Ask any top salesperson what their secret to success is, and you will get a similar answer. Customers have needs. If you meet those needs, you will make a sale.
How do you know what their true needs are? That’s the hard part. Customers often keep their cards close to their chest. They don’t want to disadvantage themselves in negotiations. They know salespeople are strongly biased to say their product will meet the needs, even if it won’t.
Many buyers are afraid of information asymmetry. They don’t know as much about buying the product as the salesperson knows about selling it. The salesperson sells it all day everyday and knows all the tricks. The buyer might only buy this kind of product once, especially if it is a large, strategic purchase.
Listening to the customer can really help. There is that old saying that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Top salespeople ask a lot of questions and listen more than they talk.
But still, during the buying process, customers seek as much information as possible from sources other than a salesperson. They attend webinars from multiple companies. They go to trade shows to try to meet other users and more objective third parties. They talk to analysts, read trade journals, comb through product reviews, and more.
In fact, it’s well known that buyers are educating themselves more than ever outside of their interactions with the salesperson. They are coming into the buying process very knowledgeable.
This trend started a bit over 10 years ago, at the top of the funnel. There isn’t a marketer on the planet today who doesn’t know about content marketing. Put informational content online, tune it so prospects find it via Google search, and then provide ways for the prospect to “raise their hand” with a subscription to a newsletter or, even better, a request to speak with Sales.
Downloadable white papers, blogs, and webinars are mainstays of this kind of content marketing. In this article, we will focus on webinars, because that is the area of marketing and sales where Scoot is really changing the game.
At the top of the marketing funnel, watching a webinar is really pretty similar to watching a video. In fact, our research shows that more than half of all webinar views are views of pre-recorded webinars. Views happen after the live, recorded event. When a prospect is just getting themselves educated, a pre-recorded webinar watched at a time that is convenient for them is often better than a live one.
When prospects are at this early research stage, they don’t really want to interact or talk to a salesperson. They don’t even know if they need this kind of product yet.
Mid and Lower Funnel Buyers are Different than Top of Funnel Prospects
Once a prospect has figured out that they might be interested in buying a product or service, their perspective changes.
By definition, a prospect who is in the mid or lower funnel is actually considering a purchase. They may not be willing to take a meeting with a salesperson, but they are shopping. Or perhaps they took a meeting or two with a salesperson, yet they are not really responsive and talking actively.
A customer at this stage is educating themselves. It’s good that they are shopping for your type of product or service. It’s bad if they don’t think your salespeople are going to help them make a good decision. Like it or not, with the plethora of information out there, customers can do a lot more of the “meeting needs” assessment themselves. They might be in a few free trials. They might be reading reviews.
So what can you do to get this fairly serious buyer to engage with you and your company? After all, you want to take all the actions you can to grow your business. If there is something you could do to influence outcomes and beat your competition, you would do it, right?
Field Marketing – at Scale
If you are a successful revenue leader, you already do some things to help buyers on their buying journey. You exhibit at trade shows, where buyers hang out. You host field marketing events around the country, enticing them with subject matter expert speakers and tasty free lunches. You might even have some content and webinars targeted for their unique interests, perhaps on implementation best practices or integration options.
All of the in-person events you host, which get buyers in front of your sellers, are probably pretty effective. You can’t do too many of those, though, because they are expensive.
So you hope your webinars get the rest of the job done.
Sadly, the same things that make a broadcast webinar attractive to a top-of-funnel audience (no interaction with your company or people), are exactly what make it a total miss for mid and lower funnel.
Don’t Treat Mid and Lower Funnel Buyers Like They are at the Top of Funnel
Customers who are really thinking about buying your product or service don’t want a head in a static rectangle lecturing them. They don’t want to be treated like a top-of-funnel nobody. They want to be somebody. They want to be valued, known, seen, and heard. They want to talk to more than just your salesperson. They want to meet your CEO, head of product, head of service delivery. They want to meet other customers. Maybe third party partners or integrators.
This all feels obvious, right? If I’m going to spend $100,000 or $1,000,000 with your company, I need more than a pushy salesperson and content.
So how do you meet this need, this absolutely critical need? None of the legacy webinar platforms were built for the kind of interaction serious buyers want. Legacy webinar platforms were all built for top-of-funnel, non-interactive webinars.
Enter Scoot.
We built Scoot for exactly this problem. When engagement, conversation, education, and relationship-building is essential to making a sale, and when this needs to happen virtually (for economic or time reasons), Scoot is the answer. It is the experience real buyers want when they are doing some real decision making.
Give serious buyers a richer experience in the mid and lower funnel, and watch deals move down the funnel faster.
So what is it about Scoot’s webinar solution that makes all this sales acceleration happen? Well, there are a lot of things, but let’s talk about three of the most important.
Simplicity and Convenience
Customers don’t like jumping through hoops, so we built Scoot to be as easy and intuitive as possible for them to join. Scoot enables an entirely next level experience for interaction (which we will detail below), and it’s essential that it is frictionless.
