How To Improve Client Business Development With Zoominars

Not to be an alarmist, but many consultants and professionals are testing positive for Zoom fatigue.

Well, get over it. Zoom is your new best friend when it comes to business development.

Perhaps time and distance are keeping you and your prospects apart. If you serve clients that are located throughout the country or even in different countries, the pandemic has actually been a good thing. The silver lining to the cloud is the widespread adoption of Zoom.

This has given rise to the Zoominar, a virtual seminar that allows you to host inexpensive meetings for people from anywhere.

While generating high-paying clients through small-scale seminars is a proven marketing strategy for consultants and professionals, times have been tough. Many professionals and consultants are frustrated that you can’t gather prospects into a room like you used to. Others are frustrated by a lack of turnout for the Zoominars they do host.

Here are recommendations to increase attendance for your next lead generation event on Zoom:

1. Develop a checklist and timeline of your pre and post Zoominar activities.
2. Determine your target audience of prospects. LinkedIn is a great tool to find people if you know details about them (we entered all that info about ourselves in LinkedIn and it is searchable).
3. Use informal research to pretest the topics to make sure the one you choose has the most appeal for your target audience. A great option is always: “The Three Biggest Blunders _____ Make When Doing ___________.”
4. Make sure emails, social media postings, web landing pages, and LinkedIn messages convey a first-class image for you.
5. Confirm registrations 48 hours before the event by email. If you want to be a business development ninja, reach out and call prospects to tell them you are looking forward to meeting them, and ask if they have any specific questions they want you to cover.
6. Deliver seminar content that is of real value. Make it a no-selling zone. Delivering a thinly disguised sales pitch is the kiss of death.
7. Make it easy for the prospect to have a strategy call later on. Offer this briefly during the seminar and send the follow-up offer by email. Make it clear it is a no-selling call and honor that.
8. For the strategy call the recommended agenda is to get clarity around their goals, assets, or roadblocks, and to learn from you how others have gotten from where they are to where they want to go.
9. Conduct organized follow-up to stay in touch with the people who signed up to attend but did not make it. These are the forgotten few. They are interested in the topic but something came up, and the easiest item of the day to say no to is the Zoominar. About 50% who sign up do not show up, and they are still great prospects.
10. Measure, measure, measure. Be sure to measure all aspects of the program to see what could be improved. Measure how many were invited, how many accepted, how many actually attended, how many who attended booked a strategy call, how many kept the call and how many of those callers became clients.

The number one challenge for professionals and consultants is creating new clients. Zoominars are a dignified way to network with prospects and develop new referral sources. As management visionary Peter Drucker once said, you must answer three questions: What is our business? Who is our client? What does our client consider valuable? The secret to Zoominar business development success lies in the answers to those three questions.