, go start a research project and find out about it. Anna Hrach: So I would love, because I'm a massive nerd, to dig into more of this research project. So you analyzed 25,000 B2B emails, is that correct? Did I get that stat right? Todd Earwood: That's right. Anna Hrach: How? Todd Earwood: That number is growing. But yeah, so in a really slow, painstaking way to get started. There's a third party that indexes the top SAS companies software as a service and HubSpot of courses on that list and Exact Target with now Salesforce of course is at the very top. But what we did, the exercise I had my team do is let's go opt in to some type of lead magnet or newsletter, whatever we can find on the home page, not on a landing page, not from an ad. And let's track how do SAS companies email and follow up and nurture that cold lead. Because my thesis was they are the best content marketers. SAS companies have to do content. ECommerce doesn't always think that way, but B2B SAS companies, the great ones know they have to, and I wanted to build a formula that said what are they doing? And then I'm glad you're a nerd like me because then I got into the weeds and like literally we took screenshots of every page. What's the call to action? What was the color buttons? How many words in the buttons? What was the follow up? Did they send you your thank you page? We went to the ends of the earth and immediately my team was saying like, "Todd, this is going to blow up our Google spreadsheet. You can't keep adding 42 columns every time you have a new idea." And so we got our engineers involved. We put in a database and they said, "Todd, this is getting ridiculous, man. You want too much." And then we went out finally and hired a guy out of San Francisco who leads like the data science meetup for San Francisco. And he knew lots of people. So we got these two phenomenal data sciences to dive into the data, which was not inexpensive but was crazy awesome to see the outcomes. Anna Hrach: That is. So I love that Excel was pretty much just about to send you an alert message that's just like, "Seriously again, another like 42 columns?" I am curious. I don't think I've ever maxed out Excel, but now I'm curious. I don't think I want to but still curious. So at the end of the results when you analyzed of these emails, what did you find? Because I'm curious because I find it interesting on your perspective about B2B SAS being best at content marketing because I feel like they don't think that. They very much feel like they're behind the game and they're not doing it right. So I'm curious what you found with all of these 25,000 emails. Todd Earwood: First of all, I wanted to know what was the intent of the email. And the nerds like me on our team would call this content type. What was the content type, but ultimately it meant what was the intent, what is the sequence? So they hit you with a go watch a demo, go watch a webinar or read a blog post. And so that was the very first thing that we started ranking those saying what's the sequence, and then we had to have humans in the loop to go in and say that the data scientists could not really identify that that well. And so we still literally every week we spend about eight man hours on this tagging saying that's the webinar, that's a save the date for an event. And then we chronicle it and edited into the model. So the outcome really and the intent was awesome was the number one thing they were doing was emailing content. Kind of the HubSpot inbound model. Like here's a blog post, check it out, which is pretty smart I think if you're at the top of the funnel and you're super cold. But the number two email was webinar. It was above eBook. It was above any other lead magnet. It was above newsletter. And that really sent me down a rabbit hole of why is it webinar. Because is webinar not the oldest marketing trick that we have in the bag? Right? That's played out. We've all been on a sucky webinar probably this week. Right? So that was where content type really drove the research to go really down the rabbit hole. Anna Hrach: Interesting. So I want to talk more about webinars and how everybody sort of approaching this because this is super, super fascinating. I definitely never would have thought webinars was number two on the list, but we are going to take a super quick break to hear from our sponsors and then when we come back, Todd, we're going to talk more about these findings and some of the ways that we can use webinars in 2019. So everybody stick around. We will be right back with Todd Earwood. Randy Frisch: Okay. So this episode has been all about leveraging data. You've heard from Todd talk about how data can inform our marketing strategy. So it's more important than ever as we head into 2019 that your marketing strategy has data driving your decisions, and that's where ICUC can help you make data driven decisions throughout the entire year. What it does is it