our webinar flopped and it was my fault

if you're searching how to promote a webinar, start with this. i opened our team call this morning with a confession.

"so last week was a bit of a flop, right? the webinar, and it's probably my bad because i'll be honest, i forgot to push people to it."

emiliano was out of office. i assumed the invites would take care of themselves. nobody pushed from either side, and the room was thin.

the backstory. at the start of the month we made the weekly webinar our north star funnel. the first run had nine confirmed attendees, six if you don't count the three of us. the goal was ten, then twenty, and to convert two or three a week out of it.

a few weeks later, one bad week and it fell over.

the content wasn't the problem. the content is never the problem. a webinar doesn't fail during the hour. it fails in the seven days before, when nobody owns the job of getting people into the room.

everyone thinks a webinar is an event. it's a campaign with an event at the end.

think about a dinner party. the food matters, sure. but if nobody calls the guests on thursday to confirm, you're eating alone on saturday with a nice roast.

so we fixed the boring part.

first, emiliano set up one shared group booking link. all three of us use it. any conversation any of us has that week, we can herd that person to the same place. no more depending on whoever happens to be in the office.

second, and this was the idea charles called genius, we put one or two existing clients on stage to share their experience live. not a testimonial on a slide. a real person answering real questions in front of people who are deciding.

that second one changes everything about the room. a prospect will doubt me. they won't doubt someone a lot like them who already did it. you stop being the speaker and start being the host.

and it ties into something we talked about on the same call. our working thesis is that the clients who stay are the ones who commit for at least three months and start using the podcast themselves. once they're hosting, the relationships they build are theirs. they're not paying for a service anymore. they're running a habit.

putting those clients on stage does two jobs at once. it shows prospects what the outcome looks like. and it gives the client a moment to say out loud why it's working, which makes them more likely to keep doing it.

the lesson for your own webinar is simple. pick one owner for the push, not a committee. give everyone one link. and let your customers do the talking.

i'll own the bigger mistake, too. i treated the webinar as something that runs itself once it's on the calendar. nothing in a young company runs itself. if it isn't someone's name next to it, it's nobody's.

and i'd rather say it out loud on a monday than let it slide into a pattern. a flop you name is a lesson. a flop nobody mentions becomes the new normal, and three weeks later you're wondering why the funnel stopped working.

a small team can't afford silent failures. there aren't enough of us to absorb one.

the funnel behind all this is the same one we run for founders, the engine that turns conversations into meetings.

so who owns the week before your next event... and is it the same person who'll get blamed when the room is empty?