The challenge
Processes and technologies for Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) have stagnated since the 1990s. Instead of waiting for existing providers to modernize, DealRoom’s team of former M&A professionals, data scientists, and programmers decided to build something better. Five years in, Deal Room’s software speeds acquisitions by 30-40%, making M&A deals more predictable, consistent, and agile for the top banks, private equity funds, and corporate development groups it counts as customers. After demonstrating results and achieving high satisfaction rates among early clients, DealRoom’s sales team asked marketing to generate more qualified leads, so the marketing team looked to webinars as a new channel for demand generation.
The challenge
“Our sales team wanted to spend less time qualifying leads, and more time selling,” says Marsha Lewis, DealRoom’s Director of Marketing. “So we immediately thought webinars—we saw how effective they are at driving qualified leads in other industries, and thought the same applied to us. Webinars have a higher level of commitment: it takes more time to attend a webinar than it does to read a blog post, for example, so we expected the people joining our webinars to have a higher level of interest in, or need for, our product. It turns out, we were right.”
“Our sales team wanted to spend less time qualifying leads, and more time selling”
A quick competitive analysis revealed that most companies were using webinars for long-form product demos.
“We wanted to create more value through our content. There’s a shortage of educational resources in the M&A industry, and if we can fill some of the gaps, then we can create win-wins, helping practitioners be more successful, and acquiring more customers along the way."
Results delivered
DealRoom’s webinar series accomplishes just that: presenting on topics like improving M&A processes, introducing agile workflows, and fostering more effective communication across teams, the series shares emerging best practices with bankers, investors, and corporate development teams. In its first two years hosting webinars with BigMarker, DealRoom grew its average webinar audience by 2.5x and generated 50% more monthly MQLs.
“Being able to create content for—and conversations with—each of our audiences is incredibly useful, and with the analytics BigMarker provides, we get a sense for—and then double down on—the areas where the most value is being created.”
