The Value of Creating Video for Sales Teams | Episode 118

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Today in IndustrialSage Episode 118, we’ve got Tyler Lessard, V.P. of Marketing for Vidyard – to discuss the value of creating video for sales teams.

Danny:

So let’s jump in today’s episode. We’ve got Tyler Lessard here, who is the V.P. of Marketing for Vidyard. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us today on IndustrialSage.

Tyler:

Oh, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Danny:

I’m super excited about this episode ’cause I kind of love video a little bit and I kind of love Vidyard. You guys have a pretty amazing product or products, should I say, but for those who are not familiar with who you guys are and what you guys do, give us a lowdown.

Tyler:

Yeah! So at Vidyard here, we’ve been around for about eight or nine years now and we are a suite of video technologies for businesses across marketing sales, customer service and it spans everything from helping marketing teams host, manage, publish, optimize and track their online video content.

So, as you’re putting videos on your website, on your landing page, out on your social channels, having more control over the experience, being able to track your engagement data, and so on. And then we also have a suite of tools for sales and customer service teams that’s really just about making it super simple for anyone to record and share custom videos out with prospects or customers as a way to put the human face out there as part of your messaging, to connect in more personal ways and to use the power of visuals in your communications. So it’s been a really exciting number of years bringing these tools to market and we’re just seeing such great adoption of video these days that it’s a really great sign and really exciting times.

Danny:

Yeah, it absolutely is. It just keeps growing more and more. I mean, we see it every year and it’s super exciting. So, maybe tell me a little about your marketing background before Vidyard, where did you pick up marketing?

Tyler:

Yeah! Well I’m still looking for it, to be honest.

Danny:

Okay, good! Yeah, you and me both.

Tyler:

I’ve been at Vidyard for about 5 and a half years as V.P Marketing but I actually started my career as an engineer. I’m a systems design engineering graduate and I started doing software development and then I shifted into doing third party developer relations and building out a community of technology developers and quickly found that I wasn’t a great developer and I was much better at working with people, at communicating value, at articulating stories.

And that was sort of my path to moving over to the dark side of marketing with my love of, sort of, bridging that gap between technology and requirement and values and making sure that we can bring those things together. So, it’s been a lot of fun and I now think a lot about both, of course, the art and the science of marketing. So I appreciate my engineering background but I really love the creative aspects of what we are seeing out there today.

Danny:

That’s awesome. Now, I love the whole art and science thing because what’s super exciting now is that you actually can have some science behind it because there’s some great tools you can use to measure these things. And what I think has been super exciting, for me anyways, is sort of that validating fact of, particularly when it comes to B2B content– because let’s be honest, B2C, everyone’s kind of got your okay over here, right?

But B2B, that validating that, no, you actually need to have content that’s story-driven and it’s engaging. It can’t be like, “Here’s our product,” video and super robotic. Showing that the more engaging, the more fun, the more interesting, the higher level of engagement over here, has a direct correlation to retention, and sales, and all that great stuff. So, sorry, I get excited about that.

Tyler:

Yeah. Well, it’s super interesting because the B2C world, to your point, is very much a transactional sort of model, right? You’re trying to drive really quick conversions but you’re not necessarily building long-term relationships and so on and B2B is all, today, about two or three important things.

One is educating the market and becoming a trusted advisor in your space. And we all know, as marketers and sellers, we can’t actually be marketing and selling anymore. People just don’t buy into it that. So, we need to be educators. We need to earn trust out there within the marketplace and then, as part of that, we need to drive engagement more so than just clicks and conversions.

You hear a lot of people talking about that these days. It’s hard to get somebody’s attention, but it’s even harder to hold it; and so the caliber of content, of communications that we’re being held to nowadays is really really high. Because if somebody clicks into your content and they’re not interested, they will very quickly find something else to engage with.

Danny:

Yeah. You’re competing with all the cat videos and everything else, right?

Tyler:

Yeah.

Danny:

So, let’s move in a little bit. So, one of the areas that I really was excited to talk to you about is really this idea on how to use video in the sales process. Because the tools and the technology there, especially some of the tools that you guys have are amazing but I think there’s a little bit of a shift that you kind of have to have.

A lot of people, when you think of video content in general, you think of, well, marketing. I think of my identity video, my positioning video, maybe a product video, right? And then it just kind of stops there.

Tyler:

Yeah.

Danny:

How do you guys position using video in that sales process? What would be like the optimized way in those opportunities that companies can leverage that?

