#531 - How to Scale Personalized Prospecting with Video (Even in SMB)

What kind of videos do you send when your prospect stops replying to you entirely? One that I have is an elevator background, put some elevator music on it and just say I'm headed down to another floor because I haven't heard back from you. Anything that I can do to like continue the spark that we had initially had in that conversation, I'm gonna do so if it means like me jumping up and down or one of my favorite and top-performing videos is a video of me spinning around on my chair and that's what's capturing and re-engaging the conversation. Anything you can do to be creative and stand out. Today you are literally going to get every single way you could possibly use videos to humanize your sales cycle. If your buyer's inboxes are flooded with a million plain text DMs, long-winded AI emails, oftentimes your only option is to break through the noise by showing you are an actual human, but that doesn't end that prospecting. It continues in your recap emails the way you deliver a price and every single touch point you have in the sales cycle that is not live with a customer. And today we have the expert in video. His name is Mikey is the number one AE in the new business segment over at Vidyard. Welcome to the show, my friend. Thanks, Armada. Let's start with prospecting. Talk me through your prospecting video framework that you use. Yeah, absolutely. So keeping the time limit to 45 to 60 seconds tops, this is somebody new you're introducing yourself with. We live in the TikTok era, attention spans are short. So we got to deliver as much value as we possibly can. And so how I like to structure my video prospecting efforts would be introducing myself. So an intro, why you're reaching out right away was the trigger. For us here at Vidyard, we work with a lot of our free users to, you know, try to upgrade them through our plans, et cetera. So for us, it's like, hey, my name is Mike with Vidyard. Notice your team at 30 minutes of presence club has three folks already using our free version. There's our why I'm reaching out. Here's like the why is there value in a conversation would be as a result of upgrading to our business plans for helping teams double their meetings booked and accelerate deals forward and then close with your call to action, which is, hey, at the end of this video, my calendar links can appear where we can cover all this and get you all the information you need looking forward to scheduling some time soon. Nice. I really like the call out of you have the benefit of you have a free version and we have something similar here at 30 NPC where for our paid training and enablement plans, we'll reach out to leaders whose reps are downloading our free content. And one of the most successful plays we've been using is calling those reps out by name. So instead of saying, hey, you've got six people downloading content, I'm going, hey, Mike, Katie, Dan and Steve all are using a free version of Vidyard and I'm doing that even before we introduce ourselves. So that's one thing that like for our team has been really, really successful just hitting them right away with here are the people that are using the free thing. Today's show is brought to you by outreach, which helps you increase seller productivity, coach calls more precisely and forecast more accurately using a platform powered by AI agents. If you're running a tape review, you're going to stop at three different points. Number one, when the prospect monologues ask your reps, what did we pull out that was important? From there, ask your reps, what should we say or ask next and then click play and recap what did the rep do versus what we thought they should do. Our friends at outreach built a 30 NPC resource hub where you can grab this play and then unreasonable about more links on the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Texas, which helps you move your deals forward faster when timing matters. The fastest way to move a feel forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting and that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward with Texas. Check it out. It's free in the show notes. I want to ask you about any sort of visual assist on this video because obviously you have a very lovely face to look at. Mike, are you doing the hold the white board up with their name on it? Are you doing anything to make them feel like, oh, this is actually for me other than the words that you are saying? I'm glad you brought that up. It's super important to be able to stand out that way because as a reminder, that's what they're going to see in their inbox is when you're sharing a video, they are going to see a thumbnail or a gift. And so yes, absolutely, I use an app on my phone actually. And I'll also hover over somebody's LinkedIn profile, circle a few things as I'm scrolling throughout the video so that that's what they see in their inbox. I'm reaching out to you for a specific reason. Here's why I'm going to highlight that with the video and making sure that they're capturing that as they open and engage with the email. So you're annotating on the video as you're recording it, which is something I am a huge fan of is annotating on the screen in Zoom meetings and videos. What are you actually annotating it or like what are you drawing on or circling? A lot of the times it'll be potentially like their team or their the role that they're currently working towards. A lot of the times for me, I reach out to sales leaders. And so like it's very common for sales leaders to include what their accolades are in the past, what they're currently working towards. And so a lot of sales leaders will include I've helped to drive XYZ and pipeline. And so I'm going to go here and circle that because that's the topic that I want to focus on when I'm reaching out to you. So something like that, underlying their name, just keeping like their attention focused on the video and directing them as they're engaging goes a long way to increase your watch reading on your videos. Where in your prospecting floor are you putting these videos? Is it in the first email? Is