At some point, every marketing team running regular webinars has the same conversation. Do we hire someone for this, or keep patching it together with whoever has time?
The instinct is usually to hire. It feels like the “proper” solution: a dedicated person, full control, no dependency on an outside partner. But the actual cost comparison rarely gets made honestly, because most of the cost of an in-house hire is hidden outside the salary line.
Here’s the fuller picture.
The visible cost: salary
A dedicated events or webinar specialist in a B2B marketing team typically commands a meaningful full-time salary once you include employer costs such as National Insurance, pension contributions, benefits, and equipment. That’s before any tools.
The costs that don’t show up in the job ad
Hiring time. Sourcing, screening, and interviewing for a specialised role usually takes 6 to 10 weeks, during which your webinar program either stalls or continues being run by someone doing it as a side task.
Ramp-up. A new hire, even a good one, needs 60 to 90 days to learn your product, your audience, your existing tools, and your team’s way of working before they’re operating at full speed. That’s a quarter where output is below what you’re paying for.
Tool stack. Webinar platform, registration page builder, email automation, design tools, video editing software. Most of this gets bought again even if adjacent tools already exist elsewhere in the business, because access, seats, or workflows don’t line up.
Management overhead. Someone needs to set direction, review output, and cover for them when they’re on leave or when volume spikes around a launch. That’s a real, if partial, cost on a manager’s time, and one that’s rarely accounted for when the hiring decision gets made.
Single point of failure. If your one events person leaves, is out sick during a launch week, or simply hasn’t run the specific format you now need, say a multi-day virtual summit, there’s no backup. Momentum on a monthly webinar program is hard to rebuild after a two-month gap.
What outsourcing changes
Working with a dedicated events partner doesn’t remove cost. It restructures it. Instead of a fixed salary plus hidden overhead, you get:
- No hiring or ramp-up time. Delivery starts from the first sessions, not after a quarter of onboarding.
- No single point of failure. A team, not one person, is behind delivery.
- Tools included. Platform, production, and editing tools are part of the service rather than a separate procurement process.
- Delivery that scales with a monthly plan, not a headcount decision. Going from one webinar a month to two doesn’t require a second hire.
The trade-off is real too. You don’t get a dedicated person embedded in your team full-time, and you’re relying on someone else’s process rather than building your own institutional muscle. For teams planning to run a large internal events function long-term, covering conferences, in-person activations, or a full content studio, building in-house eventually makes sense.
But for the specific job of running consistent, well-run webinars without a hiring cycle, outsourcing is very often the cheaper and faster path to the same outcome, particularly in the first 12 to 18 months.
A simple way to run the numbers for your own team
Put rough figures against your own situation rather than taking the comparison on faith. Add up a realistic full time salary for the role including employer costs, a reasonable estimate for the tools they’d need that you don’t already have seats for, and a conservative guess at management time. Even an hour a week adds up over a year. Compare that total, plus the 60 to 90 day ramp-up period where output is below full speed, against what a dedicated partner would charge to deliver the same number of sessions per month starting immediately. For most teams running one to two webinars a month, the outsourced number comes out lower in year one purely because of the hiring and ramp-up gap, even before factoring in the single point of failure risk of a one person team.
What changes once volume grows
The calculation shifts as volume increases. A team running eight or more sessions a month across multiple product lines or regions starts to benefit from an embedded person who knows the product deeply and doesn’t need re-briefing every time, and at that scale the fixed cost of a hire gets spread across enough output that the ramp-up period matters less. The honest threshold varies by team, but a useful signal is whether a single dedicated partner would need to run more sessions per month than they can realistically produce at a consistent quality bar. Past that point, a hybrid model, an in-house person handling strategy and speaker relationships while a partner still runs production, is often the more sensible long term structure than a full swing to either extreme.
The question worth asking before either decision
It isn’t “can we afford to hire” or “can we afford an agency.” It’s how many events per month do we actually need to hit our pipeline goals, sustainably, for the next year? That number tells you whether you need a person, a partner, or just a better process with the team you already have. If the founder is meant to be the one presenting, it’s also worth separating their time from the team’s. We break that down in how founders turn one hour a month into a full content calendar.