Tyler:

It goes back to what I was just talking about, which is the changes in the market with how we need to both market and sell. And it, again, goes back to we need to put ourselves out there and earn the trust of our audience by becoming true advisors to them. We need to show not tell, right? That old adage is more true today than ever because everybody has immediate access to all the information online, right? And ever competitor says the same thing in your space.

People can quickly read all these websites and they all tend to feel the same, but where we can still really differentiate as sellers and as great marketers is in, the stories that we tell, is in how we actually connect with people on a more human and personal level to build that trust, to build that relationship and that’s so hard to do with text-based content, right? It’s just really hard to build that personality and to build that relationship.

So we’re seeing more and more sales reps that are…of course they’re using video conferencing when they’re trying, instead of a traditional conference call. They can build that face to face rapport. But one thing when they’re doing asynchronous communications, when they’re sending emails or messages on social to either cold prospects or warm customers, is recording and sending video messages as a way to do that. Instead of, again, just hiding behind a keyboard.

And what that really does is it gives you the chance to do two really important things. One is put your face on-camera, to build that human rapport and that consistent relationship, but it also gives you the opportunity to use visuals to your advantage, right? To actually help people understand what it is that you’re talking about because we’re all educated, we’re all visual learners, right? We could spend half an hour talking about human psychology and why video is a more educational medium but the fact of the matter is if you can visually explain something and actually show a person, “Hey, this is what I’m talking about,” or “This is how our product can help you,” it’s more memorable and it’s quicker and easier to consume and it’s more likely to get you that conversion that you’re looking for.

So that’s the real opportunity that I see. It’s not about creating all these produced videos with drone footage. It’s about getting sales reps to say, “Hey, I can hit record on my webcam or screen capture. I can get on camera and I can introduce myself and I can explain what I want to deliver to a customer but doing it quickly, easily as a way to build rapport and to earn trust.”

Danny:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s the show-don’t-tell kind of thing. It’s a lot more relatable and digestible. So, one question that I have and this comes up– I hear this a lot…and you’re seeing this a lot, let’s say, on LinkedIn and building your personal brand and you have a lot of companies that just get really freaked out. I mean, I get this question all the time, from the marketing departments, or HR or whatever… “Hey so you’re telling me that, what should we… we should let our sales reps create video content? One to one messages through emails is one thing but, getting used to doing it on LinkedIn for personal brand, I don’t know…” How have you guys addressed that? What are your thoughts on that?

Tyler:

I mean the way I think about it is, as a business leader myself as much as a video guy is, what’s the risk of not doing it, right? Like you’re not going to do that and your competitors are, right? You’re missing an incredible opportunity because the reality is, the way people research and buy and connect with brands is so different today than it was five to ten years ago.

The importance of actually connecting in authentic ways with people is at an all-time high because, trust, that general trust is at an all-time low, right? Spam messages and digital noise is at an all time high and in order for use to break through the noise and really earn trust, we need to start doing these things and so, I think the real question is what’s the risk of you not trying things of this nature? And as you think about that and if you say, “Okay, well, yeah you know what, maybe we should try it,” then you go, “But how do I do it in a way that I’m confident is going to be perceived well in the market and that my reps aren’t going to go off the reservation and do something really weird?”

You need to think about how do you educate your sales reps, give them some ideas, give them some guidance, much like you did with email, much like you did with cold-calling, right? Like, the first time they started making cold-calls it was unnatural for them. You were afraid to let them on the phone but it was the same. You’ve got to think this is another evolution and we’ve got to think about, how do we learn? How do we make it ours? What kinds of videos makes sense? What kinds of visuals should we try to incorporate?

Give them a little bit of freedom but also give them some guidance and that can go a long way. It’s not going to be… your first video is going to be your worst one, right?

Danny:

Yeah.

Tyler:

And your second one is going to be your second-worst one, but you’ll get better just like you did at cold-calling and I think everybody just has to start thinking in this manner today. You can write emails, you can create documents, you can create PowerPoints. You have to be able to create video too, it’s just the world that we’re in now.

Danny:

That’s a great answer! And I’m going to remember that now. So, that comes up and I totally get it. Okay. So, what about the organization that says, “Hey, yeah. We want to dip our toe in this. Let’s say we want our sales reps to do this. Maybe we’ll leave LinkedIn and outside for personal brand on a separate matter but just, from responding to customers or what have you.” What are some tips that you can give them, in terms of getting that buy-in, where you may have reps that are like, “Really? I look horrible. I’m not doing that,” or just, what are some tips there?

