How to sell IT services with webinars?

Rolands Ozolins — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:53:56 +0000

Selling IT services generally is difficult, unless you know how.

The good news is that your system for selling services must not be complicated.

Once you find out what works, do it again and again.

In last 12 months our team ran over 100 campaigns for IT service companies: AI, AI Agents, Ai for DevOps, Cloud infrastructure, ERP and other topics.

We learned obsessively, used every piece of data and trained AI.

As a result we were able to beat the benchmarks and generate millions in pipeline.

What was the winning approach?

We tried many things – getting calls scheduled with experts, getting people to sign-up to ebooks and other things.

One approach consistently stands out—webinars. When done correctly, a webinar does four things in a single shot:

Gets attention
Demonstrates your team’s competence
Builds trust with the buyer
Opens the door with a clear first-step offer

There is no any other way to achieve these four things in one go.

However, if done right, this is all you need to sell a large project to people that hear about you for the first time.

We had 208 registrations and nearly 100 attendees. From just 40% of the leads processed so far, we’ve already created six validated opportunities and started three POCs.

Zsombor Gaal, Founder and CEO, Dezerius

Here’s how you can turn webinars into a repeatable digital sales engine.

Step 1: Plan with a Sales Goal in Mind

Most webinars fail before they begin—because they start without a clear purpose. Quick idea “Let’s run a webinar” is not a strategy.

Instead, start by asking: What is the business goal I want to achieve?

And what are the necessary previous steps before I am able to achieve the business goal?

To sell with webinars, you need to do 2 things very well:

You must have you have prepared the first-step offer and
Planned for the follow-up the next day after the webinar.

Prepare a first-step offer.

This is critical.

Selling a €200K project right away is nearly impossible – too much risk, too many stakeholders, too complicated.

This is also why cold outreach doesn’t work.

Nobody buys high complexity, high risk IT services from random guy who send and e-mail.

Instead, think, what buyers would want to know and what would they find valueable before they are ready to commit to large project:

A half-day architecture workshop
A fixed-price audit
A limited proof of concept

The first-step offer isn’t about revenue.

It’s about opening the door, showing competence, enaging buyers group and creating momentum for the larger deal.

My clients report 50–80% closing rates after delivering this kind of entry engagement.

This is huge.

This is why you focus your effort on selling first-step offers and not the large projects.

If you do not have the first-step offer ready, then you leave your webinar audience guessing how to start working with you.

Even if you delivered a great webinar, you will fail to sell anything, unless you provide a clear next step: the first-step offer for your audience.

Plan webinar follow-up

Second critical element is follow-up.

You must have a follow-up script ready, tried and tested well before webinar. A good way to finetune script is to do roleplays within your team.

The person doing follow-up should have their calendar blocked for the few days after webinar focussing on one thing only – researching participants, calling those who are qualified and selling the first-step offer.

Step 2: Run a Campaign That Sells the Webinar

Just think about it: you’re not just promoting an event—you’re asking decision makers to give up their most limited resource: time.

If you can’t “sell” the webinar itself, nobody registers and nobody shows up.

So you have to invest your best effort to sell the webinar.

Here is what works every time and what has helped us to beat industry benchmarks.

Use the “get the job done” framework.

Every campaign must answer three questions clearly:

What will participants learn?
What will they see (a demo, case study, or real results)?
What will they be able to do after attending?

If you can’t write answers to each question down in plain words or bullet points, you are not ready to to sell webinar.

Also this is not something you ask marketing or agency or AI to invent.

Selling webinar is a team effort that is lead by the CEO and selling starts with clear description of the value of attending.

Keep webinar ad texts clear and specific.

No poetry, no buzzwords, no methaphors.

Write like you would speak.

Forget “Elevating experience” or “Unlocking potential” – what does this even mean?

Instead focus on important business results your audience want to get, like: “How to Cut ERP Migration Costs in Manufacturing by 30%.”.

Short, to the point, specific.

Not creative.

Just pure business value.

Great webinar speaker photos

People buy with their eyes.

Speaker photos matter more than you think.

A professional, positive photo can lift registration rates by 20–30%.

If needed, use AI tools to polish them.

Test relentlessly.

Never assume you know what works.

Test webinar titles, headlines, descriptions, and images.

One of my best-performing ads started with headline: Stop chasing cold leads.

It outperformed several seemingly more “professional” versions.

Choose the right channel.