reports on your social media strategic insights to give you a deep understanding of your audience market and competitors to empower you to develop your marketing strategy to best target, reach, engage, and retain everyone you're after. If you want to get your hands on this go to ICUC.social/plan2019 to get started. We are back here on the Conex Show. We've got Todd chatting about this amazing report he did, looking at emails, looking at the findings, and I want to get back to webinars. Before we do, I kind of have a tangent question that'll take us there. So stay with me. What I found interesting about that finding that you shared is that I think we've seen a big move these days. I'm wondering if you agree that it used to be that the content was the email, right? Like that's where we loaded in, right? Like we used to send newsletters, right, and the newsletter was an email, but now it seems more and more, and I think your webinar examples a good example of this, is that we were clicking out to find the content, right? The email is really just the delivery mechanism, if you will, but it isn't the content. Do you think that's fair? Todd Earwood: I do think that's fair and the findings from the research actually support that because what we found was the common cadence, and, again, I'm going to have to get just a little bit nerdy because we got down into like what's the length of the subject line, what's the mean and median in regards to characters and words. How do you capitalize? Do you sentence case? Do you all uppercase like a crazy person or do you do all lowercase like a 13 year old. Like we tracked all those things and as we got into this, what we found was people are sending longer emails but the pattern of the body copy was actually smaller, quicker paragraphs, more calls to action. To your very point, Randy, I want to tease, I want to get the next step, which is to get you out of email into my world and probably I think another reason that's happening, Randy, is that we want to pixel everybody. Randy Frisch: Right. Todd Earwood: It's harder and there's probably somebody that's listening is going to say, "Oh no, no, Todd, in an email, you can do this by inserting this crazy thing was Zappi or whatever," but for most of us, like you want to get into our land that we own out of the inbox where Google and everybody's messing with us. We want to get out of there and get to our land and hopefully pick you and push you further down the funnel. So I think that's dead, right? And the data supports it. Randy Frisch: Yeah. I mean, one of the reports or stats that I always go to is this idea that most of us need at least seven pieces of content before we're ready to buy. And to your point, because we've got to be so short, we can't. We can't hit people with seven findings in that email. So the best way is to take them out, and it sounds-let's get back to your big finding-that the webinars are still a big rock, if you will, towards getting someone to click on that first asset. Todd Earwood: Absolutely. It was, again, the rankings were generic blog post type content and inbound content; two is webinar; three was lead magnet; four was newsletter and then it kind of falls off. But inbound content and webinar were way above the rest. So again, going down the rabbit hole, I started saying, "Well, second research project." We need to start looking at what are these webinars they're doing? What are the hooks? What is the motivation is to get people to come in and actually register. And then that, again, once I went down that path, I started figuring out like there's a lot of awesome things you can do with webinar. Again, if you think about my firm's focus, we're trying to help marketing and sales get together and work together. And I realized if you do webinars well and you have a high intent lead, salespeople don't complain to you and go, "Hey, I don't care if you call this MQL, I don't care about this." The reality is if you could tell a sales rep, "I have a lead. They spent 42 minutes with me listening to our educational piece. And oh, by the way, I use Todd's webinar formula to segment their interest." Then that becomes something where sales rep say, "Yes, please. I'll stop complaining about the quality of our leads. Give me more of those." And that's what made me start going, "Okay, I need to formalize this." And now we've tested it in 17 different industries, both B2B and B2C. Anna Hrach: So are we allowed to ask or can you reveal what Todd's webinar formula is? Todd Earwood: Yeah, I think there's a few key pieces. Number one, Randy, you said it right, like if the stats say you've got to have seven content touches or seven interactions with the company. What we found was, number one, if you're going to measure the metrics, we all as marketers love metrics and I love them as much as anybody. But if we're gonna really look at the metrics for a webinar, we've got to get past this