Tyler:

Yeah. Well, I think first and foremost, you have to find some folks that are interested and willing to give it a shot and you’ve got to just start trying it. And the great news is, Vidyard – and there are others, but – we have free apps that anybody can install today. Just a Chrome browser plug-in and it plugs right into Gmail and Outlook. It makes it super simple for any sales rep to record a webcam or screen capture video to immediately send it out via email and to get notifications whether or not people are watching.

And so the good news is you can start trying it with no investment up front and so, you can start to feel it out and see, “Do we have folks that do start to see some success with it without having to build a big business case to start?” and I think a lot of sales technology gets adopted that way these days.

So, I think it’s important to identify some of those folks who you think may be interested in giving it a try. Getting them the tools quickly and not overthinking it, letting them start to learn. Again, companies like us have a lot of resources to help them understand best practices and how to be natural on camera, examples and guidelines. So, I think if you can find a few people, give them that little bit of time to learn it, to try it out and see what successes they have.

And you’ll learn as you go, but once those first few people will start getting responses from cold prospects, who would’ve never otherwise responded. Or there’s the deal gone dark and then they send them a video and all of a sudden they respond back within the hour, right? We hear those stories all the time and so, I think to build on that success, you get a few internal champions who start to learn what works and they can help share the love across the sales team ’cause once it works for one person, then you get believers across the team.

Danny:

Yeah.

Tyler:

Just try it.

Danny:

Absolutely.

Tyler:

Don’t overthink it and get going.

Danny:

Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so, in your mind, what would be… What is the optimized…video…rollout? In other words, if you were to be able to say, “This organization is killing it. This is how they’re using it through all their different processes,” or whatever. What does that look like? Let’s talk from like lead gen, outbound, inbound, what does that look like?

Tyler:

Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s a bit of a cop-out answer to say it depends. It’s different for any organization but I say that in all honesty because where you want to focus is where your painpoints are in your marketing and sales process and I think that’s where you need to think about is, “Where are we having challenges?” and I’m sure most are going to say, “Oh, I have challenges everywhere,” right? Attracting new leads on everything. Really think about that and go, where could the use of video help me really elevate our performance at some point in the cycle?

That said, what I see most common are things like: number 1, starting out with your website, which is an obvious place where people are coming to learn about you. Go through your own website and look at where are opportunities where simple, educational videos could really help explain what it is you’re trying to say. Because video is such a great explainer mechanism. Think about where could you help clarify points and how could you give someone a more visual buying journey on your website.

The second thing you want to think about is your inbound content strategy. So, if you are doing a lot of thought leadership content and your content marketing is still just a blog with two written posts per week, think about where and how you can start to infuse video based thought leadership, addressing key topics in your market, putting those on your website, on your blog, but you can also start to use those on YouTube, on social, and on other places.

And then the third place I would look is the topic we were just discussing, which is within your sales team, and if you have outbound sellers– so folks who are doing prospecting. That’s a great place to try using video because it’s harder than ever to get a response in cold prospecting. Right now there’s a window of opportunity where most buyers aren’t seeing videos from sellers, and so those who are doing it well are seeing two to three times higher response rates just by starting to infuse personal videos into that process. So, I think those are a few places to start and then, again, beyond that…just focus in on where you think you can help in your own buyers’ journey.

Danny:

Yeah. Absolutely. I’ll give you one thing that we’ve found, that we’ve had a lot of success ourselves with actually is, with the… from an inbound perspective, you get leads that come in and they’re interested in X-Y-Z product or service that will kick out an email with a video from the rep who’s going to reach out to them so that you can start to create a little bit of say, “Hey listen, I’m Danny. I’m going to be calling you. I may be a little bit tied up right now but if you want, you can go ahead and schedule some time on my calendar now and we start that conversation.”

And then it’s… we love it because you get this data, you get this analytics. “Alright, we’re already starting it and the guy who’s supposed to be calling is buried in a bunch of meetings or whatever,” so…

Tyler:

Yeah. It’s a great use case and it just quickly reminded me of another idea that I think is worth sharing. You mentioned folks within your sales team who may be like, “Oh I don’t want to do video.” Some of them may not get comfortable with doing custom, one-off videos, five or ten of them a day. But you get them to record one or two videos where they’re in… that sort of cover 80% of the outbound messages they tend to send, right?

