Episode 223: Ollie Whitfield – Mastering Webinars and Social Selling: In-Depth Insights from a Seasoned Marketer

Ollie Whitfield  00:02

I came across this movement, I’ll call it for one of a better word. Hashtag social selling went absolutely crazy on Twitter at that time, good three years ago now and I got swept up in it. It was new. It was shiny. Not everybody knew about it. It was kind of Selling Excel before. Excel existed. Basically, it was wow, look at this crazy novel thing this insanely useful.

Intro  00:25

Welcome to the Making Sales Social Podcast featuring the Top Voices in Sales, Marketing, and Business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show! 

Brynne Tillman  00:50

Welcome back to making sales social. I’m so excited about my guest today, Ollie Whitfield who is the marketing lead at VanillaSoft and AutoKlose, which is pretty cool. And he’s here to share today, his brilliance around running a successful webinar, from conception to execution. Welcome, Ollie to Making Sales Social.

Ollie Whitfield  01:17

Pleasure to be here. And it’s been quite a while. I think I’ve known you for five years, something like that sort of to be here talking to you. Brynne is always good fun.

Brynne Tillman  01:26

Yeah. And we overlap on so many things. We’ve done some summits together. I think we’ve done other podcasts. I might have been a guest a while ago. But I know we just kind of run in the same circle. So I’m so excited to have you today as our guest. So just introduce yourself a little bit and talk about what being a marketing lead means.

Ollie Whitfield  01:48

Yeah, it means a lot of different things. I come up with campaigns all the time, it’s well, you know, it’s coming up to year-end. So what do our customers think about year-end? That’s a good question. Maybe we should come up with something about that. Maybe that’s an ad that we should run. 

Maybe that’s a particular webinar, maybe a series of podcasts or a bunch of things like that, where I am always going for the groundswell approach. It’s not just one thing out there that does one thing, we try and put several things together and make a more of a splash over the thing.

Brynne Tillman  02:15

I love that. And that’s great when you’re getting on the webinar out there. So before we jump into all that great stuff, we ask all of our guests, What does Making Sales Social Mean to you?

Ollie Whitfield  02:27

Means quite a lot more than you might know, actually, it’s probably one of the bigger things in my career to have learned. So I was a marketer not doing that. Well, I was a little bit stuck. And I came across this movement, I’ll call it for one of a better word. Hashtag social selling went absolutely crazy on Twitter at that time, good three years ago now and I got swept up in it. It was new, it was shiny. Not everybody knew about it, it was kind of selling Excel before Excel existed. 

Basically, it was wow, look at this crazy novel thing That’s insanely useful. So I got kind of swept up in that. And then I ended up being through an agency and contracts an inbound only sorry, social media only SDR for an enterprise company, which, if I didn’t already know how to do it, I refined my skills significantly. So I still carry a lot of that practice with me today, even though it’s changed a great deal, it does mean, I carry a lot of what I learned in that phase with me all the time.

Brynne Tillman  03:30

I love that, well, we’re thrilled to have you and it’s part of the community. So it is a wonderful community. I love the social selling community. I think high tide rises, all boats, and we all really support each other. And I think it’s awesome. So talk to me a little bit about how you got into webinars, why webinars as a marketing lead, is one of your go to sources.

Ollie Whitfield  03:58

It was the thing before COVID, believe it or not, everybody’s kind of discovered them or lead on a much heavier, obviously, lack of events. So that was a big crutch. And now I think state is part of everybody’s habit. What do we do in monthly or quarterly increments? So I’ve been doing them for five plus years, I’ve probably done 500 to 1000 of them by proxy. There was one a month per client when I was an agency client, project manager. 

So if you have five clients and you do a year, that’s a lot of webinars, so I am I’ve grown sick of them when they’re done the same through overexposure. So this is the general state of plays. They’re okay. Most of the time, they’re good sometimes and they were really good rarely. Sometimes they’re pretty bad. So that’s kind of the lay of the land but I’m seeing it much more, even though okay ones I’m saying “No, I boarded this. I’ve seen it too much.” 

So I’m very important. Excellent Legion, excellent thought leadership. So much content you can repurpose And obviously, as a social seller, if you’re going on one, it’s um, it’s the prestigious branding, it’s the RE clipping and resharing of different things. It’s more content for you. It’s a whole bunch of things for the salesperson and for the Moxa.

