804 registrants, zero net customers

804 people registered. 312 showed up. The follow-up sequence ran two weeks. Sixty days later the paid conversions numbered two, and both had been in the pipeline before the webinar. Neither, on inspection, had been moved by it. Against roughly $25,000 of one company's marketing spend, the webinar produced zero net new customers.

The quarterly review called it "highly successful," citing registration and attendance. The CFO, handed the conversion data, wasn't impressed. The framing was true and misleading at once. The webinar had worked as a marketing artifact and failed as a sales investment. Those are different things.

This runs through B2B marketing and almost never gets confronted. Webinars are easy to measure at the surface, registrants, attendees, platform engagement scores, and hard to measure commercially, pipeline created, deals influenced, revenue attributable. Marketing reports the easy metrics. Finance would care about the hard ones, if anyone surfaced them. The team gets credit for visible activity. The return on that activity rarely gets calculated.

The structural problem is that registration is a low-commitment act. The registrant trades an email address for the option of attending later. The intent signal is weak. Most registrants skip the event, most attendees stay passive, most engaged attendees have no purchase intent. The funnel from registrant to paid customer is so thin that a conversion rate below one percent is normal.

Read webinars for what they produce. Brand impressions from attendees who might remember the company. Education for existing customers, which can support retention. Speaker credibility for category positioning. None of that is direct revenue. All of it has value, smaller and less attributable than the reporting implies.

The exception is the targeted webinar inside an account-based motion. Promote it to fifty named prospects, with personalized invitations, on a topic a known buying committee cares about, and it can produce real pipeline. Attendance falls, intent climbs, and the conversion math reads like a different exercise. Most webinars skip this and run as broad-funnel content, hoping volume converts. It doesn't.

Budget webinars at the level of their real function. Brand and education investments get judged against brand and education outcomes. Demand-generation investments get rebuilt as account-based motions rather than broad-funnel ones. Track sixty-day pipeline attribution. Drop registrant and attendee counts from the conversion reports.