Danny:

Yeah.

Tyler:

It might be the, “Hey, this is who I am. I want to introduce myself. I’d love to chat more about A, B, and C because I think I could really help you there and by the way, my favorite pastime is golf,” or whatever it is, right?

Something like that where you have a couple of those and you can use them at those points, right? Like you said, as a responder to an inbound message, as part of your outbound cadence. Some of those that you could use at different points but those are all about adding that personal touch and introducing yourself as a human and I love that example that you gave. That’s great!

Danny:

We’re just big fans. I think there’s, I think like what you mentioned, just thinking about it inside your organization, where you’ve got those painpoints inside that process. Chances are, there’s a really good way that you can use videos as a solution for that and I think sales is a great, is a really great thing.

I’ll throw out a few more ideas, even just from an onboarding perspective, if you’ve got sort of the same sort of onboarding process just how to prepare people, “this is what to do, what to expect,” and as you mentioned, it’s a great medium for explaining what’s going on and I think it’s just, it’s just different and I think people get excited about that. They’re like, “Oh wow! This is pretty cool!” And we geek out on the data and the analytics in the back. “Oh, this is…we can measure and improve some things here.” Yeah, a lot of opportunities.

Tyler:

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s great. We’re seeing sales engineering or solutions consultant teams who are doing quick screen recording to create a quick demo for somebody. As opposed to getting on a call and performing a live demo, they’ll pre-record a standard demo or little micro demos of different capabilities and the sales reps can use those as on-demand assets and they don’t have to be overly produced, right? They’re things that are simple. They’re screen recording with their webcam on. You’re a real person doing it and just little things like that can absolutely go a long way.

Like you said, we just have to shift our mentality from this world of video is a highly produced medium for top of the funnel marketing. To me, video is a great new way to communicate your message, to educate your audience, to build rapport, and you don’t have to overthink it. It’s about creating videos, not producing them; and using them in any channel that you would normally deliver a message but just being smart about, “Where does the power of visual help me tell a better story than just relying on the same old text content that I always have?”

Danny:

Alright! No, totally, absolutely, 100%, agreed, done. That’s awesome. So, I’ve got a couple off-the-wall questions I want to ask you then as we go in. So, what has been, out of the last five years, sort of the best use case, or one of your favorite use cases that you’ve seen that either some of you guys have done or you guys have had customers have done? Yeah, share that story.

Tyler:

You know, one of the things I’ve seen that, it’s a simple idea but it’s been so impactful is, when you go to most websites, at least in like B2B companies, usually the main call to action is “Request a Demo,” or “Talk to Sales and Book a Meeting,” and you and I both know, when we go to websites and we see that, that’s the last thing we ever want to do.

Danny:

Yeah, yeah!

Tyler:

I never click on those buttons, and their conversion rates are really low, and so I’ve seen more and more companies saying, “What if my main call to action, instead of request a demo or book a demo, was watch a demo?”

Danny:

Yeah.

Tyler:

And when I click on that, it gives me a nice sort of experience where I can, now choose to watch different demos of the solution or I can do different things. And maybe it’s still a lead gen exercise so I still have to enter my information in a form to watch those demos, but now it’s a self-serve experience.

And what’s really great and – warning everybody, this is a selfish plug – if you’ve got a platform like Vidyard behind the scenes, you can track as a marketer and know, this person selected to watch the demo. They watched this demo for three minutes, they watched this demo for six minutes, and you can get those real-time insights to know exactly who’s engaging and how long. That can be an incredible qualifier for you, even more so than that person who clicks the book-a-meeting button because you don’t know if that person is already educated.

Danny:

Totally.

Tyler:

But using that sort of experience and we’ve seen lots of different companies doing that. In some cases, it’s totally transformed their conversion rates on their website because they go from like 0.3% of people who actually click that book-a-meeting, to like 8% of people that watch the demo– but they can track them and qualify them and call them afterwards.

So, it’s a really simple idea but little things like that and just thinking, of all the call to actions we put out there, let’s start to use the word “Watch,” more frequently than “Request,” or “Download,” or “Book,” right? Those are things people don’t really want to do. So, think about that and it can start to open your eyes to where you could be using video on the marketing side of the house as well.

Danny:

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s just, if you think about it…as a society now, you want to go watch your favorite episode of whatever, pick your episode and you go online, you find it, whether you pay for it, it’s free, or whatever but it’s there. It’s accessible and you do it at a drop of a hat.