Brynne Tillman  05:14

Okay, that’s awesome. So let’s say now you’ve decided to webinars, this is a great way to attract prospects. I’m guessing part of this is also not just to attract prospects, but get them to understand your value proposition, potentially write and get them excited to work with you. So let’s talk about like in the very beginning, now, let’s just use a client and use me as an example. So I say to you, “Ollie, I’m going to hire you, I want to do webinars, I have no idea where to begin,” What would you say?

Ollie Whitfield  05:54

I’d say “Hi, me, of course, I would say what’s the what do you want to do? What’s the point of this? And what is the outcome that we’d like?” Of course, that can be very, very different. If you’re a huge global company, it might just be simply awareness, and you just have a big name speaker, and we want to be in front of their followers, that might be all that they’d like to do, it might not be. Maybe for you, I want some lead flow going into the end of year. So we’ll try and get as many ICP fit leads as possible. And then it’s how do we do that? So more voices can go? I’ll try to not say that it depends, because that’s what everybody says.

Brynne Tillman  06:27

No, I love that. It depends in this case. So it’s like the first thing you do is What results do you want to get from the webinars? I think that’s a perfect first question. So it depends, matters. Actually.

Ollie Whitfield  06:38

Everyone lives on it. So there.

Brynne Tillman  06:41

Yeah, so let’s say “I want to get in front of sales leaders that have large teams.” More leads, so more leads from but not from the salespeople, let’s say from the sales leaders.

Ollie Whitfield  06:56

Okay, so the next thing is all about how do you target them, because sometimes with, particularly, let’s say, “A podcast, you’re sort of banking and you know, you’re gonna get people who want to learn, and predominantly, there’ll be people who are lowering their career, because they’re learning more and quicker.” People who are super senior in their career, they learn less as they go on, this is how it goes. 

So you’re going to try and work out how I attract the senior person? What do they care about? Obviously, this is good ICP research, you’re saying they care about the team quality fulfillment, they care about the revenue numbers, and so on. So we try to reverse engineer what they’re going to get upset about by the end of year, or what might be aspirational for the start of New Year, because there’s always two sides of the coin, you have good and the bad. 

And then we’re going to work out who could probably speak with us about that. Who’s credible? And what can we ask them? So from that case, I would go for somebody who’s sort of in that type of role, but maybe more visible, for example. So if I was to ask, if I was to do a webinar about social selling, I want to get people like you, you’re a more visible person like that. So I would ask you to be a good speaker, here’s the translation. 

So go for a well known person within that area, roughly. And then you’re going to break it out by what they’ve seen and what they think, try and find some controversial stuff there. And that’ll be kind of the basis of how we market this? It’s not just Brynne says to do LinkedIn. Because we kind of know we should do LinkedIn at this point. Brynne says, You should do LinkedIn messaging this way. And then I say “Why? And then I click and register.”

Brynne Tillman  08:34

Okay, so titling, it is really important.

Ollie Whitfield  08:40

As well, angling and titling so that angle is the second thing throughout your I call it storyboarding. It’s kind of what we do throughout the hour or so there may take, but the title kind of reflects, as you said, “You can’t just have a title of the importance of doing LinkedIn” because we know it’s important. I don’t really know what I’m gonna get my time. Yeah, but if it’s four things I can do. Three how to, two templates, five, go to messages or whatever. It is a number that normally helps you.

Brynne Tillman  09:15

Oh, I love that. I’ve never looked at doing a webinar in that kind of formulaic way. I think that’s awesome. I have a personal if I get on, I have a seven minute mark. If I get on a webinar, and I haven’t learned something in seven minutes, I leave no matter how excited I am about the topic, because I recognize it’s a sales pitch. I’m not gonna learn anything. What are your feelings about all of this upfront story and why I’m where I am today before they get into the meat. What are your thoughts around that?

Ollie Whitfield  09:52

I don’t do any of that. I save that for the end if you really want to for a couple of reasons. Now the salesperson in the room probably isn’t exposed to this by the marketer. And so what we’re doing with a lot of our webinars is we’re saying this would be excellent YouTube ads content, because YouTube ads are a very, very, very, very good way of getting lots of eyeballs, lots of impressions on your content. 

It’s super duper cheap, like crazy cheap. So we say, “Well, we’re doing a webinar, that’s a lot of video time.” Why don’t we use it? So instead of saying, “Hi, and welcome to the show, I’m so excited to bring on Brynne because Brynne is an expert in this and she’s written that and she’s appeared in this and she’s a top voice.” That’s a lot of speaking time before they learn anything. Just like you said, That’s not good. If it’s a YouTube ad. And it’s not good. 

