Webinar Pipeline Planner

Free tool by AAJ — work backwards from the number, not forwards from the invite

In AAJ's view, many webinar plans start with a date and a speaker and arrive at pipeline by accident. This planner runs the arithmetic in the other direction: you give it the pipeline you need and the room you can realistically fill, and it tells you whether those two things can be true at the same time. Eight inputs, live recalculation, and a verdict that is willing to say the plan does not work. Runs entirely in your browser. No signup, nothing stored or sent.

Use the tool at aajconsult.com/tools/webinar-pipeline-planner.

What it calculates

A webinar is a four-stage funnel, and the planner multiplies straight through it. Attendees are registrations × show-up rate. Qualified attendees are attendees × the share of the room that fits your ICP. Follow-up meetings are qualified attendees × the rate that take a follow-up. Opportunities are meetings × the rate that become real opportunities. Pipeline is opportunities × average deal size.

It also runs the chain backwards. The four rates multiplied together give you a single conversion chain, and dividing your pipeline target by your average deal size and then by that chain gives the registrations the plan actually requires. In AAJ's view, that one number is often the uncomfortable one.

The eight inputs are pipeline target, average deal size, registrations you can generate, show-up rate, share of attendees who fit your ICP, the share of qualified attendees who take a follow-up, the share of follow-ups that become opportunities, and an optional cost for the session. Every field recalculates on each keystroke. A value outside a field's range, such as a negative rate or a rate over 100%, is refused and named rather than quietly clamped.

After the session: plan against actual

Two to four weeks after the session, the planner reads out what actually happened: registrations, attendance, attendees who fit the ideal customer, follow-up meetings, opportunities and pipeline, each compared with the plan. It names the stage that fell furthest below plan and, as AAJ's view, what usually causes it, works out the cost per attendee, per meeting and per opportunity, and adds the return on the session's cost once closed-won revenue is entered.

It then gives a repeat, change or stop verdict from the same engine as AAJ's webinar-and-event-programs agent skill: pipeline against cost, or expected revenue against cost when you enter your win rate, measured against the return you need (AAJ's default rule if you give none, not a benchmark). It flags a first follow-up later than 24 hours and declines to judge with fewer than five meetings booked.

The run-of-show checklist

Before the invitations go out, the planner lists the eight run-of-show checks from the same skill: a topic that is a buyer problem, promotion live two weeks out, a dry run on the real platform, a recording and on-demand page, a follow-up sequence written before the event, an agreed sales handoff, a qualifying question or poll, and one call to action. It says how many are done and which are still open.

The defaults are assumptions, not benchmarks

Every field opens with a placeholder value so the page is not empty when you land on it. Those values are starting assumptions, not industry benchmarks, and the tool says so in place rather than letting you mistake one for the other. Replace each with what your last event actually did — a plan built on your own history is the only version of this worth trusting.

Which lever is worth pulling

The planner ranks your four rates by how much pipeline each one would add. It raises one rate by ten percentage points — capped at 100% — holds the other three still, recomputes the pipeline, and reports the gain. Then it does the same for the next rate, and sorts the four results largest first.

In AAJ's view, this matters because the intuitive answer is often wrong. Teams reach for promotion first, because registrations are the number everyone can see. But if half the room does not fit your ICP, ten more percentage points of show-up rate buys you a bigger audience of people who were never going to buy. The ranking is computed against your inputs rather than a general rule, so it changes as your plan changes.

What the verdict actually says

If the arithmetic is incomplete — no target, no deal size, or a rate at zero — it says so and stops rather than printing a confident zero.

Otherwise it reports the registrations the target needs, worked out by the same engine as AAJ's webinar-and-event-programs agent skill, which rounds up to whole opportunities, meetings and attendees. It then compares that with the registrations you said you can reach. If you can reach them all, the room is feasible. If you can reach at least half, it is a stretch, and the planner names the ways to close it: a partner's audience, a smaller target, or a rate you control. Below half, the target does not fit one event, and in AAJ's view a series or a smaller target is the honest fix. These cut-offs are the engine's rules, not benchmarks.

Alongside, it multiplies your registrations forward through the four rates and reports the pipeline they produce, and the gap or surplus against the target.

The funnel table

Under the headline numbers, a five-row table walks the same arithmetic stage by stage — registrations, attended live, matched your ICP, took a follow-up, became opportunities — showing the rate applied at each step and, in the last column, how many people were lost there. The losses are the point. In AAJ's view, a funnel that sheds most of the room at the ICP-fit step points to the invitation list first; later stages can still lift pipeline, but they work on a smaller base.

What this does not know

The planner is arithmetic, not judgement. It cannot tell whether your topic is one your buyers care about, whether the follow-up motion you are assuming actually exists and has someone's name against it, or whether the registrations you typed in are reachable people rather than a wish. The tool says all three on the page, because a model that hides its assumptions is worse than no model.

Frequently asked questions

What show-up rate should I assume?

Your own, from the last two or three sessions. If you have never run one, pick a deliberately cautious number, run the session, and replace it. An industry average tells you about other people's lists, not yours.

Is a bigger audience always better?

No. In the planner, raising a rate multiplies every later stage, so the lever ranking above often puts ICP fit ahead of more registrations. Check it on your own numbers.

What if the required registrations are impossible?

Then the plan is wrong while it is still cheap to change. Borrow an audience through a partner, narrow the invitation list to the accounts you want, or accept a smaller target honestly.

Is anything stored or shared?

No. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is saved or sent, and there is no signup. Refreshing the page clears it.

Related resources

Pipeline Forecast & Coverage Calculator — ICP Fit Scorer — All free tools — PR, Partnerships & Events hub

The arithmetic is the easy part.

A webinar that creates pipeline needs a topic your buyers care about and a follow-up motion that exists before the invitations go out. AAJ builds both. Book a Growth Audit.

Run this in your agent

The free AAJ agent skill Webinar & Event Programs does this job inside a coding agent, on your own data. Install it with npx skills add sarojkjha/aaj-marketing-skills --skill webinar-and-event-programs.

Using Claude or ChatGPT instead? Add the AAJ engines as a custom connector, with no install: https://aaj-engines-mcp.sarojkjha10.workers.dev/mcp