If I’m looking for something at 4 in the morning ’cause I’m beating my head against a wall for a problem or a challenge, the last thing I want to do is go hit this button and request for a meeting. What the heck does that mean? Is that waiting for an email that maybe somebody will send me six hours from now or two days? I have no idea. I want to figure this out now. So, I think you guys are empowering people to buy the way you want to buy.

Tyler:

You don’t have to replace it, right? You can still have that book-a-meeting button for those who want to take that route.

Danny:

Yeah, totally!

Tyler:

But you have somebody, that option to self educate through video because that’s what most people are doing these days. We just have to think about it as marketers and sellers and go, “Where could videos help and how can we create that content to better align with the expectations of the buyers and make it really friction free?”

Danny:

Right, absolutely. So let’s recap everything as we’re kind of, we talked a lot about different areas. I think it’s great but I think going back to,if we were to distill everything down, how do you… To be rethinking video and how to use it in sales, it’s really… you kind of talked about the two points here and said, “Listen, number 1 is education.” You had a great use case of, “Hey, if you’ve got a blogs and you’re not using video content, use it there. It’s your thought leadership. Let’s educate people, let’s get away from this transactional ‘sale, sale, sale, sale.’ Let’s provide value, answer people’s problems, their painpoints. We can do that in video.”

And then the other piece is engaging through there and I love, essentially, really rolling out or empowering – that’s a good word, empowering – your sales teams with video to be able to say, “Listen, here’s some stuff that’s produced, whatever, we can send that, but then here’s some stuff that I can do on my phone or on my desktop,” to be able to have that connection, you know?

Tyler:

Yeah, 100%. Educate and connect. Those are the two real superpowers of video. So, exactly to your point and I often end with saying, when you’re looking at using video, don’t think about it as another way to deliver the same message, right?

Danny:

Yeah, yeah.

Tyler:

It’s a new way to deliver something bigger and better and those superpowers of video are its ability to educate, its ability to engage, and its ability to connect on a more human level. So, use those superpowers and say, “How could I really unleash video in those areas to be a lot better as a marketer or a seller?”

Danny:

Absolutely! That’s it. Tyler, hey, listen, I really appreciate it. This has been a really great episode. I hope that, I think that a lot of people are going to take away this, you know… If they’re not rushing to go do video, if they’re not doing it now or say, “Hey, we’re going to put this in. All our sales reps needs to use this tomorrow,” today. So, if people want to find out, you mentioned a tool. A free tool. What is that and where can they find it?

Tyler:

Yeah. So, usually at this point, like you said, everybody’s like, “Oh my God, you’re right I’ve got to do more video,” and then they’re like, “How do I do it? I don’t know where to start.”

Danny:

Yeah.

Tyler:

So, what I recommend, you can go to our website: Vidyard.com and we actually have, if you look in the Learn section, we have some really great ungated, free content. We have the ultimate guide to video for marketing, video for selling, and also getting started with video production. So, those are some free resources in our site that you can use to kind of go deeper into these topics and start to think about and learn about where to get started.

And then, as you mentioned, we have, both a free hosting service, which you can find on our website, as well as our free tool for reporting and sending videos in sales context. Those are all on Vidyard’s website. You can also find it as an extension in the Google Chrome store. So, take a look for that and yeah. Lot’s of free resources, lots of free tools. Just get started and let us know how we can help.

Danny:

Awesome. Tyler, thanks again.

Tyler:

Thank you.

Danny:

I hope you have a great day. Thanks for joining us. Alright. So, okay, listen, love video, no surprise if you listen and subscribe to the show. We talk about it a lot but some really great things. I’m going to just distill it.

We kind of recapped there a little bit, really think about pivoting your thought on video as that marketing piece or that identity or that positioning type video. You use it in your organization, use it as a tool. Two pieces: use it to educate and to connect with people. Educate people about the problems that they have, help them solve their problems with your solution, talk about it, they can take things away. Let’s not be super-transactional.

And then, let’s connect with them through video: just like I’m connecting with you right here. Use the power of this or your desktop computer that you have there. It is super powerful and we need to be thinking about how we can pivot that. Especially as we are such a more video immersed culture and it’s going to continue to be more so as we grow.

So, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching today’s episode. If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We’d love to answer them for you on the show. IndustrialSage.com/questions and that’s all I’ve got for you. So, thanks for watching. I’ll be back with you next week for another episode of IndustrialSage. I’m Danny and I’ll catch you next time.

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