Crafting Can’t-Miss Channel Partner Recruitment Webinars

As an MSP channel vendor, keeping the top of your channel partner recruitment funnel filled with qualified leads is crucial. Traditionally, trade shows, peer groups, and other in-person events are the best way to achieve this. However, these events have high costs, including sponsorship fees, travel, and other expenses. So, how can you maintain a steady flow of partner prospect leads between the few live events you can afford? The answer is through channel partner recruitment webinars.

Channel Partner Recruitment Webinars are an excellent solution when done effectively. But how effective are your webinars? Do they hit your target registration and attendee goals with ideal partner prospects? Do attendees engage and participate actively during your webinars? What percentage of attendees respond to your calls to action after your webinars conclude?

Quality webinars can grow your partner channel cost-effectively. Conversely, ineffective webinars can be costly disasters that damage your brand, erode trust among your MSP prospects, and give your competitors easy opportunities to undermine you. With so much at stake, you must ensure that every one of your webinars succeeds. But how?

In this guide, I’ll share proven strategies honed over 20 years of delivering successful MSP channel partner recruitment webinars that engage prospects emotionally, build their urgency to act, and deliver the highest ROI of any other demand-gen activity you conduct.

Identify Your Target Audience

The first key to delivering successful channel partner recruitment webinars is identifying and targeting your ideal partner prospects. These include:

• Partners currently selling competitive solutions or adjacent technologies that your offering would complement. Your solution enables them to broaden their portfolio and expand deal sizes.
• Partners with a strong presence, client base, and credibility in your target vertical markets. They have deep domain expertise and relationships in segments you want to penetrate.
• Partners that fill white space in your geographic coverage map. Recruiting them allows you to scale in new regions and countries more quickly.
• Partners that expand your reach into new customer segments like enterprise accounts, the public sector, or SMBs. Adding them diversifies your market.
• Partners with robust digital marketing engines and active demand generation programs. They drive a high volume of leads and pipelines that your solution can now capture.

With these targets in mind, carefully curate your prospect list to ensure every attendee who registers is a partner you want.

Create Your Webinar Title and Abstract

Your webinar’s title and abstract are incredibly important for attracting the right audience and setting their expectations correctly. Here’s how to create compelling ones:

1. Craft a Benefit-Focused Title

Your title should clearly communicate the main benefit attendees will get from your webinar. For example, “How to Increase Technician Utilization by 25% with Our New Platform Update” or “Top 5 Ways to Reduce Service Delivery Costs by 30%.” Avoid vague, generic titles like “Incident Management Strategies.” You want prospects to immediately understand why they should attend and what takeaways they should expect in exchange for their time and participation.

2. Create Intrigue with your Abstract

While the title focuses on the main benefit, the abstract should provide just enough detail to create intrigue. For example, “Join us to learn about our new AI-powered service ticket bot that allows techs to close 2X more tickets. We’ll demo the tool and share proven service strategies to help you implement it.” The abstract builds anticipation for the webinar and convinces prospects to register.

Always reference thought leadership content in your abstracts. Include a giveaway that provides strategic value, such as a checklist, white paper, or calculator (but not a gift card), and ensure that registrants must attend to receive your valuable giveaway assets.

3. Align the Title and Abstract

Make sure your title and abstract work together to communicate consistent messaging. The title attracts attention, while the abstract provides helpful specifics that support the title’s promise.

4. Speak Directly to the Audience

Use “you” and “your” to speak directly to your target audience. For example, “See how our solution helps your team close tickets 37% faster.” Make it about their pain points and desired outcomes. This helps your message connect with them on an emotional level and increases registration.

5. Limit Text to Short Sentences or Fragments

Keep your title to less than 10 words and your abstract to 1-3 short sentences or sentence fragments, followed by a few bullet points highlighting attendee takeaways, and conclude with your free offer. Your messages should be ultra-scannable.

Next Steps

All of this is only the beginning of the channel partner recruitment webinar planning and execution process. For example, you must build a registration page, choose a host and guests, craft messaging, and execute follow-up plans to produce high-impact results. I provide detailed advice on all of that and more in a 10-chapter channel partner recruitment webinar e-book you can download here. It’s completely free and packed with concrete recommendations based on years of success.

Want even more help with your channel partner recruitment? Check out our Channel Partner Recruitment Playbook.

At Channel Mastered, we specialize in overcoming our clients’ unique MSP channel growth challenges and deliver can’t-miss channel partner recruitment webinars to our 45,000 MSPs. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you meet or exceed your partner recruitment goals.