If your Market is like ours, your customers are making a big decision when they adopt your service. At Hubbli, we decided to start testing webinars to sell SaaS to schools, and this is a market that is notorious for making decisions by committee.

So no matter how slick the presentation is, they just won’t click a button to pay us thousands of dollars during a webinar.

So how can webinars help shorten the sales cycle?

Well, beyond being an opportunity to demo multiple prospects at one time, we decided to come up with an offering that they can purchase during the webinar.

We tried two different ‘Middle-Sale’ offerings, with a goal of selling something that is very in line with our product, something that will make them more likely to become our customer.

First, we tried selling an online course. Our theory was that if we can get the webinar attendees to sign up for a course, they would learn how to improve their processes and get familiar with our system. Then at the end of the course, they would just transition into using their new knowledge in our out-of-the-box solution.

Well, the response to that was a lot of interest, but no real buyers. Meaning, it’s probably a good idea for us to offer this to the market, but not as a way to generate super-hot leads directly from a webinar.

My second idea was to sell a live, one-on-one assessment. We had already been offering free assessments to webinar attendees and getting a relatively good conversion on them. But it was suggested to me that if they had to pay for the assessment, there might be fewer assessment signups, but those that signed up would have a much higher conversion rate.

Apparently, asking people to pay a small fee makes an enormous difference in the psychology of the prospect. Not only did we get a 20% conversion rate for the $97 assessment, but 100% of the attendees that purchased it signed up for our full service.

Now, it’s not that simple, so let me break down the ingredients to the secret sauce.

During the webinar, I not only offered the $97 assessment at a substantially discounted price from our regular $498, but I also stacked some more discounts on top of them.

If they did purchase the assessment, “for only $97”, they would also get a discount code for 50% off the Hubbli setup fee, AND a free month of Hubbli’s service as well.

So, in total, the value of the offer is $1600.

Ok, so that is all happening during the last 3rd of the webinar but there are a few more important steps that occur post purchase.

Once they pay, there is an automated email sequence that drives them to fill out a survey, which is required before they can book their assessment appointment.

The questionnaire asked them questions that are designed to get them thinking about how valuable all of the Hubbli service benefits are. In addition to that, it asks them if they are interested in a 50% discount off Hubbli (to which they all have replied YES.)

At the beginning of the assessment, I start off by mentioning that since they indicated they want the discount on Hubbli, and since that is only available today, we might as well discuss that. Because if they decide to move forward with Hubbli we will apply the $97 they already spent with us, and our Setup process will include the assessment as well (which it does of course.)

To date, this has worked 100% of the time, to turn the paid-assessment meeting into a Hubbli signup, in under 20 minutes, and without the need for another demo.