it a follow up? Are you sending it over LinkedIn? Where are you sending the videos? Great question. The first step for us has been the most successful. And so I would argue that that is the place that you want to first introduce yourself. You're going to be sending potentially a lot of content throughout an entire cadence or sequence. And so putting a face to the name, letting them know who's reaching out, what other content they're going to be seeing and who that's going to be coming from. I think that's critical of it to be standing out at that first step. Are you doing this on all of your first touch points? Just points for every single prospect on the reason I ask is it takes a lot of time to record a good video. And I imagine if an SMB selling, sometimes you're sequencing hundreds of people in any given week. Are you doing this every single time or is it on your eight-tier prospects? How do you actually make this stuff scale? Here in video, we're using our video agent to be able to scale that use a personalized video, meaning prospect entered in sequence, personalized video recorded and sent out on behalf of me, the seller, without me needing to lift a finger. So if we want to scale that there are tools that can help with that, I understand the amount of time it would take to send every prospect a personalized video. And so for different scenarios, it might make more sense to send a little bit more of a general video. We're still standing out. You're still providing value and you're breaking down that video to an individual persona versus that individual so that you're still relaying a valuable message, but you're not necessarily as a seller putting all your eggs in one basket per say to record a personalized video for 50 prospects in that day when I can reach out with a specific message for a specific persona that still get the benefit of the video. I mean, what it sounds like you're doing is for your best prospects. The real Mike is going on their LinkedIn profile, filming a video, highlighting the things that are on their profile that can be adjacent to what vigured actually helps with in your value proposition. And you're using that as a way to say, hey, you wrote here that you're like, you know, passionate about tech innovation and selling. We want to talk about how we might help with that. I would frequently do that when I was selling to law firms where a lot of these lawyers would boast about like they're innovative with tech or they're growing their firm. And I would try to like annotate that stuff to attach to how we could help with it. But for your maybe B tier prospects, the ones that are not as hot, it sounds like you're using a generic AI avatar based video where it's like not bespoke to them, but it is still better than just like hurling a bunch of random emails where there's no face at all. Am I getting that right? Today's show is brought to you by 11X. You're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact LinkedIn posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances, and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30mpc or grab it in the show notes. Today's tactic is brought to you by attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales, busy work like CRM updates, and flag hidden dealers. So if you want to avoid ghosted deals and every discovery call with these three questions, number one, do you want to buy? AK, validate if the deal is real. Number two, when do you want to buy? Validate if it will close this year. And then number three, how do you buy? Validate that they will get you in front of power. We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes. You are on the avatar side of things. We're still personalizing it with their name, their company. It's potentially their role or any other fields that I can pull from my database. But yes, on the more of the generic manual recording, you're able to do that in that way. And I have a dumb, obvious question here. Is it believable? Because I have very well-defined eyebrows and I really question AI's ability to properly simulate both of my eyebrows and my tone of voice. Is it actually accurate? Yeah, it is. And so I'm the same way I'm like, you have nice eyebrows, nice eyebrows, but I also talk with my hands a lot. And so a lot of the times I'll find like, as I'm in, I'll watch calls back and I'm like very animated with my hands. My avatar picks up on that as well. Are they believable? Yes. Do they help you scale the message? Yes. So yeah. This is not some intentional sneaky plug, by the way. Obviously, Mike works at Vidured, but this is actually like quite interesting to imagine a deep fake me going out to a thousand. Oh, just what I needed. More Armand in my life. Yeah, I'm going to send them to our next one on one in my place. Make my life much easier. Ideally, you're sending out these phenomenal prospecting videos. You get in some meetings, book, Mike. You were talking about that is not where you stop sending videos. So once you get them to agree to a meeting on the calendar, you're sending another video before that meaning actually happens to make sure that they stick. Talk to me about the meeting confirmation video you sent. Yeah, absolutely. So that would be prior to that initial call scheduled. So for me personally, there's some hot takes out there. When you send a confirmation, is it the day before? Is it 15 minutes before? I personally like to start my day with all of my meeting confirmations. So I personally choose day of, I think that's the best way to go about it stays top of mind. For me, what that looks like is when I'm introducing myself with a video, I'm letting the prospect know who I am, what they can expect on the call and also offering, you know, to guide the conversation to get them value out of the conversation as well. So what that looks like in terms of a talk track in the video, it's like, hey, Nick, my name's Mike. I'm here with Vidyard on the call today. We're going to cover exactly how your sales development team can be standing out more consistently. If you have anything else specific that you want to call or you're hoping to cover on this call, please