Dayna Rothman - Use of Video in Sales: Accelerate Your Sales Process

My name is Dayna Rothman and I am the Chief Revenue Officer at SaaStr. I've done two talks here at Europa. One was a sales and marketing alignment panel with Anaplan and Pendo.io. And then we did another kind of revenue leaders ask me anything panel where we let the audience just go nuts and ask whatever questions they want. Video is always a huge part of any company's lead generation strategy, especially their content marketing strategy. Whether you're B2B or B2C, you want to be able to reach customers in a variety of different mediums. So when I think through something like content strategy, it's always a mix of print, ebooks, like long form writing, blogs, videos is an important part, different visuals. So I've always used video as a key part in how I'm reaching my audience, both from a brand and a lead generation perspective. So I think there's a couple of different ways that you can really pair video with marketing automation. One, of course, is to make sure that you're including videos in your emails that you're sending out, whether they're email blasts or email nurture. But I think that the other ways that you can think through it is if you understand what pieces of a video that somebody's watching or how long they're watching or what different topics of video, you can actually personalize their experience in marketing automation even more if you're understanding the metrics around what people are watching and then taking that into your marketing automation platform to further create your lead scoring or your nurture programs. Video has always been an important part of how I market across the entire funnel, both from initial lead generation branding perspective of introducing people to the brand and then also more in the middle of the funnel when you're creating videos that are more product focused. So maybe you're doing a video about a new product release or maybe you're doing a video demo and then all the way up and down until the SDR team, I've always used video in my sales development teams where they're actually creating personalized videos for the prospects they're going after. So instead of just calling and doing your typical email, I think it's always great if you open an email and you get a nice personalized video that a sales rep is creating just for you and that's always worked really well for me from a prospecting perspective. Video is also great because it's a really quick and easy way to create content. So if you don't have the resources to do a long form ebook, it's not that hard to just pick up your iPhone and do some video with it either when you're doing yourself or with the team. So at Sasser we're trying to get our sales reps to use video more in the sales process and very much in that video is a great way to easily personalize for a prospect. So if you understand what a prospect is looking for, how your product can help them, putting that in a video is a great way to put more emotion and a face to the brand in addition to making the prospect feel a little bit special because you're making a personalized video for them. At Sasser we've only begun to really explore webinars. It's definitely something that's high on my content marketing strategy and radar. We have done a few webinars in the past but the plan is after Europa and going into annual that we're doing webinars on a more frequent basis. So those would be hosted webinars that we're doing internally. Also sponsored webinars because Sasser is in a lot of ways a media company and we work with a lot of companies on a co-sponsored basis and webinars are a big way that our customers want to get in front of our audience. So partnering with them so that they can get in front of our disaster audience is another really key way that we're going to use webinar strategy in the future. I think webinars are excellent for lead generation and at other companies I've been at it's always been a really big part of not only lead generation but also deal acceleration. So the great part about webinars is that they can really activate your database and they don't always necessarily need to be net new people coming in. Like how are you actually engaging the people you already have in your sales funnel and your database? So by creating webinars and promoting them out to your own database they can actually be a tool to help accelerate your sales process. I've done webinars in the past at companies like Marketo and Bright Funnel that were actually even focused on opportunities. So we would only invite opportunities to certain webinars or maybe you're running a webinar for an account based marketing plan. So you can actually take webinars all the way from the top of your funnel and really bring them into the bottom of your funnel. Definitely some of the challenges that I face in the FATPASS for webinars is for one, making sure that your webinar platform is actually has the capacity for the amount of people showing up. And this is something that not a lot of people think about. Like when you purchase a webinar platform you don't think that there might be a limit to how many people can actually attend. Like I've definitely partnered with other companies that haven't thought about this and before they know it they have like a thousand people sign up for their webinar but their platform can only accommodate 500 and they don't figure that out until like the day of the webinar when people can't get in. So that's a huge problem. I mean obviously you know there's always going to be some technical difficulties. Like in my opinion the easier the webinar platform is to use the better. Like I don't need anything crazy fancy. I just want it to work, to be reliable and to be easy for my team. I think that things get more complicated once you get into something like a virtual event which I've done at Everstring, quite complicated virtual events that have like multiple different session tracks and things need to be pre-recorded. You know when do they go? Like the whole experience needs to be branded. That gets a little bit more complicated. You need to make sure that you have the skills like internally to be able to you know do something like that and that your webinar platform can handle the you know the strain on the system when you have so many people coming off and on the platform. So I think video marketing is only going to become you know more of a staple in a lot of marketing organizations especially videos that I mean it's great to have a produced video. I love having a nice produced video where you have your videographer, you've got your editor and everything like looks perfect and branded but there's also a lot of value to like these quick videos that you're making. They can actually generate a ton of views. Like for instance Jason Lemkin our founder at Zaster, he does a lot of these like very quick personalized videos where he takes a topic, he takes his iPhone. I mean it's very rough but it generates a ton of views and it does have that like nice human aspect where people feel, it's almost like when you watch a YouTube video you know on your own like maybe you know I watch like a makeup tutorial video and you connect with that YouTuber. When you're bringing that into B2B some of these quick videos it's a great way to do it and I think that's only going to become like more prevalent over time. I think the reason that more companies don't use video in their marketing stack is because of this like preconception that video is time consuming, video is difficult, it takes like a lot of effort to get your team like rallied around a video and it does require you know a little bit of storyboarding and so I think the barrier is that a lot of teams feel like they don't have the resources to do it or the desire on the team but once you get past the fact that like your videos can be like a little bit more raw and off the cuff and then I think that more marketers will start to adopt it. The other thing I found is like I've had certain teams in my marketing history that have been great at video and it's like a natural thing they want to do and then I've had other teams that have been more of a challenge to like get them to think about video but once you get into a groove where you're creating videos on a regular basis it becomes more of a natural part. It's kind of that like initial hump though that you need to get over around kind of corralling your team on video and getting them to understand that like it's you know it doesn't need to be as much of an effort as they think and if you think about it like doing a video is a lot more it can be you know a lot quicker than like writing a 10 or 15 page e-book.