from Stephanie Montelius, VP of Marketing at Nominal, as told to Contrast
Stephanie Montelius has run marketing at enough B2B companies to know exactly what a bad webinar platform looks like. She has used Zoom Webinars, GoToWebinar and BlueJeans across previous roles, and she has seen each of them create the same problems: attendees who can't join, tech that gets in the way, and data that doesn't connect to anything useful downstream.
When she joined Nominal as VP of Marketing, there was no webinar program. She was starting from zero. And despite the fact that Nominal already had Zoom for internal meetings, she went and bought Contrast on top of it. A purpose-built webinar platform was worth the additional investment.
"Under no circumstances" would she use Zoom for webinars. That was her answer when the question came up internally.
Since launching on Contrast, Nominal has run its largest webinar to date, built a pipeline of demo bookings from a single session and is now planning a multi-session virtual event in Q4. What started as a blank slate is becoming a core part of how a lean marketing team reaches one of the hardest audiences in B2B. Enterprise CFOs and accountants who have no patience for tools that waste their time.
About Nominal
Nominal builds financial operations software for upper mid-market and enterprise companies. Their customers are CFOs, controllers and accounting teams at large organisations dealing with complex, high-volume financial workflows. It is a specialist product for a specialist audience.
That audience shapes everything about how Nominal goes to market. Finance professionals at enterprise companies operate under strict IT and security policies. Many of them cannot download third-party software on their work machines. Asking a CFO to install Zoom to attend a webinar is not just friction. It is a reason they simply do not show up.
They are also an audience that is always learning. Accounting standards change. Regulations evolve. New tools and workflows emerge constantly. The appetite for knowledge is real, but the format has to meet them where they are. Some want to read. Some want to listen. Some want to watch. Webinars sit at the intersection of all three.
Stephanie knew this before she joined Nominal. She had built webinar programs for marketers, for lawyers, for finance professionals. The audiences were different but the hunger was the same. "Even if they had a low attendee count in the actual live webinar, we were able to use that content long term in most situations," she said. Webinars were going into the strategy whether Nominal had done them before or not.
Why Nominal Chose Contrast Over Zoom
Nominal already had Zoom. It was already paid for. The easy decision, and the one that came from leadership, was to just use it for webinars too.
Stephanie said no.
She had run into the same problems at too many previous companies to start down that road again. Zoom meetings and Zoom Webinars are different products with different pricing tiers, different capabilities and different limitations. She had seen those limitations up close: attendees who couldn't join, IT controls that blocked access, support that couldn't resolve anything and a data workflow that required manual CSV exports to connect to anything useful. She wasn't going to rebuild those problems from scratch at a new company.
Contrast solved the three things that mattered most to her from day one:
Browser-based, no download required
Nominal's audience of enterprise CFOs and accountants work under tight corporate IT policies. Many of them cannot install third-party software on their work machines. A webinar platform that requires a download is a platform that excludes a portion of every audience before the session even starts. Contrast runs entirely in the browser.
All-in-one, built for a lean team
Stephanie runs a small marketing team with a lot of ground to cover. On other platforms, running a webinar meant standing up a separate landing page, managing registration in one tool, hosting in another and then pulling data out manually afterward. Contrast handles registration, hosting, analytics and HubSpot sync in one place. "I didn't have to stand up a landing page. I didn't have to go out and identify the snippets. It just offered us this web based, all in one simplified solution," she said.
Affordable at the scale they needed
When Nominal needed to open a webinar to over a thousand attendees, the answer was a quick conversation with their account team. No tier upgrade surprises, no mid-cycle pricing changes.
The Co-Hosted Webinar Playbook
Nominal's biggest webinar to date didn't start with a product pitch. It started with a question: who does our audience already trust?
The answer was Nicholas Boucher, a thought leader who creates content specifically for accounting and finance professionals and has built a large following among exactly the people Nominal is trying to reach. Stephanie's team approached him for a co-hosted session. The format was deliberate. Nicholas would show how to do something using a free AI tool. Nominal would then show how their platform does it automatically, without the user having to execute it manually themselves.
One thing Boucher insisted on was open registration. Not just corporate emails. That meant the audience would be wider but less qualified. It also meant the platform had to handle it. Contrast's browser-based setup meant anyone could join from any device without an IT request or a software download, which mattered for an audience of enterprise finance professionals who routinely can't install third-party tools on work machines.
The session drove Nominal's largest registration volume to date. "We had numbers we were really happy with," Stephanie said. Because attendee data synced directly to HubSpot, the team could qualify and enrich the list quickly and get targeted follow-up out fast. Not everyone who showed up was ready to buy. "If they don't book a demo in the webinar, there's still work to do afterwards," Stephanie said. "But we've been able to get a decent chunk of those people to take demos through follow up. And it's actually going well.
Repurposing: The Webinar Feature That Changed How Nominal Thinks About Content
After her first webinar on Contrast, Stephanie opened the clips feature and saw the session already broken into shareable moments. "Oh yes," was her reaction. "Saves me so much time."
Contrast helsp you easily repurpose webinars into new types of content
That wasn't something she had planned for. She knew repurposing was possible in theory, but seeing the session automatically sliced into usable clips made her think differently about what a webinar could produce. "It kind of helps me think about where I could create some snackable material," she said. "That was a surprise."
For a team trying to build thought leadership with limited resources, that matters more than almost any other feature. A single webinar with Nicholas Boucher doesn't just live as a recording. It becomes clips for LinkedIn. It becomes supporting material for blog posts. It becomes on-demand content that a prospect can find three months after the live session and still convert from. Every piece of content Nominal produces has a longer shelf life than the hour it aired.
This is also what makes webinars the right format for Nominal's audience specifically. Enterprise CFOs and accountants are not sitting on LinkedIn waiting to be entertained. They consume content on their own schedule, in the format that suits them. Some will watch live. Some will catch the replay. Some will find a 90-second clip that answers a specific question and follow it back to the full session. A webinar on Contrast is not a one-time event. It is a content asset that keeps working.
"If I were to leave and go somewhere else, I would say to my next company: what is our webinar platform? Let's try and use Contrast," Stephanie said. "I really like that it's a hub.
CertifID isn't the only team that made the switch. See how other B2B companies improved registrations, attendance and sales pipeline by moving to Contrast. Browse all case studies →
How Contrast Is Powering Nominal's Next Stage of Webinar Growth
Nominal came to Contrast with no webinar program and a clear ambition to build one. The next step is making it consistent. In the second half of the year, Stephanie's goal is a regular cadence of thought leadership sessions that complement what the team is producing on the blog and social. Contrast makes it easy enough for her lean team to actually pull it off.
And alongside that, Stephanie is planning a virtual day in Q4. Not a 30-minute session. A multi-hour event with guest speakers, a major product announcement and a format designed to bring Nominal's growing customer community together in one place. It is a significant step up from where they started, and they are building it on Contrast.
A platform simple enough to launch from scratch, run a co-hosted session for over a thousand attendees and automatically turn recordings into reusable content is a platform they trust to handle whatever comes next.
"I genuinely love using Contrast," Stephanie said.
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