Educate Agency Leads with Webinar Workshops

Chris Handy runs Thinkhandy, a HubSpot partner agency in Fort Worth, Texas, that he started about four years before this recording after a B2B sales career in the wireless aftermarket. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode, number 7 of Inbound Agency Journey, with Andrew Dymski joining for the recap at the top of the show. Most of the conversation is about how Chris nurtures leads: short personal emails and a monthly Q&A webinar that became the center of his sales funnel.

Plain emails that look like they came from Chris

Thinkhandy hadn’t landed on a niche (about half its clients were in construction trades like roofing and air conditioning), so Chris put the personalization into what happens after a lead comes in. Gray asked whether that meant smart content or separate workflows. Chris said persona first, then the emails.

I’m a big proponent of really quick, not graphically designed emails that are more personal, that really look like they’re coming from me. So a lot of them are just questions regarding, “Hey, what’s the biggest challenge you have with marketing your roofing company?”

(Listen at 14:13)

People reply from their phones, and open and response rates run far above his designed marketing emails. Most of those sends are triggered by a manual filter, and he reviews every new contact in a HubSpot CRM list called “inbox” before automation touches them. A great fit gets a call or a note from his own email instead.

The webinar fills the middle of the funnel

Gray asked for a recent win. Chris answered with a look inside his funnel: the Inbound Success Workshop, a monthly GoToWebinar Q&A where he answers questions and reviews attendees’ websites and landing pages on the spot. It’s become so central to his sales process that he sends everyone there, including unqualified leads who want to pick his brain. The idea came out of a conversation with a HubSpot Academy professor who’d come to Fort Worth to speak to the HubSpot user group Chris leads. The top of Chris’s funnel was working and the bottom took care of itself. The middle was the problem.

We’re generating hundreds of leads every month. It’s great. The people who are ready for the sale, they let me know, and we close some of those sales and some we disqualify, and that’s great. But getting people from the top of the funnel to the bottom, I had this huge mystery gap that was sitting there. What is that middle of the funnel? A lot of people tell you it’s a case study… but I still think that’s more of a bottom of the funnel piece of content. If you have this webinar sitting in the middle, you can use this as a closing tool for everybody.

(Listen at 20:10)

It’s also a polite way to disqualify

The webinar gives Chris somewhere to send people he won’t take on as clients, and they still get something out of it.

It also becomes a disqualification pool. You can say, “Hey, look, you’ve got a great company here. I’d love to help you. It may not be the right fit for how we like to work with our clients, but I’ll tell you what. We’re basically free consulting every month that you can come on, and anytime you have an issue, we’ll go over it.” So even those people are satisfied. They recommend people. They give me content to go over in the webinar.

(Listen at 20:46)

The signup form asks one question: what is your biggest marketing challenge? Chris drops the answers into Evernote, highlights the ones he’ll cover, and takes questions from people who actually showed up first, unmuting anyone who agreed to talk.

No pitch on the call, and a retainer that took over a year

Gray asked what the call to action is at the end. There isn’t one on the webinar itself.

I don’t say “schedule an assessment.” Everybody who comes knows who I am. They do get an email later… saying, “Hey, I hope all your questions were answered. If you are interested, you can schedule an assessment and we can go over your details in private,” because a lot of people don’t want to go online. They don’t want to submit a question. They just want to watch.

(Listen at 24:13)

Attendees have told Chris that’s what they liked: he wasn’t asking for the sale. The payoff can be slow.

We have people attending this for nine, 10, 11 months before they come on and they schedule an assessment. So it’s a long game… We’ve just brought on a retainer this last month. I was looking back. They first visited our website in 2013. They first signed up for the webinar in early 2014, and they’ve visited that webinar eight times since then. And now here in February of 2015, they requested an assessment… So over a year that they’ve been just dancing around this, and I’ll attribute it all to the webinar for sure.

(Listen at 24:47)

Working in the open with the client

Gray asked about lesser-known tools. Chris uses Podio, customized per client, and invites clients into the workspace. The tool matters less than the policy behind it.

We want to iterate rather than work on it, work on it, work on it, reveal it, and then possibly fail. We spent way too much time doing that before, and we don’t want to do that anymore. So we work completely openly with the client. They have full access to the project management system. When we’re late on something and we’re talking back and forth about, “Hey, we’ve got to get this in gear, it’s due next week,” the client can see all that. And we made that decision early on that we were going to do that, and it helps us keep accountable.

(Listen at 30:15)