If you want to retain attention, just like you said, “If it’s a few minutes in, and you’ve not really learned anything, my intention is kind of waning, and I’m, I’m not that interested.” So my style is knowing that the first bit is going to be a clickbait, for the YouTube ad, think of when you gotta watch your video, and you have six seconds, and you can’t skip yet. Think of that. So when I start, I go, I sort of have to pre plan this, but I say something like, “Cold calling is dead.” And this is why. And then I pause for a second and take about six seconds or so.

 And then I can continue explaining why that’s a statement that’s maybe true or maybe not true. Instantly, you kind of got your attention going that type of thing. But I’m doing that for two reasons, the ad and the attention. So then I kind of set the groundwork very quickly, as best I can I say “Cold calling isn’t working.” And here’s why. And then I expand upon that point for maybe 2030 seconds. And today, I’ve got my guests to bring with me to explain how we’re going to address this. And then we just very quickly do the hybrid. Welcome to the stage. How are you? Let’s get into it. Point one. What’s on my slide deck?

Brynne Tillman  11:46

Oh, I love that. And then at the end, you’ll do the tool.

Ollie Whitfield  11:51

Yeah, the whole. Okay. So thanks so much, Brynne, I really appreciate your time. If you, the listener, managed to stay this long, I salute you, thank you for your attention span, you’ve got much longer attention than I have. However, I must encourage you, you’ve got to go and follow over in brilliant work, and they follow you. What can they read of yours? And work there, listen to your podcasts, all that stuff.

Brynne Tillman  12:10

That’s great. I love that. Okay, so let’s say we get through, we give them great education. What if we have a call to action more than maybe this was a webinar that we want to drive traffic to? A mini course or like a paid call to action? What’s your advice around that?

Ollie Whitfield  12:36

So I like to always call it out before the end. So there’s no point in sending them something in an email after? Because you’re gonna get the open rate percentage of the pool of people who even see it, tell them beforehand, and then you know, whoever watched it live or on the replay? They heard you say it. And at least I can’t really say because it’s not possible to but incrementally, my awareness of my brain has a course equal to when I received the email from you, I think, of course not just widespread saying. 

So that increases the open rate. And you can send a bunch of times or, well, let’s say if it’s on Zoom, you can always put it in the chat before you leave, you could tell them the link, all that kind of stuff. But never leave without showing something and tell them you’re going to do it. And then you’ve got a much better chance where Oh, yeah, I remember she said that she was going to do that. Here it is.

Brynne Tillman  13:27

Oh, I love that. And it’s authentic. I think that’s great. I have my tip. I don’t know if you know who Phil M. Jones is. But he has a book that’s called exactly what to say. And there’s a page out of that, that I use in every single one of my webinars at the end, which is, you know, here are your takeaways, these are your is your homework is what you’re gonna do, or whatever that is. And now one of three things are gonna happen.

Number one, you’re gonna go back to your desk, do things like you’ve always done before, never implement. But “Hey, that was a fun hour.” Number two, you’re going to do this on your own, you got enough information and you’re ready to go. Or number three, like I really want to do this, but I need a little bit more help if that’s you stick around. How do you feel about having that kind of transition? So I’m done education, but now you’re sticking around, I got permission to sell to you.

Ollie Whitfield  14:22

Interesting. So do you mean just at the end of the show? It’s been maybe five minutes? And if you decide to stick around, then fair game? Is that kind of a question? Yeah. Why not? I think you’ve got a calendar bucket, because most people run into their next meeting, and you’ll get a small number of people.

Brynne Tillman  14:38

10 minutes early, then they’re fine with that.

Ollie Whitfield  14:42

Clever, I like it. I think it can’t be too hard to sell. But of course, you know, it’s on your property and we’re in business. So I’m with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it also tweaks the follow up content that you send me. So then you wouldn’t want to send the ex guy If you’ve already kind of explained the whole value prop, because that leads into the value prop, you kind of want to think of, well, maybe it’s a case study instead. Or maybe it’s a video testimonial or something else that you want to send in your follow up to complement that rather than just to stick selling on the end of it.

Brynne Tillman  15:18

I love that. I love that. Okay, so now we’ve got this webinar down, how did we get people there? What did you do from a marketing perspective to fill the seats?

Ollie Whitfield  15:29

So I actually have a question for you, this has been a little bit of a point of pain and anger for me. So a while ago, having a really good guest or guests, as I prefer, is a really, really good way of attracting people, especially if they have differing points of view, you can have you for LinkedIn, I could have someone on cold calling and someone on email, that’s a great webinar, three different points of view three guests to post on LinkedIn was pretty much the done thing. 

