Webinars when used properly can become your most popular and effective sales tool, even surpassing the potential of blogs, paid advertising, and social media.

However, the art of salesmanship demands some tweaking when going online for what many cynical attendees refer to as a “pitch fest”. Your webinar, to be successful, needs to strike the right balance between:

1. Providing information and valuable content that holds your audience’s attention for sixty to ninety minutes.
2. Making targeted (strategic) “pleas” to the audience to pull out their credit card to spend money on your products and services.

There is no substitute for superior sales techniques and experience, but the reality is that very few individuals possess these invaluable skills.  Five percent of people at best, and some don’t even know it!

Compounding your dilemma as an online business owner and Internet marketer is the fact that ninety-five (95) percent of your potential audience is sales resistant, i.e., they go into your webinar convincing themselves that they will never buy from you, no matter how good your presentation is.  Even a well-targeted, so-called “hungry” audience may only include one person in ten willing to give you a decent chance to “sell” them.

People generally don’t like being sold to, so how can you as an entrepreneur improve your webinar sales performance in an ethical yet effective manner?  Fortunately, there are several tried and true tactics available that you can put

to the test almost immediately – even if you are a complete rookie at the game:

1. Take Advantage of Your Guest Expert’s Sales Experience

When I started out in Internet marketing, I was terrified about trying to sell products and services myself. Fortunately, I was helped by great mentors, many of whom came on my webinars (and teleseminars before that) and basically drove sales revenue through the roof!

Try to find webinar guests who are not only experts in their field, but also have a flair for sales. It will be well worth the extra upfront fee or higher commission percentage that some (but not all) experts will demand.

2. Strategically Sprinkle Your Sales Pitches at Different Points of the Webinar

It’s great to offer a ton of useful information to your webinar audience, but to make the event profitable you’ll need to remind them to take action. At the same time, you must avoid alienating people with overly aggressive sales angles.

There are no hard and fast rules about when to make deliberate sales pitches during the webinar, but for a one-hour presentation, you can make appeals at the twenty-minute, forty-minute and fifty-five minute marks. Your instincts may also dictate an impromptu pitch after particularly strong messages from you and/or your guest expert.

In some cases, you can even make money before the actual webinar by turning your webinar registrations into immediate sales.

3. Exude Self-confidence, Persistence, and Charisma to Your Audience

You may be having the worst live webinar experience imaginable, but don’t let your audience sense it, otherwise you’re toast! Turn technical or verbal slip-ups into opportunities to connect with others and humanize yourself.  Strengthening informal relationships with long-time email subscribers and new attendees alike will help you judge their personalities better.  Hence, enabling you to empathize with them, understand their needs and wants, and – this is a key – knowing when to press forward or pull back.

Audiences embrace webinar hosts who are fast on their feet and empathetic towards their circumstances. 

4. Embrace the Science of the Webinar Sales Process

Selling is an art in that there is no set formula for successful campaigns. However, it is paradoxically a science as well, because we can fall back on basic principles regardless of our specific business situation.

This holds true for webinar preparation, creation, and execution as well.  What we call the webinar sales process is essentially what traditional salespeople have followed for decades, perhaps without knowing it.

For better or for worse (I think better), embracing the systematic process below brings sales success closer to the talented entrepreneur who in the past may have been held back by a lack of sales acumen:

1. Initial Prospecting (high converting webinar landing pages and sign-up process)
2. Qualifying Prospects
3. Pitching (subtle pre-selling with e-mails, webinar content)
4. Webinar Presentation (good content, webinar bonus offers, money-back guarantee, etc.)
5. Closing Remarks (webinar call to action, direct attendees to sales page)
6. Following-Up after the Webinar (thank you page, converting registration page into permanent recorded webinar page)

Keeping these webinar marketing and sales best practices in mind and avoiding these common webinar marketing mistakes will lead to more successful webinars with higher sales.

About the author: Gloria A Adams works as a content writer for the essay writing help. Besides, she is highly interested in business coaching. In this case, she takes part in different conferences and webinars in order to get new knowledge and skills. Gloria dreams of writing and publishing her own book on career succession.