Webinars and Expert Talks as a Source of Qualified Inquiries

Why do many webinars bring attendees but no orders?

You prepared a webinar, collected 60 registrations, 25 people attended, and the feedback was friendly. Three weeks later, nobody has inquired. The recording sits on the website, and the team’s view is that webinars simply do not work in your industry.

Usually it comes down to one of three mistakes. The topic was a product presentation nobody would voluntarily watch for an hour. There was no clear next step at the end. Or attendees never heard from you again after the webinar. I consider the third mistake the most costly, because the attendees gave you an hour of attention and their contact details.

A webinar is an online event at which you speak live to a group, attendees can ask questions and the content is usually recorded. An expert talk at an event works by the same logic. Both are ways to convince many prospects of your expertise at once. For sales, though, only what happens afterwards counts. So the question is: how does a webinar become a source of sales conversations rather than just attendees? To answer it, we first look at whether webinars bring sales contacts in B2B at all and which topic attracts the right attendees, then go through the three-act plan of inviting, presenting, and following up, and finish with attendance rates, follow-up, and costs.

A webinar without follow-up is a talk to guests whom you then do not see home.

Do webinars really bring sales leads in B2B?

Research on this is limited, but one study is particularly revealing for selling to business customers. Wang, Malthouse, Calder and colleagues (2019) analyzed four years of data from a large international consulting firm. They counted how often employees of important client companies attended in-person events such as conferences, digital events such as webinars, and how often they used content on the website.

The result: the more often a client’s employees attended digital events or used digital content, the more sales leads and won opportunities came from that client. For in-person events this relationship did not appear. The effect covered employees at both low and high levels, with the attendees’ job titles playing a role for digital events. The authors see content and events as a complement to the salespeople’s work, not a replacement.

This is a single, large company with existing client relationships. What carries over is mainly the direction: digital events can measurably contribute to sales leads when they are part of the sales work. The same finding is described in the article B2B content marketing, because webinars are a form of content, just live. Incidentally, the fact that in-person events had no effect in this analysis does not mean trade shows are useless. How they pay off is described in the article Trade shows and events.

Which topic attracts the right attendees?

The topic decides who comes. A product presentation mainly attracts existing customers and competitors. A general industry overview attracts students and consultants. A concrete problem of your audience attracts people who have this problem and are looking for a solution. Those are the attendees you want to talk to later.

Good topics usually come from sales: the question that comes up in every first conversation, the objection you answer for the tenth time, the mistake customers made before hiring you. A webinar on such a question is essentially a first conversation you hold with many people at once.

The three-act plan: invite, present, follow up

I divide a webinar into three acts, the three-act plan. Each act has its own goal and its own tasks. Most businesses put 80 percent of the work into the second act and almost nothing into the third. For orders, it is the other way around.

1. Act 1: Invite

   Goal: get the right people to register. A dedicated registration page with a clear promise, invitations via the newsletter, personal messages to target contacts and a mention in the networks. Two reminders: the day before and one hour before.

2. Act 2: Present

   Goal: answer a question so well that a conversation is the obvious next step. No more than 30 minutes of content, then 15 minutes of questions. At the end, a single offer, such as a free conversation about the attendee’s own situation.

3. Act 3: Follow up

   Goal: turn attendees into conversations. Within two business days, a personal message to everyone, tiered by interest. Requests for a conversation are handled immediately.

The registration page follows the same rules as any landing page: one promise, one audience, one button. How to structure it is covered in the article Building a landing page. For invitations, an existing newsletter is the most valuable channel because it reaches people who already know you. More on that in the article B2B newsletters.

How many registrants actually attend, and what follows from that?

Anyone running a webinar for the first time is often disappointed by how many registrants do not show up. That is normal. A thorough evaluation of an online training program from Australia shows the order of magnitude. House and colleagues (2025) describe 36 free webinars for primary health care professionals between 2022 and 2024.

In total, 1,246 professionals registered and 463 attended live. In the first year it was 309 of 677, in the second 154 of 569. More than 90 percent of attendees rated the webinars positively and particularly valued practical, interactive content and the chance to review the material later. The authors themselves name a weakness: only a few attendees answered the questionnaires on impact, so it remains unclear how much of it reached practice.

The program was free, aimed at health care professionals and is not a sales webinar. For your planning it still offers two lessons. First: expect a third to half of registrants to attend live and plan the invitations accordingly. Second: registrants who did not come are not lost contacts. They have shown interest in the topic and receive the recording with a personal message.

Another finding fits this. In Norway, Cvijic, Kvernenes, Åstrøm and colleagues (2026) compared dentists who only watched recorded webinars with those who also attended an in-person course. The webinars alone were seen as flexible but with limited learning effect. The combination with a personal encounter led to more application in daily work. For sales this means: the webinar opens the door, the personal conversation afterwards leads through it.

How do you follow up without being pushy?

The third act is decisive. Not every attendee is equally far along, so you follow up in tiers. The tier results from what attendees did during and after the webinar.

The deadline for conversation requests matches the deadline for A inquiries from the article Lead handoff from marketing to sales. Someone who explicitly asks for a conversation in the webinar is an inquiry like any other and must not get lost in a mass email. Whether an attendee really fits your offer is clarified with the same criteria as for any inquiry. They are in the article on lead qualification.

What does a webinar cost, and what does it have to deliver?

A webinar costs mainly time. The following worked example shows a business that runs a webinar on a frequent customer question and follows up consistently.

Whether it pays off depends on the value of an order. For comparison: anyone trying to get six first conversations through cold outreach usually needs considerably more time, and the people they talk to do not know them yet. There is also a side effect that appears in no calculation: the recording remains. It becomes an expert piece that sales sends after first conversations, and the registration page for next time.

The next step

You do not need an expensive platform for the first webinar. A conferencing tool your business already uses, a registration page and a plan for the third act are enough.

• Collect five questions that keep coming up in first conversations and choose one as the webinar topic.
• Test the topic with five customers: would they take an hour for it?
• Set a date six weeks out and build a registration page with a clear promise.
• Plan the invitation via newsletter, personal messages and networks, with two reminders.
• Limit the talk to 30 minutes of content and 15 minutes of questions, ending with a single offer.
• Write the follow-up in advance: four templates for the four groups, responsibilities and deadlines.

After the first webinar, do not count attendees, count conversations. If there were six good conversations, you have found a format you can repeat every quarter. How to hold these conversations is described in the article The first conversation.

Taken together: a webinar brings orders when the topic comes from the questions asked in first conversations, the talk ends with a single clear offer, and the follow-up is planned before the event. Its success shows in the conversations that follow, not in the number of attendees.