5 Ways To Use Your Webinars To Grow Client Relationships

Not only does the webinar format allow you to transmit knowledge, express personality, and engage with participants, but most significantly, webinars provide a platform for lawyers to establish and improve relationships with clients and potential clients.

That doesn’t just happen automatically, though. On the contrary: moving a webinar participant from a “first-time attendee” to a meaningful relationship takes effort and focus. Here are five ways you can do that:

1. Prompt Follow-up Questions

Webinars offer valuable opportunities to engage in substantive dialogues that create and strengthen your relationships with clients and potential clients. For that to happen, however, you’ve got to encourage participants to ask questions in the first place. Sometimes, it’s as easy as suggesting registrants send in questions before the webinar when you confirm they’re signed up or remind them about the webinar.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of stopping more often during your presentation, to make it clear that you’re open to questions. Sometimes you need to “prime the pump,” to kick off the Q&A by reframing on-topic queries that clients and others have already asked you. Whatever method(s) you use, the more you ask for input, the more you’ll create an environment where your audience feels free to talk, to interrupt you, to explain their specific concerns and ask your advice on how to alleviate them.  Your platform should be able to accommodate all of that.

2. Solicit Meaningful Feedback

Let’s be honest: nobody earns a “5” across the board on every single presentation they make. But that’s often what the evaluations say. How do you get more meaningful feedback? By asking more meaningful questions…

For example: don’t give your attendees a standardized evaluation that requires them to rank the speaker’s preparedness of a scale of 1 to 5, or rate the slides for clarity, or tell you whether the webinar “met your expectations.”

Ask them instead how relevant the topic was to their business or if you covered all of their concerns. Use evaluation questions that communicate your interest in knowing whether or not the webinar will help them be more successful.

Another way to get more valuable comments? Solicit feedback during the webinar itself, right after the presentation ends and before the Q&A starts. If you wait until you’ve finished, your once-engaged audience will likely have already started to scan their inbox and check their voicemail. Instead, circulate your request for comments when your presentation is still top-of-mind.

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