Interview: How to Turn B2B Webinars into a Predictable Source of Sales Calls
Behind the Agency Podcast with Logan Lyles, Founder of Demand Shift
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Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.
TL;DR – Key Takeaways
Most B2B webinars “feel finePrefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.” but quietly fail at the only thing that matters: turning registrants into actual sales conversations.
Logan went from a 1–2% conversion rate from webinar signup → booked call to ~10% by redesigning the signup and follow-up flow—not by chasing bigger attendance.
The core fix is a 2-step signup process: registration → short qualifying survey → instant option to book a call if they’re a fit.
Moving the CTA up (in front of Q&A and even into the signup flow) dramatically outperforms the classic “hard pitch in the last 2 minutes” move.
Webinars still work: Logan’s survey of 250+ B2B marketers found a ~35% live attendance rate and an effectiveness score just over 7/10—but only when you tweak the format and funnel.
Email is still the #1 driver of webinar registrations, but most teams only tap their own list. Logan uses cold email and partner newsletters to get net-new registrants.
Platform doesn’t matter as much as two things: owning your registration flow (to run the 2-step process) and sending real calendar invites (ICS) to boost attendance.
Logan gives away the full framework on purpose—because people who DIY often become referrers, future clients at their next job, or ideal buyers for a lighter “show you how” product.
Meet the Guest
Logan Lyles is the Founder of Demand Shift, a boutique agency that helps B2B teams turn webinars into a reliable engine for qualified sales calls, instead of a vanity brand play.
After 10+ years in B2B tech sales, Logan helped grow a podcast production agency, then ran podcast + webinar programs in-house at Teamwork.com, and later led sales and marketing at an agency called Business Builders. There, he built the webinar framework that 5×’d conversion from signup to booked call.
Now, Logan helps B2B marketing and sales teams fix their “conversion cliff” and use webinars as a serious pipeline channel, not just another content checkbox.
Episode Summary
1. From “Okay Webinars” to a 5× Conversion Breakthrough
Logan didn’t set out to be “the webinar guy.” He spent a decade in B2B tech sales, joined a fast-growing podcast agency in 2018, then took his first in-house marketing role at Teamwork.com, running both podcasts and webinars.
The webinars worked on the surface; good attendance, strong brand lift, engaged audiences, but when he looked at direct pipeline, the numbers were underwhelming.
Later, back on the agency side at Business Builders running sales and marketing, he asked:
“What would it look like if webinars were actually designed to create sales calls, not just content?”
He experimented, built a new approach, and 5x’d conversion from webinar signup to booked call. That became the seed of Demand Shift.
2. The Main Pain: The Webinar “Conversion Cliff”
Most marketing teams have the same pattern:
Promote a webinar.
Get a decent number of registrants.
Watch 65% of them never show up.
Then convert a tiny slice of the live attendees into a next step.
Logan’s research with 250+ B2B marketers found:
~35% average live attendance (65% no-show)
Webinars ranked just over 7/10 as a lead gen tactic—promising, but underperforming for most teams.
The big problem?
There’s a conversion cliff at two points:
Registrant → live attendee
Registrant → booked sales call
And on top of that, follow-up is usually weak and generic—“Thanks for attending” vs “Sorry we missed you”—with almost no meaningful segmentation.
“If only 35% show up live, and your CTA is buried in the last 5 minutes, most of your registrants are never even seeing your offer.”
3. His Unique Way of Solving It: Design for Sales Calls, Not Just Attendance
Logan’s angle isn’t “get more registrations at all costs.”
It’s: make the existing demand way more efficient.
He does that by:
Moving the CTA earlier in the webinar (before Q&A, like a mid-roll ad break).
Redesigning the registration flow into a 2-step sign-up that includes qualification and a direct path to booking a call.
Using webinars as both thought leadership and lead gen, not one or the other.
Treating webinars as a series, not one-offs—building trust over time.
Real example:
One client went from zero calls booked from their webinars to almost two dozen from a single small change, moving the CTA before Q&A instead of bolting it on at the end.