registration and attendee only model. It's not just the live event, right? So we don't really measure other. If you think about marketing campaigns, you launch an eBook, you don't get mad on day two if not everybody downloads it. But a webinar you think, "Well, it's a hosted event, so that has no value." And the answer there is that's not true. So what we do is we structure the content in a model that the good old company Buzzfeed has programmed us humans to do, which is the listicle model, right? So we have top three X and typically we do strategically, we try to pick a hook that is about avoiding pain instead of getting gain, because that'll drive registrations and interests. So humans will all go at the end of the earth to not lose something. Right? So we'll do top three mistakes that healthcare CMOs make with paid media, right? And so by having that longer title, which is perfectly fine, we learned and then saying I'm going to take that content and there's lots of content production tricks we have in the bag. But the interesting part is by creating the content and the listicle model, you're going to be able to repurpose that content when you're done with the webinar export that MP4, you should have five separate videos. I've got clients now who remake that MP4 into a like a highlight reel, TSN, ESPN style of like here's the two minute hook of a 45 minute webinar. So I think the magic is you create a webinar once in a great way, highly intense sales leads, and I now have a content factory model where I can repurpose this multiple times. Randy Frisch: I'm sorry to jump in, Anna. Anna Hrach: Yeah, no. Randy Frisch: I feel like that answer is our two minute exert that we're going to use for this. That was awesome. Go for it, Anna. Now you Ann a Hrach: No. I was going to say I'm so happy to hear you say that because yeah, it's all of this work and all of this time and love goes into creating these webinars. And then we just kind of drop it like an anchor into the bottom of the sea. We never bring it back up again. But there's so much content potential, so much reuse. There's designed a little quote snippets. There's highlight reels. There's teaser reels. There's so much that you could do. You could take excerpts of it and create a podcast, a highlight. There's so much content that comes from webinars. It is content gold and I completely agree. People are not taking advantage of it and it doesn't have to be a one time event. I loved your analogy of the eBook. Todd Earwood: Yup. We don't evaluate other marketing campaigns that way. Anna Hrach: No. Todd Earwood: We never do. And we think some content pieces we create are intentionally going to have a short shelf life, right? You may have an end of year promo or content strategy where you're helping people plan for next year. I think we're all kind of doing that in some way. That's common, right? And you're not going to have a lot of traffic to that in April. That's fine. But if you do the webinar correctly, yes, you can have it in a short term focus topic, but a lot of times if you do it right, you can have it almost evergreen. But the other key part that I think we're missing is I'm the son of a minister who's now retired and whether you go to church or not, you can probably understand the analogy that if you walked into a church and a person greeted you at the door and then that same person walked in front of the audience and said, "Welcome today, let me give you some announcements," and then they asked for your money then they prayed for you. Then they gave you a sermon and they asked you to come down forward. Then you greeted you at the door on the way out. Holy cow though. You'll be so tired of hearing that one person you would never go back, but that's what we do in marketing for webinars. We have one person and somehow you're supposed to carry the engagement and the interest of the audience and 99% of people are not going to put their face up on video, so it's a PowerPoint. Is there a worse medium than PowerPoint, no face, one person talking. I argue there is not. So what we do is we tell our clients, unless Kevin Hart the comedian or Adele the singer works in your company, only they are allowed to be the only webinar person. In our model, we have a host for MC and we have a thought leader and we want to put that thought leader up on the pedestal where they deserve to be. In our opinion, thought leaders don't come down with us peasants and tell us about our bios. We don't read our own bio's, right? We don't say here's the housekeeping of a webinar. So that's another key part is marketers we're just missing today. Anna Hrach: Nice. I love that. So the other thing that you've done with webinars is you just couldn't stay away from building, could you? You went and you built this amazing tool and I'd love to just mention it real quick just so people know that there's some resources out there on how to get started. Todd Earwood: