Let’s talk about a trend, shall we?
Think about the number of times in the last week when you’ve read something on Facebook. Now, compare that to the number of times you’ve watched something on Facebook. Those numbers are probably pretty staggered toward video, right? And if so, you’re not alone — right now, there’s a big demand for more video content all around.
But that demand — like the fact that marketers who use it grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users — gave us an idea. What if we used video to help our sales reps and process? After all, given the aforementioned content consumption preferences, it seemed like people might not want to read tons of sales emails — but they might be interested in watching a video from a rep.
We’re always on the lookout to help our sales reps book more meetings. We call that the prospect:connect rate, which summarizes the efforts of reps to get responses (connect) when they reach out to leads to propose booking a meeting (prospect). So, our objective was to improve sales connect rate, and create more sales opportunities. And since videos are a highly popular content format, we wanted to see if adding that to our traditional outreach mix could help.
So, how did we test that theory, and what were the results? Let’s dive right in.
How We Increased Sales Opportunities 4X With Video
The Hypotheses
- Video doesn’t hinder overall activity levels. Sure, recording and sharing visual content like this might seem more time-consuming than sending an email, or making a quick phone call. Could reps send tailored, personalized videos to their prospects and still hit activity benchmarks?
- Video will be more engaging than emails or phone calls. Are people more likely to answer an email with video — and actually play the video — than they are a regular email, or a voicemail?
- Videos will be more efficient at creating opportunities than emails or phone calls. By adding video to the traditional call and email cadence, more prospects would book meetings, thus improving our connect rate.
Key Method and Technology
First, we wanted to determine how we could help reps take what they were already doing via email — being consultative, being helpful, and providing actionable tips — and present it in a more visual approach. Ultimately, that came in the form of short video inbound marketing assessments (IMA), in which reps talk through a prospect’s areas of opportunity in their marketing and problems that can be addressed. It’s what our salespeople go through with each and every prospect during an initial call. By including this video, we aimed to spark the propsect’s interest by giving them a taste of what they would get if they booked a meeting.
We used a simple Chrome browser extension tool that would allow our reps to record their tabs, screens, faces, and voices with one click. It also allowed them to seamlessly insert those videos into emails to prospects with a single click — and track any action recipients were taking with those emails.
Here’s an example of what that might look like, courtesy of HubSpot Principal Inbound Marketing Specialist Katie Carlin:
The Framework
Beyond figuring out the technology, we needed…
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