4. The Webinar Fast Track Framework
Logan’s core framework has five parts:
Promo Tactics That Work
Email is still the top driver of registrations.
Most teams only use their own list.
Logan also uses:
Cold email: inviting ICP prospects to a helpful webinar instead of pitching a demo.
Partner newsletters or strategic partners: paying or swapping access to the right email audiences.
2-Step Sign-Up Process
Step 1: Simple registration form (name + email).
Step 2: Instead of a dead-end “Thank you” page, send them to a short survey with 5–7 questions:
Qualifying (company size, role, industry, etc.)
Discovery (problems, priorities, current tools)
Ending with: “Do you want help with this? Want to book a call / demo?”
If they qualify and say yes, show the calendar right there.
That shift alone took Logan’s signup → booked call rate from 1–2% to about 10%. Across a dozen clients, he’s seen some hit 18–19%.
High-Value Live Show
Mix thought leadership and lead gen.
Webinars work best as an ongoing series, not random one-offs.
Use live Q&A, chat, and interaction to build trust and familiarity.
Personalized, Segmented Follow-Up
Use survey answers to segment follow-up beyond just “attended vs didn’t attend.”
Speak directly to their role, pain, and readiness instead of sending one bland sequence to everyone.
Repurposing & Amplifying
Every webinar becomes:
Short clips
LinkedIn posts
Blog content
Email content
Push people back to the on-demand replay for those who prefer to binge later at 2× speed.
5. Common Mistakes Logan Sees (and How to Fix Them)
Mistake #1: Dead-end thank you pages.
You send every registrant to a page that basically says “Cool, you’re in.”
No next step. No value. No qualification.
Fix: Turn that thank you page into a qualifying survey + offer to book a call for those who are ready.
Mistake #2: Burying the CTA at the end.
By the time you pitch your offer, half the live audience has already dropped.
Fix: Move the CTA before Q&A—treat it like a natural “if this was helpful and you want more, here’s the next step” moment.
Mistake #3: Only emailing your own list.
You’re not adding new people to the funnel—just re-warming the same ones.
Fix: Use cold email and partner newsletters to reach net-new ICP audiences with a low-friction invite: “Join this webinar” instead of “Get on a demo.”
6. Where the Founder/Leader Still Belongs
Webinars are basically “founder or SME time at scale.”
Logan’s story about the prospect who said:
“No, we’ve never been on a call… but I feel like I’ve been on this call a hundred times.”
That came from watching Logan host webinars for years—live, on video, in chat—before they ever had a 1:1 conversation.
For agencies, that means:
Your founder / senior expert on camera builds trust way faster than another AI-written blog post.
You can still scale your time by packaging that face-time into a repeatable series, not random one-offs.
7. Hiring, Scaling, and Productizing the Framework
Logan isn’t just doing this as a pure done-for-you service.
He’s already thinking in “offer ladder” terms:
Done-for-you implementation (for teams that want him to run the whole thing)
A downsell / DIY course + light coaching for teams that can execute but want the playbook
Generously sharing the framework publicly to:
Help non-buyers who’ll never be a fit anyway
Create future referrals and “we used your framework and crushed it” testimonials
Stay top-of-mind when those same people change roles and suddenly have budget
He encourages agencies to think the same way:
“There are people you can show how to do it, people you can do it with, and people you can do it for, and there’s probably an offer for each.”
Notable Quotes
“Most people treat the thank you page like a dead end. But 100% of your registrants see it. Why wouldn’t you use that moment to move them forward?”
“I thought people might be annoyed that I moved the CTA way up in the process. After testing it with a dozen clients, the opposite has been true.”
“One prospect told me, ‘We’ve never been on a call. But I feel like I’ve been on this call a hundred times,’ because he’d watched so many webinars live.”
“The people who DIY with my framework were probably never going to buy done-for-you anyway—but they become some of my best referrers and testimonials.”
Learn More / Get in Touch
Visit → https://demandshift.co
Join the B2B Webinars for Lead Gen Report Waitlist → https://demandshift.co/report Download the Audience Research Prompt → https://demandshift.co/prompt
Connect on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/loganlyles/
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