I was working on the early planning of a new web site today, and I was struck by a realization that I think may prove helpful to many of you who follow this blog.

As I have said countless times, effective online selling hinges on your ability to climb into your prospect’s head (empathize) and speak to her in the way she needs to be spoken to in order to move her to action. You have to anticipate her questions and make answers available in the right places – coinciding with her own buying process.

I have done this dozens of times now, but as I worked through the process today, something useful occurred to me.
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I’ll be honest.  I didn’t give much thought to Webinars until about two years ago when I developed a “teach-to-sell” seminar for Nextel targeting residential Realtors.

Our goal was to sell the BlackBerry to Realtors with the Nextel unlimited data plan bundled with a suite of software applications for the Blackberry that had particular relevance to this audience.  The approach (and the draw) was to teach Realtors how to leverage wireless technology to increase prospect conversions and boost client satisfaction.

The live version of the seminar worked extremely well.  Response rates to our direct mail invitations to the seminar were in the 10% range, and the audience conversion rate (attendees that bought the BlackBerry and service/software bundle) was consistently 20%+. In the throws of our jubilation over these metrics however, there was one problem that we simply couldn’t escape…

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I had lunch last week with a guy who runs a city web site (geo-domain… whatevercity.com).  In the course of our conversation, he presented an idea for an advertising partnership that they had been exploring with growing enthusiasm.

Not unlike many collaborations between businesses, I got the feeling that this one sounded logical and attractive to the businesses involved, but lacked any particular appeal to the consumers that the partnership was intended to impact.

The following is my over-a-sandwich attempt to turn a seemingly sterile marketing collaboration into a concept with potential consumer appeal…
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