Aaron Ross - Video as Value Creator: Quality Over Quantity

I'm Aaron Ross, probably best known for writing this book called Predictable Revenue. I'm happy to be here speaking at SASTR Europe, especially because my wife's coming in tonight, so I should have a couple days here in Paris with her for the first time in a long time. But the other fun fact people remember me for is that I've got nine kids. So the Predictable Revenue book is all about how I created the outbound sales process and team at Salesforce.com, helped them add 100 million in a few years in revenue, in extra revenue, and almost doubled their growth rate in some markets. So, that was a long time ago. We're overwhelmed with all this information. And video is one way just to make it easier to connect with people, right? If I just see texts, it's one-dimensional. If I see a picture, it's two-dimensional. But when I can see someone at least moving and speaking, I just get that much more of a way to, more opportunity to connect with who they are as a person and what they're saying. So, it's also like in younger people, then they use, they're just growing up with video more. So, they're just used to it. If I had one piece of advice for marketers using video, I would say it's really, it's easy to shoot video. It might be tricky to post it in a way that people not only consume it, but also they get value from it. So, just like video has been relatively new the past few years, but like everything else, we're overwhelmed with content. And so, the quality of the video in, yeah, production value, but in business, it's also the quality of the information. Okay, I'm watching someone, but what am I learning? What am I getting from this? Do I want to see this again? Or am I, eh, that was okay. I don't really need to see this again. So, just really focusing on the value that you're creating for the audience and the, especially the content, like what can they walk away with from this video? I think the marketing theme of 2019 would be less is more. Or maybe quality over quantity. Because over the last 10 years, content marketing has meant more content, more and more and more. So, first people started to write blogs every day, and then it was blogs and video. And then it became how do we distribute, and how do we distribute that to get more partners to spread it? But again, there's just so much information. There's plenty of information on everything now. So, even more important is the quality. Yeah. So, how could you create less content that's better, that stands out more for your customers? And part of that is being more specific with the right kinds of, the best audience of yours, the best listeners, the best viewers, the people you care most about. So, rather than trying to create video for everybody, like who's your ideal audience and like what do they really want to learn about? So, it's that quality. So, less content, but better quality for the right people. So, back in the early 2000s, I had a lot of And so, I had a company that failed, and I knew before I started in the company, I needed to know sales. So, I went to salesforce.com, and I took the only sales job they had. I barely made any money, but I was getting paid to learn. And there, what I learned, what I discovered was that even at Salesforce, which had so many leads coming to them, they're all thousands of inbound leads a month. They're mostly for small business. And Salesforce at the time was trying to get into big companies. And the only thing they were trying to get into was big companies. And the only thing that really worked repeatedly with those big companies is outbound prospecting. So, I said, ey, give me a chance to create a prospecting process. Because people, all the salespeople were prospecting but it wasn't working. So, it took me four months to create a process that worked at Salesforce, where we could basically go into Fortune 1,000 companies even and get as many appointments as we needed to fill our sales pipeline. And there was our sales pipeline. So that process to create a predictable number of quality sales appointments every month, which then led to predictable revenue, was what I created, which led to then creating, the first year we added an extra million, and then it was an extra seven million, then an extra 20 million, and that just kept growing, growing, growing. And actually since nowadays, of the 10 billion Salesforce does now, I don't know, more than a billion probably came from that process, and created ways back. But that was what helped them double their sales growth. Companies today have, they're doing inbound marketing, they're doing outbound prospecting, they're also marketing to customers. So there's all kinds of ways you're trying to connect with people to get them excited about your product, either to come to you, or to stay with you, or to buy more. And just like email, or social video is another way to connect with them. So people shouldn't stick only to email, they shouldn't stick, only to written posts, they shouldn't stick only to video, right? They're all complementary. But when you use something like video in smart ways, whether it could be adding a little video to a landing page, whether it could be using a prospect or using video in their outreach sequence, whether it's for customers, giving them an update, not just with a written blog, but maybe putting a video in there as well. There's a lot of ways you can use it. So video can be an amazing way to help you increase your lead generation, well, sales results, whether that's from inbound lead generation, outbound prospecting, or customer marketing. So again, but like anything else, it takes practice to learn how to use video in a way that it gets results. And I think one thing I would share with anyone is that when you're doing a new technique, or you're taking a technique you've been using and you're adapting it, it