Inside Cordial's Webinar Motion: A 70% Attendance Rate and a Follow-Up Playbook for Enterprise vs. Mid-Market
About an hour before every Cordial webinar goes live, a $5 coffee lands in each registrant's inbox. It sounds like a gimmick. It's also part of why 70% of them actually show up, while most teams are refreshing the dashboard hoping to crack 30%.
Madeleine Work is Director of Product Marketing at Cordial, and she's built webinar programs on both sides of the market: mid-market at a previous company, and now enterprise at Cordial. That range matters. It means she's seen exactly what carries over as you move up-market and what quietly breaks along the way.
At Cordial, her product webinars run at a 70% attendance rate with 3x the engagement of the program's earlier sessions. But the number she actually cares about isn't just attendance. It's what happens after: product adoption, accelerated deals, and expansion inside existing accounts.
Her program runs on a tight, intentional setup. Quarterly product webinars tied to releases, with a goal of moving monthly once positioning work is done. An audience that's roughly 85% customers and 15% late-stage prospects. A registration target of 100 to 150 of the right people rather than a big anonymous list. And, like every Game Changers guest, she hosts on her own site through Sequel, which keeps the audience in Cordial's ecosystem and skips the export-and-upload and customer journey frictions of a third-party tool. The audience never gets bounced to a Zoom link, and every click, poll answer, and minute watched stays as first-party data Cordial owns.
Laying the Foundation: Decide What the Webinar Is For
Before any tactics come into play, Madeleine makes one decision that shapes everything else: what is this webinar actually supposed to do?
Her product launch webinars have three goals, in order: drive product adoption, accelerate in-flight deals, and cross-sell. Net-new opportunities are a welcome side effect, not the target. That single choice is what lets her optimize for the right room instead of the biggest one, and it's where most teams go wrong before they ever pick a topic.
"If your goal is net-new opportunities, product launch webinars are not the move. If people aren't even familiar with your core value prop, they're not going to understand whatever new feature you have."
The Strategy: A Product Webinar Is an Adoption Engine, Not a Lead Magnet
Because the goal is adoption and acceleration, Madeleine builds for an audience that already knows Cordial. Launches pitched to customers, and late-stage deals land, because those people have the context to care about what's new.
For actual top-of-funnel, she uses different formats entirely: the "anti-demo" (a demo you can watch without talking to a sales rep) and customer stories (like this Game Changers Masterclass session itself). A product launch aimed at a cold audience falls flat, in her words, like this:
"Oh great, you have an MCP, but I don't even know what your product does, so why would I care that it has an MCP?"
Clarity of purpose is the whole game. Once you know a webinar exists to move pipeline inside accounts you already have, every downstream choice, the room, the incentives, the reporting, the follow-up, gets easier to make.
The Playbook: How Cordial Runs a Product Webinar
Madeleine's motion is four moves: fill the room, keep it alive, report it so execs care, and follow up based on who actually showed up.
1. Fill the room: the $5 coffee
The highest-ROI tactic in her playbook is almost embarrassingly simple. About an hour before the webinar starts, every registrant gets a $5 coffee gift card, sent through a Sendoso party link inside a customized email (built in Sequel, but any email tool works).
The timing is the trick. It lands in the exact window when everyone else's reminder emails are getting ignored, and it signals this session is worth showing up for. That one move is a big part of how Cordial clears 70% against a 25 to 35% norm.
Tip for marketers: People feel guilty about taking a gift without giving something in return. They’ll feel obligated to attend your webinar, even if your gift is just a $5 coffee gift card
2. Keep it alive: participation, not a monologue
Attendance is half the battle. The other half is making sure the room doesn't feel like a broadcast.
Madeleine runs a points-based giveaway with dead-simple rules: attending earns one entry, and every time you participate you earn another. It's driven 3X higher engagement than the program's previous webinars. She also designs polls to do double duty, surfacing which tools and use cases customers care about so CSMs get a real follow-up signal, and she builds a transition into the session every 7 to 10 minutes: change the topic, ask a question, tell a story, or hand to another speaker. The session runs as a conversation, not a solo presentation.
All of it, the polls, chat, and reactions, runs natively in Sequel, so every response is captured as first-party engagement data instead of getting buried in a recording. That's what turns a poll answer into a follow-up signal instead of a vanity stat.
Tip for marketers: The worst part of webinars is feeling like you're talking to yourself. Good engagement is good vibes, and people will participate for the glory alone if you let them.
3. Report it two ways: immediate and executive
Madeleine reports at two altitudes, and she's honest that a product webinar to an enterprise audience won't light up top-of-funnel metrics, so she doesn't pretend it will.
For the immediate read, she drops the Sequel dashboard straight into the team Slack for the initial analytics snapshot: attendance, engagement, participation, all in one place. For the executive read, she moves to a Salesforce dashboard and reports influenced pipeline across both renewal and new business, tying webinar engagement back to the accounts and deals it touched. Because that data lives in Sequel, its Salesforce integration pushes attendance and engagement onto the account record, so influenced pipeline is tied to the deal automatically instead of being rebuilt by hand.
Tip for marketers: For a product webinar selling into enterprise, it’s very unlikely you’d be able to fully attribute a $3M deal to a single webinar. Instead, report influenced pipeline across renewals and new business.
4. Follow up by segment: this is what changes up-market
If one part of the playbook separates mid-market from enterprise, it's the follow-up. This is the piece Madeleine has run both ways, and it's where most teams get it wrong when they scale.
At enterprise, follow-up is high-touch and human. She shares poll responses and the chat transcript with CSMs, who reach out to their accounts individually. Because she designs the poll questions around what CSMs are actively enabling customers on, and closes with a prompt like "What are you most excited to implement?", reps get attendee-level notes that make each follow-up genuinely personal. Because it all runs on Sequel, that outreach starts from each attendee's actual poll answers and chat activity, not just a list of who logged on.
At mid-market, the same instinct gets scaled. Instead of 1:1 CSM outreach, she runs a 1:many email with a Chili Piper booking link that routes each attendee to their account owner. When she ran this motion earlier in her career, focused on upsell, it was the only way she could actually attribute expansion pipeline back to marketing.
Tip for marketers: Enterprise follow-up is a person. Mid-market follow-up is a routed booking link. Same goal, completely different motion, and if you copy one into the other you'll leak pipeline.
The Results
Cordial's product webinar program delivers what most teams can't:
- 70% attendance rate, well above the 25 to 35% norm
- 3X higher engagement than previous webinars
- 98%average viewing time
- Influenced renewal and new-business pipeline, reported in the language executives care about
The central theme isn't a single clever tactic. It's clarity of purpose. Madeleine decides up front that a product webinar exists to drive adoption and accelerate deals inside accounts she already has, then engineers every step around that: the right 100 to 150 people in the room, a $5 nudge to get them there, participation mechanics to keep them present, executive-grade reporting, and a follow-up motion matched to the size of the buyer.
The biggest lesson for anyone scaling a webinar program up-market: the tactics that fill a mid-market room still work, but the follow-up has to grow up with your buyers. What converts a mid-market attendee is a fast, routed booking link. What moves an enterprise account is a person who read the chat and knows exactly what that customer said they wanted to build next.
Want these reults for your own webinars?
Cordial hosts on their own site through Sequel, so every webinar feeds adoption and pipeline instead of a third-party platform's analytics. If you want to see what that looks like for your program, book a demo.
