How Carta Drives $Millions in Revenue from Webinars Through Operational Excellence

Carta is the go-to solution for equity and fund management, making life easier for private companies juggling cap tables, valuations, fund formations, tax and audit support, and more. You’ve most likely encountered Carta if you’re working for a private company.

Every aspect of their business is led by providing value for their customers, prospects, audience, and network; including their virtual event experience. 

Carly Chan leads the efforts at Carta. Her team has made a huge impact on the business’ growth, and has set a high bar for the industry’s virtual experiences. 

The good news is that you can learn from their playbook on how Carta has generated over 51k registrations and millions in ARR through:

• Operational excellence
• Content relevance 
• Data-driven decision making

Let’s get into it!

The strategy behind Carta’s success

Carta Virtual Events Team was formed in May 2022. Prior to that, webinars were one-off projects instead of strategic programs that fuel sales and revenue pipeline. 

Today, virtual events are an integral part of their marketing strategy due to their successes in: 

• Generating millions in ARR each year
• Achieving an attendance rate that is 11% higher than the industry standard

The key to generating similar results in your own organization is to start by asking 3 questions:

• How do we get our audience to care?
• How can we handle the volume of work?
• How do we sustain our momentum?

Building the foundation

Carta Virtual Events Team ensured they understood and tailored the audience journey to a “T” before defining their plan.

Understanding the audience journey

When someone clicks into any upcoming or on-demand Carta webinars, they’ll be met with the embedded Sequel event where they can register, attend, engage, and re-watch on one single page. 

They’ve streamlined the whole audience journey and reduced friction by 75% through embedding virtual events on their website; and creating templatized workflows with their Web and Marketing Operations teams. 

Leading with relevant & valuable content

Carta’s approach to audience acquisition and retention is through content relevance, resulting in a 480% increase in registrations. The goal is to have attendees leave the session feeling at least 1% better informed.

1. Defining your value proposition

Always start with the value proposition in planning. Work closely with your content partner to ensure each session is relevant to the business, speakers, and audience. 

2. Stand out from the crowd

Find an angle that will be unique in your space. Taking this approach will help you stand out from your competition.

3. Lead with respect & professionalism

Carta productions always start and end on time. This shows respect to the speakers and attendees who are punctual, so they don’t need to derail their schedule for the day.  

They also start productions with a professional opening video. This sets the tone by showing your audience that this production was thoughtfully designed with quality.

Scaling the webinar motion through operational excellence & data 

It takes the Carta Virtual Events Team less than 10 minutes to set up each new webinar with their infrastructure & operational workflow.

1. Identify the common factors across productions 

Create templates to save time and prevent anything falling through the cracks. Consider creating these templates at the bare minimum:

• Kickoff brief
• Event day document
• Debrief 
• Graphic templates
• Communication templates 

2. Create a single source of truth

A single source of truth eliminates silos and confusion, and can rally the entire organization behind your initiatives.

Maintain one document that is regularly updated as your single source of truth. Having this resource is helpful when multiple projects are running in parallel.

3. Automate

If you have a process that can be automated, do it. Use technology to save time and prevent human errors so there is more room for content and experience development.

Look at your MarTech stack and see what can work together to eliminate manual work. For Elizabeth Green, Demand Generation Marketing Manager at Carta, it’s essential that the virtual event data flows seamlessly between tools so that no lead gets left behind. That’s how they leverage the robust Sequel + Marketo integration to ensure all data are automatically updated in every tool. 

4. Uphold operational standards

Some tasks can’t be automated, so make time to do the grunt work and hold your counterparts accountable for what they commit to. This will help your team stay on track, promote ownership, and utilize all the templates & workflows to execute your strategy.

5. Enable growth through data

Remain objective and make data-driven decisions to ensure your programs are continuing to create positive business impact. Use project-based debriefs to look at the quantitative impact & discuss qualitative learnings, and decide as a team where to cut loss or double down.

Replicating Carta’s success 

What might work for Carta might not work perfectly for you. Tailor your virtual event strategy and programs to your own team & business model while incorporating the core ideas that Carta has seen great results from including:

• Lead with value proposition to attract and retain your audience
• Scale with operational excellence through program & project management
• Sustain growth monumental with data-driven decisions