can take months to sort of crack the code and figure out how to get the results you want with, in this months. It's not going to be 30 days usually unless you get lucky. So stick with it. Figure out what are the results you want to get. Is it extra revenue? Is it having your customers stay longer? Is it more leads? And be willing to put the time in to figure out how to use video to achieve those measurable results. So in my book Predictable Revenue, I go through how companies can build a sales team, how to design the sales team, and what kinds of roles they should be in, how to generate leads, and ultimately create first predictable pipeline. But if you can create pipeline predictably, then you can create revenue predictably. So in a lot of that was based on using outbound prospecting. Now a lot of companies either aren't ready for outbound prospecting or they do some but it's a small program compared to their inbound marketing. So if you want to do inbound marketing, so again a way to fill your funnel. Okay. To generate revenue, there's a couple things that are really, really important to make that work well, to get the most out of those leads. So the first is if you have more than a hundred leads a month coming in, a couple hundred leads, having a dedicated person to respond to those leads is essential. Don't just, it's very rare that you should just give them straight to your sales people. Because most sales people will not be very effective at following up on those leads. There's always exceptions, but step one is making sure the leads you generate get great service. And usually that means that you have something, someone called either a market response rep or an inbound lead qualifier whose job it is to review all those leads, get rid of the trash, contact the leads that look promising, talk to them, and then route or pass them to the right people. So that way leads don't get dropped. So that's number one. Number two is making sure you have the right metrics. So whether you're using video or any kind of format, there's sort of five key inbound lead metrics you need to pay attention to to know is it working. So they're pretty standard, you know, how many leads are you creating, how many are getting qualified, what's your qualification rate, what's the dollar value of the pipeline being generated per month, and how much revenue is coming from that. So if you're not, too few companies track their whole inbound funnel from sort of beginning to end, from the number of leads being created to how much revenue is coming from those leads, so especially that back half, if you don't do that you don't really know what's working, what's not. Because ultimately a marketer's job is not to generate leads, right? It's not to create a pretty brand, it's to help increase revenue for the company in ways that are a good fit for the company and for the customers and for the, basically the financial health of the company. predictable revenue, the first book. The main marketing techniques I used was, I already knew a bunch of people in the sales world from being at Salesforce and from blogging, and I think there's a few webinars and some guest posts that we did, so basically partner marketing, and I don't even think I did that much, I should have done more, but that was the way around, the book just smiling, would've think, um- Meinung out. Thank you so, you know, just landed a little back big question. Yeah. Yeah, right. 30 days. Because when you do a 30-day launch, people read it, but then it drops off. So the launch helps it going, but then you need to keep it going for way longer than you think. And ultimately, if it's not a book that people love and want to tell their friends, it is going to decline on its own. So most of the predictable revenue sales that come from word of mouth. So I feel lucky that way. So many salespeople say, I love this book. We get our whole team to buy it. And originally, that came from doing live events and speaking about the content was the catalyst that helped me take the original rough ideas of the book and translate it to things that were simple and useful to people. So if I summarize, what I did was live events helped me create a great book that people loved. And I shared an early draft way ahead of the launch. And then I launched it with partners, people who knew how to share the content with their audiences. So one, two, three. Yeah, so the webinars, when I used webinars to help promote the book, I just reached out to some people I knew in the sales world. So I knew people at InsideSales.com or other usually software companies. I said, hey, we want to do a webinar. So I reached out to people who knew me already and just did webinars really around the ideas in the book. And the early webinars, if you look back on it, they were pretty rough. I didn't know exactly what the main ideas were that people wanted to hear about. So like everything else, just by starting the webinars and doing some practice ones that probably even weren't that good helped me get the ball rolling to figure out how to do webinars that the audience really enjoyed. So we still do them. We probably need to do more of them. But they're a great way to reach people. Now, again, everyone's so overwhelmed with the number of webinars and the number of content. It just means they still work. You have to do a better way to do a better job with them. Yeah, webinars are still important for all B2B marketers. Just like blogs are important. But each different kind of marketing channel has a different purpose. Like blogs, usually for most companies, they're not great at lead generation. But it's a great way to create content. It can be a great way to help people who do find you to get to know you. Webinars can be, again, they're not great for like, I say lead generation, but they're great for list building and to education. So again, there's these