Experience shows:

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is fastest to start and delivers low cost per lead.
Google Ads can work but are slower to optimize.
LinkedIn Ads are expensive and reach is limited—may be fine for niche targeting, but not for scale.

If I need to choose one, I choose Meta.

In fact, I only use Meta.

All my experiements with other channels led me back to Meta.

Step 3: Deliver webinar content with Professionalism and Energy

If planning and campaigns get people to show up, delivery is what builds trust.

Prepare speech, not slides.

Slides are support, not the content itself.

You do not read slides.

Focus on what you will say.

Do a dry run.

Record yourself, transcribe, and review what you say.

It’s the fastest way to improve delivery, because any mistakes will be painfully obvious in text.

Respect attention spans.

Your competition isn’t another vendor—it’s YouTube.

People are used to speed and density of information.

So speak faster than feels natural.

Get to the value immediately.

Don’t waste five minutes waiting for latecomers—you’re punishing the ones who arrived on time.

Get the basic tech right.

Poor sound quality instantly destroys credibility.

Invest in a simple external microphone (€15+ in Europe and less than 2 Eur from Temu).

Place the camera at eye level. Add decent lighting. These are tiny investments compared to the value of the projects you’re trying to sell.

Here are links to the gear I am using.

Lights: Logitech Litra – great quality, adjustable tone and intensity, USB powered. The best: super easy to place on top of desktop monitor (that’s a rare feature). 1 unit is a great upgrade, 2 units will provide very good lighting from both sides.

Camera: Emeet S800 4K – large size Sony 4K sensor, more than enough quality, good low-light performance, easy to use. Easily beats Logitech C920 and similar. Works on Mac.

Lapel Microphone: I use IK Multimedia iRIg Mic Lav – all the quality you may need + allows to use of wired headphones in parallel (if necessary). A standard headphone jack is typically available on most laptops.

I use OBS Studio for recording videos and CapCut for editing and Demio as webinar platform.

Actively engage audience

Webinars are not lectures.

Use polls, surveys, and offers.

Ask participants to write in chat where are they joining from.

The more audience engages in chat and polls, the more they feel safe to engage and sign-up to offers.

You want your audience to feel as part of nice community.

Platforms like Demio make interaction seamless and provide valuable participant data for follow-up, such as attention % and focus %. These datapoints a very useful for lead scoring.

Step 4: Follow Up Immediately

Follow-up is where sales happen. Without it, webinars are just expensive content marketing.

Call, don’t just email.

One or two participants may respond to automated emails.

The majority won’t.

Pick up the phone and make calls!

That’s how you sell.

And after you delivered a great webinar, having a conversation with participant is very nice thing to do, because you are not stranger, but an expert who recently shared valuable knowledge and insights.

Use a clear script tied to your first-step offer.

Calls should focus on moving the buyer into that workshop, audit, or PoC—not a vague “what did you think?” conversation.

Therefor caller must use a script prepared and roleplayed earlier in planning step.

Prioritize with lead scoring.

Not everyone deserves a call. Score leads based on:

Attendance (full session vs. drop-off)
Focus (were they engaged?)
Job title relevance
Company fit

We use multiple AI models for lead scoring, since this is only technology that can make a reasonably good inference about participant titles (they may be misspelled, abbreviated, in various languages) and do deep research about companies.

Act fast.

Follow-up should start the next day.

Wait a week, and momentum is gone.

This is why in Step 1 you should prepare and plan for follow-up.

Common mistakes to avoid

No clear sales purpose – webinar must be focussed on helping you sell the first-step offer, which, in turn, is a logical step before buyer commits to full project. If you do not have the first-step offer prepared, you are not likely to sell anything.
Weak content quality – unprepared speakers, boring slides, poor audio will do the opposite of demonstrating competency.
No first-step offer – leaving buyers unsure of what to do next.
No structured follow-up – no follow up, leads sit idle, enthusiasm fades, sales never happen.

Get professional help

Webinars work great and, if you know how to do it, you can run them without a marketing team or any help.

However, to get there you must do webinars very frequently.

I recommend to start with using professional help from company that is running webinars frequently and with great success, like IBD Consulting.

By paying for help, you’ll likely save a lot in the end. Your marketing budget will be used more effectively, and webinar registrations will cost 3–5 times less than if you handled it on your own.

Learn more about our webinar offers and schedule a call to explore how we can help you generate quality leads with webinars.

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