AI is all the rage on tech websites, but it can still seem like a pretty obscure, inaccessible tactic for B2B companies.

The hype and expectations of AI are astronomical, yet the actual business impact it can have on B2B companies at this moment is still relatively uncertain. However, one thing I can assure you is that AI technology is advancing faster than most of us will ever be able to keep up with.

Preparing a foundation for AI now will end up paying dividends down the road.

Here, I’ll focus on two things that will play a critical role in obtaining a competitive edge with AI both now and in the future: simplifying your internal tech landscape, and advancing your team’s ability to handle more cognitive work that will arise through AI augmenting growth.

Before you go ahead and jump into laying out an AI roadmap, it’s important to first consider your overall business strategy. Setting out an AI roadmap without first truly understanding where you want to go or what you’re trying to do will lead to many more complications down the road.

Establish an overarching strategy.

Strategy means different things to different people, and laying out a solid plan that everyone can work off will be an important first step. When trying to come up with a plan to capture and/or create market value, you’ll get many different perspectives and a lot of disagreement. Coming up with a broad strategy that each key department can agree on will start building a strong foundation to launch off of.

When it comes to finding areas where AI can have a large impact, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are your vulnerabilities?
• How would other startups disrupt you?
• What areas would they specifically target?

Try this exercise: assemble a team to envision how your company could potentially fail in five years. Think about the worst case scenario, and imagine what would have protected you from getting to that dire point. This can be an effective way of building a solid strategy that will open up room for innovation driven by AI.

Next, look at your internal processes and key interdependencies from both a technological and interdepartmental standpoint. This is where most organizations tend to get over complicated. The key here is to strive for simplicity. This will be important when it comes to quickly adopting cutting edge technology in a way that will give you a competitive edge over other companies.

What does simplicity look like? Try for something that every department can understand, not just IT. AI will play a role in every area of the organization, so having processes and a technology landscape that people can grasp will make it easier for AI adoption when the time comes.

Train your entire org on the basics of this interconnected infrastructure, and then offer opportunities for theoretical innovation from each department. Ask for ideas, solution providers, ways to simplify tasks, ideas for removing inefficiencies and increasing productivity. Have a reoccurring feedback loop where you can gather up-to-date information on what your departments feel will help them exceed. People will be much more forthcoming when they have a good understanding of how the organization operates and what could be needed/impactful.

Building out a tech landscape that everyone can understand at a basic level will be difficult, but this is critical to opening up opportunity for innovation in every part of the org. When evaluating software and platforms, think hard on how these technologies align your departments (or further divide). For example, getting several departments on one platform will allow for much easier AI adoption in the future.

While most AI tech coming out right now will be very specific to the department, there will certainly be more aggregated platform plays in the future. Adopting AI onto one of your existing platforms (that covers three to four departments) and works by one set of internal rules will be much easier than trying to layer AI onto individual departmental platforms that are siloed throughout the org and all have different sets of rules. Think about it from a language perspective — getting four countries with different languages to unite will be much more difficult than four countries with the same language.

Technology and process universalization throughout the org will go a long way when it comes to not only adopting next-gen AI technology, but training your people on how to effectively use it.

These changes will also help streamline more effective communication and allocation — an area AI will play a massive role in. Examples of AI augmenting human capabilities could look like the following:

• an employee engaging an internal bot to find critical information to their job
• a sales person rapidly creating custom/personalized content for a specific prospect assisted by AI
• a content strategist figuring out exactly what topics will drive the most traffic from AI tech
• a new hire being guided through a custom onboarding program assisted by AI

Allocation of internal resources and information will most likely be one of the biggest pieces of low hanging fruit you can seize with current AI technology. Many companies have the expectation that AI will enable their workforce through increased productivity and allocation of information and resources. This is where I want to shift away from tech simplification and look towards what will most likely be the most important aspect of AI adoption: training your people.

Your team is the key to capturing growth via AI.

Creating an overarching strategy that effectively ties in all departments with a simplified tech infrastructure is a great start. Having everyone from each department understand those interdependencies while embedding a constant loop of communication will allow for more ideas on innovation (many of which will be driven by AI). The next step is preparing your team so that they’re not just ready to come up with theoretical innovations — they’re ready to drive them.

If you thought things were going to get a bit easier with AI coming in to handle all of our menial tasks, I’m afraid you’re vastly mistaken. Sure, the fluff of our daily jobs will likely start to fade away. Tasks that once used minimal brain power will soon fall under your AI counterparts, as they’re the easiest to process. However, with that, the demand for humans to consistently perform higher cognitive tasks will vastly increase. Try creating a more interconnected culture where people are working on all sorts of different challenges, even outside of the department they work for.

Here’s a few ideas you could try with your team:

• Regularly meet to discuss organizational challenges you face as a leader.
• Ask for feedback on how other areas of the organization could run more effectively.
• Create micro-leadership opportunities for people on your team to do things that normally wouldn’t fall under their job scope
• Promote more content consumption and create opportunities to apply what they’re learning via special projects
• Push your team to regularly network with other departments and promote career opportunities throughout the overall organization

It’s up to you to properly enable your team for this dramatic shift where the business value of emotional intelligence will skyrocket. By adopting both a culture and organizational framework that allow individuals to initiate innovation and change, you’re taking the first step in making this happen.

As an acquisition marketer, I hear questions like this all the time: “Is the PDF dead? Is the webinar dead now too? How should we continue generating leads for our sales team while continuing to innovate on the content formats we produce and gate behind a form?”

