Webinar Run of Show Template
For marketing teams, hosts, and anyone producing from a laptop
Sixty minutes, one host, one presenter. The demo is its own cue rather than the last five slides, because a live demo has completely different failure modes from a deck and needs its own budget.
The whole thing is designed so the ending never gets compressed, since the ending is the part that actually does something for you.
The rundown
| # | From | Length | Cue | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +0m | 5 min | Waiting room, hold slide | Music bed, "starting shortly", chat open |
| 2 | +5m | 3 min | Welcome and agenda | Host only; set the Q&A expectation now |
| 3 | +8m | 2 min | Speaker introduction | Host hands over, presenter unmutes and shares |
| 4 | +10m | 25 min | Main presentation | Wrap cue at 22 in the presenter view |
| 5 | +35m | 10 min | Live demo | Fallback recording ready if anything fails |
| 6 | +45m | 10 min | Q&A | Host reads questions; seed two in advance |
| 7 | +55m | 5 min | Close and next step | One call to action, link in chat, stay on 30s |
The From column is an offset from your start, not a fixed time. Pick a start and the clock times follow.
Take it with you
Copy gives you tab-separated text, which pastes straight into Google Sheets or Excel as proper columns. The same clipboard pastes into PilotCue's importer, so you can start in a spreadsheet and move later without retyping anything.
Opening it in PilotCue creates the event with these cues already in it. Free to run, and the crew, backstage, and speaker screens are free on every plan.
The presenter cannot see the clock
On a webinar the presenter is looking at their own slides on a shared screen. They have no peripheral view of a stage timer and no producer waving at them, so they overrun without ever realising it.
Put the countdown somewhere they will actually look, and agree the wrap cue before you go on. Twenty five minutes of presentation with a wrap at twenty two is a completely different experience from "let me know when I am near the end".
Budget the demo separately
A demo is not the tail of a deck. It has its own risks: a slow environment, a login that has expired, a feature that behaved differently this morning. Folding it into the presentation slot means those risks come out of your Q&A.
Give it its own ten minutes and have a recorded fallback cued. If the demo dies you switch to the recording and stay on time, which the audience will never notice.
Protect the last five minutes
The close is the only cue that pays for the webinar, and it is the one that gets crushed. If you reach minute 56 still answering questions, the call to action turns into a rushed sentence over people leaving.
Treat the close as immovable and let Q&A be the flexible item above it. Cutting Q&A from ten minutes to six costs you almost nothing; cutting the close costs you the whole session.
Seed the first two questions
Live Q&A has a cold start. Thirty seconds of silence reads as a badly attended event, and once the room feels empty people leave.
Have two real questions ready to read out. They are usually questions you were genuinely asked before, so nothing about it is dishonest, and they get the queue moving.
Questions people actually ask
- How long should a webinar be?
- Forty five to sixty minutes, including Q&A. Attention drops sharply past the hour, and a tight 45 finishes better than a loose 60.
- Should Q&A be at the end or throughout?
- At the end, with the host collecting questions in the chat throughout. Interruptions mid-presentation wreck the presenter timing, and they cannot see a clock to recover from it.
- What do you do if the demo breaks live?
- Switch to a pre-recorded version and keep talking over it. Decide this before you start and have the recording cued, because the moment it breaks is the worst possible time to invent a plan.