How To Use Webinars To Build Pipeline For Business Development

As an executive recruiter, your expertise and specialization is the reason why so many clients entrust their executive-level searches and placements with you. But, business development is more than waiting for referral work and searches. Business development requires personal outreach, consistency, and one-to-one touch-points to build trust and relationships with prospective clients. One of the best ways to leverage a one-to-one, personal touchpoint while demonstrating your expertise at scale is leveraging webinars in your marketing campaigns. 

Webinars Generate High-Value Leads For Business Development.

Webinars are a great platform for attracting and engaging high-value targets directly for business development. As a marketing channel, webinars are designed to provide a live, personal, one-to-one, “in-person” experience, where you can speak directly to prospects for 30 minutes to an hour. Prospects will attend webinars with the intention to learn new concepts or insights based on your expertise and walk away with some actionable takeaways. The best executive recruiters are able to authentically showcase their expert insights, while leaning heavily into their interpersonal and relationship building toolkit to drive results.

Building Interest With A Relevant Topic And Choosing A Guest. 

When choosing a topic for the webinar, choose something that is relevant to your industry, that you are passionate about, and has been a frequent topic of discussion with clients in the last several months. Try to avoid general topics such as "Quarterly Industry Updates” and narrow in on something more specific to your niche such as “CEO Leadership Traits In Demand For 2025”. By choosing a more specific topic, this enables you to showcase the level of advisory expertise you bring to the table, and sets the groundwork for viewers that you are the go-to expert in this space. 

Webinar guests can bring a more diverse perspective to the topic at hand, and create a richer conversational style. With a guest, the content of the webinar will be even more valuable to viewers, and the dynamism of multiple speakers will keep them engaged. Guests can include other industry experts, colleagues or even current / prospective clients. A webinar is an excellent opportunity for you to engage more deeply with a current or prospective client, and help them elevate their own personal brand. Having a panelist or guest speaker also provides a larger reach for promoting your webinar. Be strategic about who you choose to have as a guest and determine whether their reach, networks and connections could be potential leads for your own business development pipeline. 

Using A Slide Deck And Speaking Directly To Your Audience.

Whether you will be joined by a guest or are a solo speaker for your webinar, avoid depending upon slides. Viewers will lose interest in your webinar and exit the session early for two reasons:

1. The topic is not providing any value to warrant their attention. 
2. The slide deck is the primary visual for the entire webinar. 
   
   

When using slides or a deck in a webinar, use sparingly as a supplemental material to communicate your concept or idea. The webinar format is ideal for building deeper personal connections and “in-person” relationships at scale, and the best way to do that is to place yourself as the primary visual in the heart of the conversation. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when using slides. 

• Avoid keeping the slide / screen share active for too long, as viewers will lose interest.
• Switching between speaker and a slide deck provides visual variety for viewers. 
• After a few minutes, turn off screen share to allow for you to be the main focus of conversation - this builds trust and authenticity.
• If you need to refer back to a slide as you move through your talking points, you can return screen share for a few minutes and then pivot to yourself, and your presence, as the primary visual.
• Remember you are the expert and viewers expect to learn from you not slides.  

Using Polls To Engage Viewers For Meaningful Outreach and Follow-Up.

Webinars are excellent for engaging prospective clients and gathering more intelligence about their talent challenges, decision-making process, and intentions behind partnering with your firm. Some webinar platforms enable you to leverage polls to pose questions to viewers and solicit their input and feedback, and typically multiple choice works best for encouraging participation. 

This response data can then be used to personalize and target your outreach and follow-up with registrants once your webinar has concluded. Typically, placing a poll at the very beginning of the webinar is best for two reasons: 

1. This is when you will have the highest number of viewers and participants to gather insights from. 
2. A Poll requires participants to contribute and engage with the discussion early, resulting in a higher retention rate for viewers. 
   
   

To get the most value out of using polls, you will need to be incredibly strategic about the way you position a question and the options you provide for response. From poll questions and responses, you can infer conclusions and use these assumptions to tailor your outreach, without explicitly asking for a meeting. For example:

“Poll: What is the size of your executive leadership team?”

Depending upon the responses we list as options for the above sample question, we can make assumptions around: 

1. The funding stage of a company
2. If they may be in a position to potentially expand the executive team
3. identifying any opportunities for searches at the VP or Director level
   
   

Avoid asking poll questions that are too generic or too leading, and keep in mind that sensitive poll questions can lead to conflicts around confidentiality and reduce participation. Using poll data and responses to inform your follow-up outreach to viewers can guide and tailor your business development outreach and help you understand where they may be in their purchasing journey.

10 Best Practices For Running An Effective Webinar

Running a webinar on a quarterly basis is a manageable cadence and affords you plenty of time to choose your next relevant topic and source any guest speakers. A quarterly webinar cadence allows you to remain top-of-mind with prospective clients, while delivering your expertise and thought leadership in an interactive, personal and memorable way. When you are ready to launch a webinar, below are 10 things to consider:

1. The lead time for promoting and generating sign-ups should be about the 2-4 leading up to the webinar. 
2. Send at least 2 marketing emails (1-2 weeks apart) to invite prospects to attend. 
3. Manage registrations through a Zoom registration page or a LinkedIn event page.
4. Promote your webinar on LinkedIn with at least 2 social media posts (one a week leading up to the webinar). 
5. Try to strive for 50 sign-ups for total registrations / sign-ups
6. Be sure to use a platform that has a webinar feature set, that automatically disables participants' cameras and microphones from being on, so you have full control over any disruptions. 
7. Share the webinar poll within the first 5 minutes of the webinar to gather input.
8. Try and have an extra set of hands who can help manage the operations of the webinar.
9. Leave the last 5-10 minutes of the webinar for questions and answers by participants. 
10. Keep your energy high - as this keeps viewers excited and engaged. 
11. Use the registration and attendee list to follow-up with each group accordingly based upon their participation and any poll data you have collected from them.