different marketing channels. They all have their pros and cons. So I'm not actually even sure today what our best, I mean, our best form of lead generation is the people who read our book, which is good, but it's also not going to take us towards the growth that we want to see. So we even, we're finding how do we, what kinds of marketing programs besides our blog and webinars are actually going to help us generate more buying leads, right? And I'm not sure that's why we have a VP in marketing. His job is to figure that out. How would you use video to promote a new product? Well, I think the most powerful kind of video are always from customers who are using a new product. If you can have little testimonials, especially if they're not scripted, right? People who are actually using whatever the new product is, how much they enjoy it, what they're getting out of it. What I think another trend that we're seeing and we should continue to see is people, it's like authenticity, which usually looks like in a video, people who are just speaking. It's not too professional. It's not too scripted. It's not, we would say stilted. Right? It's there's, it might even be a little bit rough because it makes it feel more real. Like, I remember 20 years ago in TV they started to move the camera a little bit, so it wasn't too fixed, and moving the camera made it feel a little more real. So that kind of wobble with when you're interviewing people is important, so it feels a little more real. Yeah. overproduced. It's not too professional. You want it to look good, but not too professional. So like if you're walking into someone's house and it's too clean, you're like, this is kind of suspicious. People don't really live this way, especially if they have kids there. You're like, no, this house is a lie. I don't feel safe. So a little bit of wobble is actually good. So can prospecting and sales emails be improved with video? I think sometimes they can and sometimes they can't. A lot of times, one thing that's great about email is that you can be, you can communicate things very easily and simply, right? So for short emails, video I think would get in the way, especially if you already know that person. But if you have a bit more to say or if you don't know that person, video could be better or a great compliment because you can just, you know, talk into it and you can convey your personality. So it's... Sort of like understanding who are you talking to and what are you trying to get across? Is video going to help you or is it going to hurt you? Because if I get a video in my email, it's more work to open it. So I'm like, hmm, am I going to listen to this? That from the receiver, at least that's how I am. And I might, if I, someone I know, like, well, maybe I, maybe it will, maybe it won't. If it's someone I don't know, if it's the right kind of content, like there's that decision. I don't have to make that decision over email. I can just look at it. So if you do a video, just make sure it's going to be useful, worthwhile for the right person so that it actually gets watched. Because a lot of videos, unless they click on it, they're not going to watch it. So again, these days when there's so much content and people are juggling so many things, one thing that helps cut through the clutter and overwhelm is our relationships. So when you can help build a relationship with someone, which can be done over the phone, can be done over email, it can be done over video, I mean, it can really be done any way. Video in complimenting to how else you're doing it can be a way to try to, for them to see you as a person and for you to see them. That's why video conferencing is getting more and more common, right? The technology's improved and in video you can see them. So with video, with recorded video, same thing, even in sales, whether it's early in the sales cycle or later, when it makes sense, because again, sometimes it may not make sense if you're just trying to communicate something simply and quickly. But video can be a way to help you. Video is a way to help not only communicate complex ideas, but help build that relationship. So they feel like, because people buy from people. If they trust you as a person, if they trust your company as a brand, they're much more likely to buy over someone else. If they don't trust you, then they're not going to buy. So it'd be a way to help, I would use it to help build that trust and relationship with an audience and customers. My outlook on measuring video is usually now, is more of an executive user. I'm not a video producer, but I don't really care about the vanity metrics like views or shares. What I look at is the whole funnel, if it's an outbound funnel or inbound funnel. What I would look at is if we're using video in some channel versus if we're not using video. And what's the difference? Does it lead towards more appointments? Does it lead towards more sales? Does it lead, like what kind of funnel metrics does it, the higher level funnel metrics does it affect? So there's the inbound funnel, outbound funnel, or customer success funnel. Like where are we using it? And what are we trying to affect in that funnel? Or is it really just, I mean there's value too in just educational content. And if we're just using it for readership and sort of to nurture people, that's useful as well. And I would know to look at it with that, which is okay, we can do video just to nurture people. I'm not really going to care, maybe at that point I will care more about the views and the shares to try to gauge which topic is more interesting. So of 10 videos, which ones are the most popular to say which content, what do people care about? But what was different about that video where it got the most shares? So sort of depending on the situation is where I'll try to figure out what's the metric that means the most to me as an executive.