Yeah. There's two things we built. One is, Randy, you said it earlier, like I can't stop building graders. I've built bunches of graders. Randy Frisch: I love graders. I love them. They're amazing. Todd Earwood: So we built another grader. So it lets you quickly say if you like webinars or you've done them or you haven't done them, it doesn't matter. Go check out the grader and it'll tell you a score and give you tips. I think as marketers, we all want shortcuts. It gives you a shortcut tips of how to go create these with less pain and better outcomes, but the other two I think that you're talking about is we've built a web form tool. It's as simple as filling out a web form using our different playbooks and out spits the PowerPoint. As marketers, frankly, I'm giving it up to you. You should be able to style it at that point, but if I just hand you the strategy in a two to three person post, thought leader model, the tool spits it out. So I want to reduce that issue that marketers have of creating all the content and saying, "Here's a playbook, run the play," and out spits the PowerPoint and you're ready to go. Anna Hrach: Nice. Love it. Well, Todd, thank you so much. I've had a ton of fun. We've had a ton of fun talking to you. Just in case, let's go ahead. Where can people get ahold of you because I'm sure people are going to have a ton of questions for you about webinars and all of this great email stuff. So how can people get ahold of you? How can they find you? Todd Earwood: Sure. You can find me at WebinarWorks.co. WebinarWorks, plural, .co, and I've got a page for you guys, for your listeners with these webinar grader and tools you can go check out that WebinarWorks.co/contentexperienceshow. Anna Hrach: Look at that. That is fantastic. Awesome. Todd, thank you so much. It was so wonderful having you on. Before we go though, we want to get to know a little bit more about the personal side of you and now that we got to know all about the professional side. So stick around for just a few more minutes and we are going to ask you some fun questions. Everybody stick around and we're going to get to know more about Todd Earwood. Randy Frisch: All right, Todd. So this is the fun part. We've done all the webinar knowledge we can get from you. But now we kind of get to know the personal side. What I did is I put together some lightning round questions here. We're going to hit you quick. I got five or six. We'll see where they go, and we'll get some of your personal preferences too as we're going into this, which will kind of take us from the professional to the work. Okay. So are you ready? Todd Earwood: I'm ready. Let's do it. Randy Frisch: Okay, cool. So your personal preference to listen to webinars or podcasts? No pressure, no pressure, no pressure. Todd Earwood: I love Webinars as a marketing strategy, but dude, podcaster my ears every day. Randy Frisch: Alright. Alright, so next one. Favorite webinar software Todd Earwood: Software. It's Go To Webinar. Randy Frisch: Okay. Nice. The classic. Todd Earwood: Go To Webinar's number one. Randy Frisch: Now we're going to get a little bit more personal. So you're from Louisville, Kentucky from what I know. Bourbon or Fried Chicken? Todd Earwood: Fried Chicken. It's like heresy here to say that, but it's not. It's actually all my friends can drink all the bourbon. Randy Frisch: All right. That's okay. No judgment. Then we've got to finish up that question with ice cream or pie? Todd Earwood: Dude, ice Cream every day. That's not even discussion. I don't understand the question almost. Randy Frisch: So sticking to the region you're in. I mean, there's a lot of fan for both basketball and football, like college wise, right? So where do you lean basketball or football? Todd Earwood: It's, again, it's almost like ice cream and pie. I love sports, man. I love all sports. Even your hockey. But I am hardcore college basketball to a factor that I can't even evaluate. It's so much more basketball and football. Randy Frisch: Amazing. Well we will cheer for your team. Let us know who your team is. I imagined, but I'm not going to presume. Todd Earwood: it's Louisville cardinals. I live in Louisville. I was born in Louisville, and came back here after college to work professionally, so I am hardcore a Louisville Cardinals fan. Randy Frisch: Well listen, I'm glad. I'm glad no one's been able to vary off that passion as they did your passion for building tech. But it sounds like you found your way. Todd, this was a ton of fun. On behalf of Anna and myself, thanks to everyone for tuning into this episode. If you enjoyed this one, check out all of our other episodes. You can find them on iTunes, on Stitcher, on Google Play, on Spotify. We're everywhere and when you can, give us feedback and let us know what you're enjoying. Until next time, thanks to everyone for tuning in and thanks to Todd Earwood.  
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