Everybody sends their opt- in email, there’s some emails, that’s obviously on a marketing team’s job to do that. But the LinkedIn post has, is now doing a lot less than it would. So I’m running into a bit of a bother there. So I’d like to ask you, how can I post about this thing? And get, you know, how used to the whole? So state the link in the comments. And that works significantly less than it did. So what can?

Brynne Tillman  16:17

I do create an event, see, create an event and each person can invite up to 1000 people a month. And it’s really simple to do. There are some not great, but there are some filters. So maybe I want to find someone in specific industries. And then that’ll give me a list of all my first degree connections in those industries. And in under five minutes, you can invite 1000 people.

Ollie Whitfield  16:45

Okay, so I have a pushback question. And I trust the question. So my push back is, okay, cool. Let’s say you spin up an event. And I invite all of my connections. The thing that happens on the marketers level is, they may say, “Yes, I’m going to come.” It’s like your birthday on Facebook, you might have a party on Facebook, you click yes, I’m going. And then you show up to the bar, and you’ve got no one there. They haven’t actually done it. There’s the link, but they have to then still go and do it. So how much have you seen? If you have any stats at all? We may not. But how does that sort of crossover happen?

Brynne Tillman  17:20

Yeah, so about 20% show. It’s not an exact stat. But that’s like our estimate on all the ones that we do. And we do them every week. So that 20% show. And then what we do is, so if you’re if you say I’m attending, you can message everyone even afterwards. But I may go in and I don’t have to meet, I don’t have to be the messenger. I can have someone on my team say “They’re attending and reach out on behalf of Brynne you know, we’re excited that you’re interested, here’s the actual link for registration.” 

So they could do that beforehand, and message everyone that says they’re attending. Alright. And then afterwards, depending on how much back end help you have, they reach back out to the people that didn’t attend or to everyone and say, and maybe in the verbiage it’ll say, if you click attend, we’ll send you the replay. Now, if it’s alive, the replay is actually in the stream. But if it’s a zoom webinar, where they had a register, I would keep that registration window open in the zoom that they have to register. But you can go back and give everyone the replay link.

Ollie Whitfield  18:39

Okay, I like it. I tried that for a virtual conference I did. And we had a fairly low shear rate, though we hadn’t done it before, we weren’t really sure what to expect. And of course, well, the number of people you invite looks really big. The number of people who fill out the form or the downside of that is much smaller. So you think it’s a big drop off. It’s just the process of doing that. But I don’t think we had the follow up and the bit in the middle, which you just described, that’s that that’s probably the missing piece.

Brynne Tillman  19:08

Yeah, so and as they attend to the problem, and sometimes the order changes, and so you can’t go back to where you were, it’s a little annoying. But this is a great and totally white hat methodology to have one of your assistants do it out of their own LinkedIn, just make sure their LinkedIn is connected to your company page and it looks all legit. 

And just say, “On behalf of Molly or whomever your client is, we’re glad you’re interested in attending to officially register. Here’s the link.” And so you know, maybe you’ll get 20 or 30% of those folks to register. And then maybe half of them will shop. But we’ll go back to everyone in the list to send the link to the replay.

Ollie Whitfield  20:00

Gotcha. Okay. And then obviously, as a social seller, you’re saying, “Ah, target account person here, they registered, maybe I’ll send them a different follow up to the rest.” This person hasn’t read the message. Maybe I’ll call them and say something different. That type of stuff too.

Brynne Tillman  20:15

Right. Yeah, I’m so glad you were so interested. I’m sure something came up. But I wanted to reach out and share some of the insights directly with you that can help you and your team do X, right. And now they’re like, “Really wow.” So you know, I’m happy to spend about 15 minutes with you, and really share the nuggets that will really help you go from here to here, or whatever that is, yeah, absolutely. 

You have, in my mind, a qualified list of people interested in your program, and you can bet they don’t have to deal with all of them. Pick the eight or 10 that are really good. Folks that you want to meet. Now remember, if you have a panel of people, part of it is, you know, I’m happy to spotlight you. I’m inviting our folks. It’ll be on a podcast, the only thing we ask is that you do these three things, you put it in your newsletter, or an email, and you share it on LinkedIn. And you pick 1000 people to invite from the event and have a little video to teach them how to do it. 