It’s 2018, and the way our prospects and customers find and consume content has certainly changed. While I would love to say that there’s one new, highly optimal content format that all marketers should use for lead generation instead of older formats, I can’t — it’s a little more complicated than that. Instead, I’ll make a bold claim: webinars aren’t dead, and neither is the PDF ebook.

What has changed, however, is a saturation of mediocre PDF ebooks, webinars, and other forms of gated content available online. So while webinars aren’t dead, that doesn’t mean marketers should continue running the same, tired playbook.

Luckily, HubSpot and GoToWebinar teamed up to bring you the ultimate guide, “How to Produce Webinars Your Sales Reps and Prospects Will Love.”

Make sure you’re following these steps to create an effective webinar that works in 2018.

Webinars Drive Sales

According to InsideSales.com, 73% of marketing and sales leaders say webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. Why?

• They are highly engaging. According to GoToWebinar, the average webinar attendee viewing time is 61 minutes.
• They work across the entire customer journey. From thought-leadership panel discussions to weekly live demos, webinars are a dynamic and effective way to move prospects down the funnel from awareness to closed deal and beyond.
• They generate high-quality leads for Sales. Webinars come with a ton of information about your prospects you can use to identify high-quality, sales-ready leads. With each webinar registrant, you can collect lead and engagement data your sales team can use to initiate personalized outreach.

How to Make a Webinar in 2018

Convinced that webinars are still a relevant acquisition strategy in 2018? Follow these steps to create an effective webinar.

1. Leverage Your Sales Team for Content Topic Ideas

When it comes to building a successful webinar strategy, it comes down to sales and marketing alignment. If the marketing team is creating content that isn’t helping their sales conversations, it won’t be a successful effort for driving high-quality leads to sales.

Luckily, you have experts at your disposal for coming up with content ideas that will actually compliment and aid the sales conversation: the reps themselves.

Instead of guessing what your sales team might want a webinar to be focused on, ask them. Get reps’ buy-in for a webinar before you plan it. Set up a meeting to discover new content ideas and to find out what pain points they need to help solve. This will go a long way for ensuring sales’ follow up with registrants is seamless once the webinar is over.

2. Nail Your Promotion Strategy

Once you’ve come up with relevant content topics for your webinar, its your job as marketers to get that webinar in front of as many eyes as possible. With webinars, it’s not just about generating initial excitement; you have to build excitement and encourage engagement once the webinar goes live. Here are a few tips for doing both:

• Try your hand at Co-marketing. One of the best ways to get new expertise, generate interest for a piece of content, and expand the reach of a campaign is to run a co-marketing webinar. Instead of running a webinar with speakers internally, try working with another company that’s going after a similar buyer persona and bring their expertise into the conversation. Doing so creates more interesting content and gives you the opportunity to get your webinar in front of another company’s established audience.
• Create automated email reminders under each sales rep’s name that will be sent to prospects who have been invited but not yet registered.
• Create manual email templates reps can send in their one-on-one communication with prospects.
• Set up an automated email to notify reps when one of their prospects has registered for your webinar. This will help them engage and close those prospects done the road.
• Once you’ve gotten registrants, that doesn’t mean they’ll show up. After all, if you promote a webinar 1-2 weeks in advance, a portion of your registrants are likely to forget when the live date comes around. Remember to send out reminder emails the day before and day-of the live event so ensure a high live attendance rate.

3. Don’t Just Stick to a PowerPoint and Talking Head

The format of slides with a person speaking on screen has been done time after time. Don’t feel the need to stick to the script — literally. Instead, think about ways to mix up how the information in your webinar is presented:

• At HubSpot, we’ve found unscripted, discussion-style webinars to be quite effective at engaging our audience. In many of our live events, we’ve foregone the slides completely and instead brought two speakers together and had a host ask live questions on air. It’s effective for both encouraging Twitter participation via a hashtag and keeping the content conversational, but informative.
• Try building a webinar around your prospects’ questions. Send a call for questions to be answered live on-air. This will help build engagement and excitement for what’s to come. Hopefully, the people asking questions will be more likely to show up day-of too.
• You can also use a landing page, like this, that includes a voting feature for people to upvote they’re top questions. This will also help your prioritize the material your audience is most interested in.

4. Deliver Necessary Information to Sales

A huge part of the pre and post-webinar process is making sure the right information gets delivered to sales. That’s why GoToWebinar and HubSpot recommend creating one webinar hub that’s easily accessible by sales with the following information:

• On-demand recordings of all webinars.
• A calendar with past and future webinars.
• Documentation that details the webinars goals, title, target persona, funnel stage, key points, speakers and logistics.
• Promotional and follow-up emails.
• Collection of graphic and text CTAs sales reps can drop into their communications.
• Mechanism to collect suggestions from sales reps for new topic suggestions and general feedback.

Once the webinar is done, however, it’s time to make sure the sales reps are ready to close those leads. Send a follow up email to your reps and include the following information:

• Leads who registered
• Leads who attended
• Leads who registered but didn’t attend
• Leads who never registered
• New SQL leads from post-webinar lead scores
• Any other relevant webinar data
• Send email templates sales can use to send to leads based on their webinar behavior. Include other relevant content they can use to continue to nurture leads in the coming weeks.

Putting the extra effort in will go a long way toward making sure the webinar is a success from both a sales and marketing standpoint.

It’s All About Alignment

Webinars as a marketing tool aren’t dead. But they’re also not just an effective marketing tool; they’re also effective sales tools – but only if your sales team has the information, content, and tools to use them to move prospects down the funnel and close deals.

However, creating the kind of alignment you need to make this all a success isn’t easy. That’s why HubSpot and GotoWebinar created this ultimate guide for creating a successful webinar in 2018 and included a checklist to guide you through pre, ongoing, and post webinar communications.