First, customers have to be able to join from anywhere, just like they would expect with an old-school legacy static webinar or Zoom meeting. This means that if they are on a phone, Scoot has to work and give them what they want. We have spent several years and invested a lot of effort in building an incredible five star iOS app. Scoot works seamlessly on Android, too.
The design of Scoot is super friendly. Lots of rounded corners, round bubbles, and tool tips. If your customer has ever played a video game, they will get it immediately. If they haven’t, they will get it after a couple of minutes. We have a great tutorial to help them out, too.
Additionally, Scoot is browser-based, which means that no application has to be downloaded when your customer joins on a laptop or desktop computer.
Being Valued, Connected, and Well-Informed
This is where the magic of Scoot really comes into play. Your customer wants to feel like they are a valuable customer for you. They want to feel like they know people who can help them be successful with your product or service. And they want to learn as much as possible in a short period of time.
All of that is organic to the Scoot experience, as long as you understand this dynamic and design your meeting or webinar the right way.
Learn from Others
Remember, your serious mid or lower funnel buyer is looking for information from someone other than your salesperson. So how do you make that happen in a Scoot webinar? Well, for sure, you will have some content presented by a subject matter expert. A great presentation is still important in a Scoot webinar. But then what happens after the presentation?
Your customer gets to move through the Scootaverse and actually go talk to the people that have the information they want. That might be the speaker, who can be approached in a 1:1 or small group. Or it might be an integration or other partner of yours, who can provide a measure of third-party perspective. What is the most important thing to get right when using your product? What are the critical pitfalls to avoid when implementing it?
Executive Love
Executives are the most underutilized salespeople in your company. They have incredible power when talking to prospective customers, who naturally love having access to the top. Just think about your own life. Don’t you love knowing the owner of your favorite restaurant or bar? It just brings your affinity to another level.
Executives are underutilized because they are busy and almost impossible to schedule. They only show up for the biggest in-person events, and they rarely travel to visit customers. But what if they could seamlessly teleport into a customer event from anywhere in the world? Scoot makes that a reality.
Because executives have to focus their time on the biggest customer opportunities, Scoot has Smart Badges. Smart Badges make it super easy for an executive to search for the big customers, teleport directly to them, say hello, and move on to the next customer. Execs can work the Scoot room just like they work a physical room.
Insight into Roadmap and Strategy
Customers, especially those who are spending a lot of money on your product or service, know that it will be very difficult to reverse course after they buy. They need to know that they fit into your long term strategy, and that future features will take their needs into account. How does a customer assess this? They are not asking your salesperson, that’s for sure.
They read your website, your blog, your executives’ public comments and interviews, and they try to make a reasonable determination.
But what if they could meet your product managers and leaders themselves? That way, it’s not just an assessment, it’s a dialogue. They feel listened to. If a product manager tells them that their needs are important, or that their idea for a feature is a good one, how far do you think that goes to giving the customer confidence that they are in the right place? Very far.
Salespeople Listening
Yes, although we want to get as many different people in front of your prospects and customers as possible, we understand that your salespeople will be at the Scoot meeting or webinar, too. That’s all good.
What Scoot brings into the picture, though, is the human side of your salespeople. Customers get to see them interact with other people who are not buyers (colleagues, existing customers, presenters, and executives just to name a few). If an existing customer looks happy and seems to enjoy speaking with the salesperson, that will make the prospect reconsider a negative view of the salesperson. Or, if the salesperson interacts with the CEO in a professional way, and the CEO seems pleased with the salesperson, then that validation will matter a lot, too.
Salespeople do better in groups, just like the rest of us. Customers are disarmed, and conversations flow more readily. Value is created, a lot of value. Just like in person at a field marketing event.
Powerful Personal Meeting Notes and Summary
With all this value being created for buyers in a Scoot meeting, the other thing that buyers really want is a way to be more efficient. They want to make their own jobs faster and easier to do well.
So what we built was our incredibly powerful personal meeting note taker and summarizer. This goes far beyond just taking notes of what a presenter said during a presentation and what questions were asked. This is a journey map, a summary of all the conversations they had, and with whom. This is a roadmap for them to follow-up, with names and faces.
If the meeting is recorded (which is common with sales and marketing events on Scoot), then the attendee also gets a copy of the summaries of all the conversations they had. (Note this can be configured to be turned on or off, depending on the host’s preference.)
Scoot’s Meeting Summarizer is configurable for at the Scootaverse level. The host can decide to record conversations or not, and they can decide if attendees should get automated summaries of the meeting or not.
Of course, hosts also get access to a comprehensive summary of all the summaries. By giving value to buyers (taking notes for them and sending summaries), the host is able to get more value themselves by having access to the same information.
Conclusion
Scoot is the only webinar platform that meets the unique needs of serious buyers who are at the middle or lower end of the purchasing funnel. The simplicity and convenience of Scoot, combined with the value creation of networking and executive selling, accelerates your sales.
Scoot delivers the sales accelerating benefits of field marketing, yet at 1/10 the cost. And no one has to travel. Deals move faster and close at a higher win rate.
Ready to Get Started?
Don’t wait to experience the Scoot difference. Schedule a demo today to see how Scoot can revolutionize your sales funnel and propel your business to new heights.
