About a year ago Zefort switched from Zoom to Contrast to run their webinars. The results? Staggering. Their attendance rates shot up by 79%. People stayed longer during the webinar; 90% watchtime vs 50% before. On top of that, the marketing team at Zefort now spends only 30 minutes on hosting a webinar. Instead of the 5 hours they did with Zoom.
These are some of the numbers Heikki shared with us. Heikki is the chief marketing officer at Zefort. Zefort is the all-in-one contract management software. They help organizations simplify and secure their contract processes by providing a centralized, searchable repository with powerful AI features. With a strong focus on usability, compliance, and integrations, Zefort enables legal, procurement, and business teams to gain full control over their contracts – saving time, reducing risk, and improving collaboration across departments.
This case study in a nutshell:
Zefort was struggling with an inefficient webinar process that involved multiple platforms and a lot of time to setup. After implementing Contrast, they:
- Reduced webinar setup time from 5 hours to just 30 minutes
- Increased average attendance by 79%
- Improved audience engagement from 50-60% viewing time to 80-90%
- Scaled webinar frequency from monthly to 1-2 per week
- Discovered that webinars influence two-thirds of new pipeline creation
Webinars before Contrast
Before Contrast, Zefort was running webinars through a patchwork of systems: Zoom for hosting, HubSpot for communications, and WordPress landing pages for registrations. While functional, this approach was inefficient and was costing valuable marketing resources away from content creation.
Before we started using Contrast, we hosted our webinars via Zoom. We managed our webinar communications through HubSpot and collected registrations using landing pages built on our WordPress site. While this setup worked, it was quite complex and required juggling multiple tools. The process was functional but far from efficient. Since we clearly understood the business impact of webinars, we wanted to streamline and improve the process to make it more effective and less time-consuming.
This limited Zefort to hosting just one webinar per month, despite webinars consistently generating high-quality sales conversations with good conversion rates. The company was missing opportunities to scale this valuable marketing channel.
What were your biggest frustrations using Zoom?
Running webinars before Contrast felt unnecessarily cumbersome. We spent hours on technical setup for each event. Although we eventually got everything working within HubSpot, the amount of manual work was excessive. Most of our time was consumed by technical tasks, leaving little room to focus on what truly matters – crafting engaging webinar content and promoting the event to the right audience. Instead of being a strategic marketing activity, webinars often turned into a technical project.
Heikki is not the only person with these problems. Lauren from Rally experienced the same using Zoom before she switched to Contrast.
What did this mean for you and your team?
Here at Zefort, webinars have long been a key part of our strategy to educate and engage customers while showcasing industry solutions and trends to potential clients, Heikki tells us. They consistently generated high-quality sales conversations with good conversion rates. However, due to the inefficiencies in our previous process, we couldn’t run webinars as frequently or effectively as we wanted. As a result, we missed opportunities to scale this channel and maximize its full business potential.
Why we started looking for another platform
Beyond efficiency concerns, Zoom felt "rigid and overly corporate," clashing with Zefort's approachable scale-up identity. The company wanted a seamless brand experience throughout the entire webinar journey.
We wanted to find a modern webinar platform that would elevate the customer experience. Zoom felt rigid and overly corporate, which didn’t align with the relaxed, approachable style of our scale-up company. We were looking for a solution that not only handled the technical side of webinars but also reflected our brand personality and made the experience more engaging for our audience.
What did you look for in another platform?
A seamless brand experience was at the top of our list. We wanted our customers to feel like they were interacting with Zefort throughout the entire webinar journey – from registration to the live session and follow-up. During the webinars, we also wanted flexibility to structure sessions, highlight key points, and display questions using visual effects to keep the audience engaged.
Another key requirement was a native integration with HubSpot. As HubSpot is central to our marketing operations, smooth data flow between platforms was non-negotiable.
In the end, this is what was on our wishlist for a new webinar platform:
- Provide a seamless, consistent brand experience from registration to follow-up
- Offer flexible presentation features to keep audiences engaged
- Integrate natively with HubSpot for smooth data flow
- Support easy content repurposing after events
- Reduce technical setup time while enhancing the attendee experience
What were other nice to haves?
Post-webinar content repurposing was high on our wishlist. We wanted an easy way to turn webinar recordings into valuable marketing assets – such as captioned video clips and blog articles. Having tools that support this kind of content reuse helps us extend the life and reach of every webinar far beyond the live event.
Contrast checks all our boxes
Why did you finally end up choosing for Contrast, we asked Heikki. Here's what he shared with us.
