end the webinar at the high point

our first friday webinar had five people on it.

a later one had no live questions at all. we finished the content, opened the floor, and listened to the sound of a room full of muted microphones.

so wednesday the team sat down and rebuilt the whole thing.

i want to share what changed, because i think most founders running webinars make the same mistakes we did. they're just too polite to say so.

the first fix was length. we'd planned for thirty minutes. we cut it to fifteen.

everyone thinks more time means more value. it doesn't. it means more chances for someone to tab over to their email. the goal is to end at the high point, not when the energy runs out. you want people leaving a little hungry, not a little relieved.

the second fix was who talks when. emiliano runs about eighty percent of it. i take the middle, the why it works part. charles closes with no slides, a minute or two. intros are one credential each. nobody needs your full bio. they need one reason to listen to you.

the third fix was facts over adjectives.

the temptation on any webinar is to embellish. we decided to lead with facts instead. seven hundred replies and a hundred and fifty seven calls booked across the previous two weeks. and the headline metric is pipeline we generated for clients, not revenue we closed. pipeline is the thing we control. it's the honest number.

a fact does the work an adjective only pretends to do.

the fourth fix was no pricing. not on the webinar. pricing turns a room of curious people into a room of people doing math. that conversation belongs in a one on one, after someone has decided they want to talk.

the fifth fix was the one that would have saved our silent session. seed the q and a.

nobody wants to ask the first question. so you ask it for them. we took the five questions we hear most often and built them in.

but here are the ones we're hearing most often. here's the 5.

now there's no dead air. and the funny part is, once you answer the first two, the real questions start coming. people just need permission.

we also decided to research who signs up and call people by name. it's a small thing. it turns an audience back into a room.

and the last fix was the biggest one. a webinar is a series, not an event.

one session is a performance. eight sessions is a curriculum. so we mapped about eight weeks of topics and ended each one with a tease of next week.

we have to come up with a way to get them to come back every week so that the group's like 10, 20, 30, 50, not like 1.

that's the line from the call i keep coming back to. the first session is never going to be big. the question is whether the tenth one is.

if you're running webinars that convert badly, i'd bet it's one of these. too long. too many adjectives. a silent q and a. pricing too early. and no reason to come back.

the long term version of this is simple. a weekly show with a growing room beats a big launch with an empty follow up. every week the people who return trust you a little more.

if you want to see what fifteen minutes looks like now, come to the friday session.

so look at your last webinar... did you end it at the high point, or wait for the energy to run out?