Webinars are a creative way to grow your client list and connect with your market. Among many other things, they can be beneficial for your business.

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Below, you’ll find a list of skills and characteristics that will make an entrepreneur successful with webinars. Any person who produces highly successful webinars is somewhere between 8 and 10 on a 1-10 scale on these skills.

Before we go into the skills, I’ll answer a question I am asked a lot: “Which webinar service should I use?” It depends on your purpose, goals, volume, and budget. It’s your prerogative which webinar service to use. Don’t get stuck comparing the different webinar services – simply choose one from many great options available today, and put the tool to good use.

Here Are The Webinar Skills That Will Put You In Control Of Your Webinar Success:

9. Learn to Use Your Webinar Service

If you have never used the webinar service you signed up for, practice! Many fear that something will go wrong during their live webinars. Fear is often caused by things we don’t know or understand. Fear of technical problems during a live webinar event can be diminished simply by learning how to use the webinar functions. You, as an accomplished professional, have dealt with things that are much more complex than that of the technical features of today’s webinar services.

Create several practice webinars, present anything you already have by yourself, and invite a few colleagues or friends to act as the audience. Practicing with live events makes you confident in managing the few technical things you need to handle during your public event.

Remember this: There will be people in your audience who might not be familiar with the webinar environment. Your confidence helps the participants feel confident too.

8. Webinar Presentation Creation Skills

A webinar is a business tool – a very effective one! – for marketing, sales, and delivery. Even the best tool, however, is inefficient without clear intention, competency, and commitment to using it for the purpose you got it for.

Most of us have attended a webinar that turned out to be just a sales pitch, or was too much about the presenter. Many of us have also participated in a webinar that was a boring lecture or was too dense with information – leaving us feeling frustrated or overwhelmed.

Creating a webinar that is interesting, inspiring, and teaches something that the audience can take action on and get results with is a skill. A learnable skill. There is a formula for creating winning webinar presentations¹; this, when infused with your specific expertise and your personality, creates an end result of a unique and authentic webinar that delivers great value and drives sales.

7. Ability To Define Purpose Of Your Webinar

Before you can create a webinar presentation, you need to define the purpose. Is it for generating new, targeted leads for your business? Reactivating old, passive clients? Launching a new product or service? Or maybe training your team on a specific topic?

Too often, webinars are created based on a general or weak idea. When the purpose is unclear, the message appears scattered. This in turn produces weak results. Considering the wide variety of purposes webinars are great for, they are used for only a narrow scope of it.

If you are just getting started in using webinars, integrate them so they support your long-term business strategy. If you are already using webinars as part of your business model, or your business is primarily based on using webinars, pay more attention to the purpose of each of your webinar event. Purpose gives you a clearer idea of what you present and how you present it, allowing for more powerful communication.

6. Ability To Set And Define Realistic Webinar Goals

Well-defined and realistic goals help you manage your (sometimes subconscious) expectations and hopes.  The reality that doesn’t meet your expectations causes disappointments and might lead you to a conclusion that you’ve failed, while in reality you just didn’t hit your expectations as quickly as you imagined.

To encourage you, let me tell you about one of my coaching clients who began to use webinars in his business. He is a business strategist who had, at the time of his first webinar, a list of about 700 people. Albeit the subscribers had rarely received any emails from him, 98 people who received his webinar invitation registered, and 70% showed up at the event. He was very excited due to the interactive audience and the great feedback he got at the end of his webinar. Two hours after the live webinar however, his excitement disappeared because no one had responded to his offer for a free consultation session. A day after the event, still no requests; and he was telling me that that webinars won’t work for his business. This attitude changed again in less than three weeks: Two webinar participants signed up for his consultation service, bringing in over 20,000 euros. You bet he now organizes webinars regularly and swears that webinars are a “must” business tool!

Be aware and conscious of what you secretly hope for, so you can manage your expectations and stay on track in executing your plan until you get the result you want.

5. Clarity On What The Problem Is

Your clients invest in your solution because they want to get out of something. They make this decision primarily because they are uncomfortable with the issue they have. Typically, people won’t decide to change until the discomfort of the issue is stronger than the discomfort of doing something different.

When you know the problem well and understand why a person doesn’t want it anymore, you can create problem-based webinars. Webinars that clearly communicate the problem make the sales process simple.

