Almost every partner program eventually lands on the same idea: do a joint webinar. It feels low-risk and mutually beneficial, so it gets scheduled — and then, more often than not, it underperforms. Thin registration, weaker attendance, a generic slide deck stitched together the week of, and no real follow-up plan once it's over. The activity happened, but nothing about it was actually designed to produce pipeline.
The problem usually isn't the format. Webinars are one of the few co-marketing tactics that genuinely work when partners have real audience overlap — you're borrowing trust in front of people who already have a reason to listen. The problem is that they get treated as a favor to keep a partner relationship warm instead of a planned demand-gen motion with an owner, a promotion plan, and a follow-up sequence attached.
That's a program-design problem first. Once the program side is right — the right partner, real audience overlap, a specific offer instead of a generic "product overview" — the tooling that runs the actual event should get out of the way, not add its own overhead. That's where a platform like Livestorm earns its keep: registration pages, reminder sequences, and post-event analytics that a two-person team can run without an events or marketing-ops hire dedicated to it. We reach for it specifically for partner and customer webinars where the team running it isn't a dedicated events function — just people who also have a day job.
Where this actually breaks down, more often than the tool: no clear owner on either side, no shared promotion commitment (both partners mailing their list, not just one), and no plan for what happens with attendees afterward. Good software won't fix any of that.
If you're trying to figure out whether a partner webinar is worth running at all — or whether the actual gap is in partner selection, not execution — that's the conversation we have with clients before anyone touches a calendar invite.