Contrast checked all our boxes – but it also surprised us by delivering much more than we expected. The platform offers a rich set of features and is continuously evolving (you can find our latest updates here), which gives us confidence that it will keep meeting our needs as we grow. The pricing was also flexible and fit perfectly with our requirements. In the end, choosing Contrast wasn’t just about meeting technical criteria – it was about finding a partner that truly enhances how we run webinars and engage with our audience.
What are your favorite features?
Contrast does an excellent job covering every aspect of the webinar process. We no longer have to spend time on technical setup – everything runs smoothly and effortlessly. We can trust that the registration page is already optimized, email communications are in place, and the recording is scheduled automatically.
One of our favorite features is the webinar studio, including its backstage feature. This allows us to test screen sharing and other technical elements before going live. This is especially valuable when we have guest speakers joining our webinars. It gives us peace of mind knowing that everything is working perfectly behind the scenes, so we can focus on delivering a great experience for our audience instead of worrying about technical issues.
What webinars metrics have you been tracking to understand Contrast's impact?
We focus on a few key metrics to measure the success of our webinars. First, we track the number of registrations, with a clear distinction between new participants and returning attendees. This helps us understand both our reach to new audiences and how well we are engaging our existing community.
Engagement is another critical metric – we monitor how actively participants engage with the content, whether they join live or watch the recording afterward. It's important for us to see that the content resonates and keeps the audience interested beyond just signing up.
Thanks to Contrast, webinars have become a seamless part of our weekly marketing routine, delivering 79 % more attendees and fuelling our sales pipeline.
Our most important marketing metric – our North Star – is the impact of webinars on MRR growth. Webinars are not just about driving attendance; they play a strategic role in generating qualified leads, nurturing customer relationships, and ultimately contributing to recurring revenue growth.
Contrast delivers big time on ROI
To run more frequent and higher-quality webinars, we first needed to improve our internal workflows. Previously, we calculated that each webinar required around three hours just to handle the technical setup – building landing pages, emails, HubSpot workflows, visuals, and other configurations. After the webinar, it took another two hours to process the recording and publish it on our website. In total, we were spending five hours per webinar on technical and content-related tasks.
With Contrast, we’ve reduced this entire process to just 30 minutes.
We now use Contrast’s landing pages, and thanks to the native integration, registrations flow directly into HubSpot. Participant lists are automatically available in our CRM, seamlessly contributing to lead scoring and nurturing processes.
This efficiency gain has allowed us to focus more on creating engaging webinar content and executing targeted marketing efforts – the areas where our marketing team brings the most value.
To our surprise, simply switching to Contrast also led to a significant increase in webinar attendance. Previously, we averaged 34 participants per webinar. Now, with Contrast, we consistently attract an average of 61 participants. This means we’ve achieved a 79 % increase in attendance – a clear sign that a better platform not only saves time but also enhances audience engagement.
On top of that, the Contrast team supported us in building a customized HubSpot dashboard, which gave us deeper visibility into webinar performance. Through this, we discovered that webinars influence two-thirds of new pipeline creation. This insight has highlighted webinars as one of our most powerful marketing tactics, directly contributing to business growth and sales opportunities.
Previously, our main goal was to drive as many people as possible to attend live sessions because we didn’t have an efficient way to leverage recordings afterward. Now, with Contrast, recordings are automatically sent out shortly after each webinar, giving our audience the flexibility to watch the content when it suits them best.
This shift has significantly improved our engagement metrics. In the past, live attendees would stay connected for about 50–60 % of the webinar duration on average. Today, both live sessions and recordings are viewed for 80–90 % of the total broadcast time. By offering a better customer experience throughout the entire webinar lifecycle, we’ve seen a clear increase in audience retention and engagement.
In marketing, it’s essential to leverage the tactics that deliver the best ROI. With our previous setup, the complexity of the process limited us to hosting just one webinar per month. Now, thanks to Contrast, we’re able to run 1–2 high-performing webinars every week – and still have time left for other marketing activities.
This shift has transformed webinars from an occasional campaign tool into a scalable, consistent part of our marketing strategy.
What's next for Zefort with Contrast?
With Contrast, we’ve seamlessly integrated webinars into our everyday content marketing. Webinars are no longer standalone projects or isolated events – they’ve become a continuous part of our content strategy. We now repurpose webinar recordings within our nurturing programs, where previously blog articles were our primary assets. This has expanded our ability to engage prospects and customers throughout the buyer journey.
Contrast also provides us with better analytics, helping us understand what resonates with our audience and where there’s room for improvement. We’re especially pleased to see how quickly Contrast is advancing its HubSpot integration, which allows us to tie webinars even more closely to our sales processes on multiple levels.
Overall, webinars have evolved from being occasional marketing efforts to becoming a strategic, data-driven engine that supports both marketing and sales – and Contrast has been a key enabler of that transformation.