Ollie Whitfield  21:24

Yeah, that’s really big skin in the game, it’s okay, you can come on. But we need you to do this to make sure that it’s a fair trade off as well. There’s a thing for if you’re very new to this, and you have no audience, you’re kind of taking their time and their profile. And that’s to give when you’re a bigger company, when you already have some of that stuff. It’s a bit more about their promotional effort, as well as their time and then being on it.

Brynne Tillman  21:48

I think it’s always about their promotional effort. You know, no matter what size you are, we want to grow our audience. Right. That’s the bottom line. And we’re bringing on experts that attract the right audience if we’re doing this right. So yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree with that. And I think we need to make it easy for them to do, we need to teach them how to do it, we need their commitment.

And this can be framed in a way that’s beneficial to them, you know, we’re going to be sending it to our people, when other people on the podcast get new listeners, they’re gonna listen to you. So we are all committed to helping each other get more exposure, you know, and so that commitment that they’re putting in, they’re gonna get back tenfold, even 100 Fold if you have that many podcasts. 

Ollie Whitfield  22:47

Can I give you a little pro tip for that? Yeah. Okay, you seem so excited by that. I hope this lives up to your expectation that I’ve said that. So I’ve seen many times when you become a speaker at a virtual conference, something like that you nearly always get his promo pack, they nearly always call it. It’s a Google Drive folder, but promo pack, it’s got your image, it’s got a social media post, it’s got a very canned email copy. Exactly. It’s got all of that stuff. And it looks very similar to everybody else’s, but it’s there to help yourself with. 

If you give them that, I would say there is a 95% chance they don’t use it. But they do something 50% more likely than they were before. So if you don’t send them that, obviously, they can’t use it because it doesn’t exist. But you’ve got a much lesser chance that somebody shares and does that email and those other things, unless you know them quite well. And you’ve got him with their team. And it’s a good trusting relationship. 

That’s, that’s different. But if you put them back together, don’t be offended that it doesn’t get used. I have done that many times. I’m like, dammit, I spent all that time making this down email. And it’s this social media post. And I put hashtags in it, and they didn’t use it. But they posted. That’s the point. They got done. So yeah, you have to not look at Oh, but they didn’t use my copy. It’s okay.

Brynne Tillman  24:03

I agree. I agree. But, you know, we got about 20 or 30% of the folks that do but you’re right with the ones that do say copy my assistant, send it to my assistant. Right. So maybe the next tip is who’s in charge of your posting? Should we include them in the swipe coffee? There you go. Yeah, because I wouldn’t do it. But cats do. Kathy’s on the email, he gets done.

Ollie Whitfield  24:32

And nearly every time that I’ve ever dealt with a, let’s say a trainer, consultant type of company, they’re not someone who works out big in a company. They have a team who does that stuff for them because it’s part of their marketing blend. So yeah, I’m a trainer. I don’t post on LinkedIn every day. I forget. I get into calls and stuff. So yeah, it’s somebody else much more often than you think.

Brynne Tillman  24:55

That’s awesome. Well, I can’t believe how fast time is going, Ollie. What is One last tip you might give the audience.

Ollie Whitfield  25:02

One last tip I give the audience Wow on the spot for that one. Oh my goodness, spreading social selling about webinars helped me out.

Brynne Tillman  25:12

Mostly webinars, I think that up to this.

Ollie Whitfield  25:16

One, coming up with more than two guests is my thing. You can have one, it’s perfectly good. If you have two or three, you’re going to get a range of opinions and you’re going to get a more breadth spread out of content. So you’re going to have a, there’s more chance to learn something if you have a range rather than just one perspective.

Brynne Tillman  25:33

So I’m going to ask one additional question on that. So do you treat it like a panel without a deck? Or do you give them each 10 minutes.

Ollie Whitfield  25:41

I give them 15 minutes, I leave them in the greenroom each so that I get depth of conversation on one topic. And then the same again. And the same again. I also get if you’re not watching the screen, you’re just listening. You hear a different voice every 10 minutes, and that’s your attention span being fired back up again.

Brynne Tillman  25:56

Ah, brilliant. Well, Ollie, this is awesome. I had some great takeaways, and I’m excited to start to implement them inside my webinars. How can people find you and how did they hire you?

Ollie Whitfield  26:09

I do this stuff all through LinkedIn. So if you liked anything I said, or you have a question at all, I’m more than happy to help. So drop me a message, and I’ll see how I can help you out.

Brynne Tillman  26:17

Wonderful. Thanks for being here. And for all the listeners when you’re out and about don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro  26:25

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