Why?

Because when you know the real problem, you can teach it to your market segment. This might sound odd, but often people see an unwanted end-result as a problem, and don’t realize that they are barking at a wrong tree. When they understand the true problem, their perception changes and they become open to new solutions.

4. Ability To Get In Front Of People Who Want Their Problem Solved Now

When you organize an event, you want people to attend. (A side note: You can generate income with a webinar no one attends², but that’s another topic.) Without a doubt, market reach is essential. Most entrepreneurs and business owners, however, don’t realize they already have more than enough reach to get an audience for their webinar.

The most common reason entrepreneurs or business owners don’t realize their own market rech are:

• They have not executed a consistent plan contacting their market segment and have no real fact based knowledge on how many they can reach

• Their messaging is unclear and has a weak or even nonexistent call-to-action – thus, no action by their audience, leaving the business owner feeling she is not reaching the market. However, it’s her unclear message that doesn’t get through

• No clear idea who they truly can help the best. Therefore, contacting anyone is continuously postponed with a fear of being seen as an unwanted intruder

What you can do after reading this article is check out how many people are in your client database, on your prospect list (fresh and old), on your email subscription list; check how many people visit your website, how many first level connections you have in LinkedIn, and how many followers you and/or your company have on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Look at the numbers, give that little voice inside your head a small break, and send a simple survey to those people to find out who has a problem for which you have a solution. Then let that group of people know that you will organize a webinar discussing that problem, and grant them free access to that event. That’s one of the simplest ways for you to get targeted audience for your webinar.

3. Ability To Craft Great Offers

I view offers like gates revealing a path to the desired destination. When you believe in your product — or if you are a service provider, you believe in yourself being able to deliver what you promise — you can stop offering minuscule offers that provide partial solutions for a discounted price.

If something helps people with a specific matter or problem, it is your moral obligation and responsibility — and your right — to offer this solution for them. They can then choose it or not. That is their job. Your job is to prepare a good offer, so your audience understands how your help positively changes their lives.

If you are not proud to offer your product or service, is it because you are desperate to sell it to anyone who will listen? If so, do more work on understanding the problem and the people with that problem, and how your solution fixes them. If it’s the quality of your product you are not proud of, improve it or find a  better product. There are plenty of great products to sell – no one needs to sell bad stuff and lose their integrity because of it.

2. Willingness To Follow Up

I know, I know, you’re probably rolling your eyes. People simply do not want more emails. People don’t want unwelcome, unsolicited emails cluttering their inbox. However, if a person accepted your invite, and registered to and attended in your webinar, it strongly suggests that she is very interested in what you offer.

Those who responded to your offer, you naturally provide what you promised. Those you have not yet responded, show them that care – by not leaving them alone with their own thoughts. Thank those who  attended your webinar. Highlight insights from the webinar. Share what others said about it. Encourage them to step forward and enrol for your solution, which helps them to get rid of their problem. Respectfully help your prospects to decide.

1. Leadership Confidence

A lot goes into creating and organizing a successful webinar, and to be able to do it repeatedly. It requires self-leadership to manage yourself through the whole process of creating and organizing a webinar, as well as handling the pre- and post-webinar actions. It also takes resilience to keep going, albeit the first few webinars would give you more feedback than desired results.

Leadership skills enable you to manage the energy in your webinar room, and keep your audience mentally and emotionally engaged throughout the event. Being confident enough to ask for active participation and to create interaction with your audience trains them to take action when you request for it.

Great leaders will learn and dedicate themselves to being better, with a focus on output and achievement. Multiple achievements lead to success and a self-confidence that keeps the momentum going from webinar to webinar.

Conclusion

When you improve your skills listed above, you’ll provide your webinar attendees something much more valuable than information: You’ll provide transformation!

People who organize webinars for money rarely achieve it. People who work to be their best, and dedicate themselves to that process daily, earn tons.

Take joy in serving others with inspiring, well-prepared webinars that initiate change, and you’ll catapult your own success and significance toward a higher level.

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^{This article was originally published on Linkedin Blog and has been reposted on Connected Women with the permission of the author. 
Edited by Michelle Sarthou
Image credit: Shutterstock
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