let me know so I can make the best use of your time. Looking forward to it, we'll chat soon. So keeping it really tight, letting them know what they can expect, what kind of value they're going to get out of you on that call goes a long way to actually increasing your show rates for those meetings that you're scheduling. Mike, are there ways that you'll adapt this based on what you know about the prospect before you're meeting with them? So if they ask certain questions or if they're a certain persona or there are certain things that popped up in your research, are you adapting that video or is it pretty much you knock through them the same way every single time? Yes. It depends on what sort of information that you have. So one thing that's common for me, we talked about for user data, is I will also, if it's not already clear, if I haven't prospective them myself, if this is an inbound meeting, I'll share that in the meeting confirmation so that they're even more tuned into the call, so that they're going to be aware that there's value here in this conversation. And they picked up something about their own org, but they didn't even know necessarily. Yeah, that's really good. So what you're doing is when you have an inbound lead, before you go into the meeting, part of your call prep is going and seeing, hey, is there anybody else at this company that is using the free version of our product? And that actually reminds me of a similar strategy that another guest that we had on the show, Andrew, who was the VP of sales over at Superhuman, where they have a similar motion to you, Mike, where they have, it's all a paid version, but if they can find pockets of people using the free version of Superhuman, that gives them a reason to get a full department using it or to get the entire company using it. And oftentimes, the path that Andrew would think about for multi-threading in his deal would be based upon the free users that he's seeing. So he would see, hey, there's a pocket of people in sales that are using Superhuman, but there's a whole host of people in engineering. And it sounds crazy, but at the end of his first meeting with sales, he would be like, hey, we actually need to go talk to your engineering leader because how do folks on his team are using Superhuman also? And that can help us build the case for like actually helping you get some better pricing or like better features because you're getting into the higher tier plan or whatever. And so it sounds crazy, but understanding like what other departments and people will, you'll be surprised by some of the nuggets you find from a multi-threading perspective. Okay, so two things. First call, if we haven't covered pricing, we're going to recap that case study that I had referenced during the call for us here at Vidyard. It would be, you know, we have a few of our bread and butter case studies that we would love to be able to share and weave into the conversation. So I'm going to record my video going over that case study just for them. I'll have one actually I have one in my cadence and or sequence. That's a little bit more generic, but in an active deal cycle, I like to do it personally for that prospect. We'll highlight the challenge, the solution, and then the result, and keep that video to about 30 seconds. Pretty quick. It's a quick hit. Here's the case study. You've got the link to review, but then you've also got the video from me walking through it so that you can continue to build value with your internal stakeholders. When I'm not in that conversation, I like to say that it eliminates the game of telephone on the other end, you're relying on your champion to relay the value of what you had just talked about and a lot of the times I can get lost in translation when it's going up the chain. So by having the video of you relaying that information, that's coming straight from the messenger. It makes it a lot less likely that that value is going to be misconstrued or perceiving the wrong way in any type of way. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early. So pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has risk, and I have something I can coach to. Now we built a guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again, and you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by Nooks. Nooks is the AI-powered pipeline engine that researches your accounts, builds your target list, writes your emails, and gets you more live conversations on the phone. Thousands of reps at companies like HubSpot, SizeMek and Deal use Nooks to automate the busy work and prospecting so they can focus on closing deals. Reps that use Nooks daily have twice as much pipeline as their peers, and we put together a guide with our friends at Nooks on how to automate the busy work and prospecting and dialing so you can focus on winning. Go get it for free at the link in the show notes. And then the second part would be pricing. A lot of, you know, my customers that I work with, a lot of teams have pricing documents and PDFs that can be up to 26 pages long, maybe more, and so we say like how can pricing be that complicated? When it's at the end of the day, it's a number. So that's the same aspect where let's eliminate the game of telephone when that pricing is being submitted into budget, when it's being talked about with the CFO. We're not going to discuss, like we're not going to leave it up to our champion to just share the pricing and that's it. We're going to talk about the pricing, but we're also going to talk about all the value that we built in the conversation. Why each item on this proposal is valuable to your business, and we're going to go through that in about a two minute video walking through all of those details. That's what I'd recommend as far as like a time length, two minutes tops. That gives you, I mean, CFOs are, we all know CFOs are super busy anytime they're reviewing pricing or proposal. It's got to be quick. So let's hit the total number. We'll walk through it as a seller. We're going to have that communication sent directly by us to the person reviewing it on the other ad and eliminate that whole game of telephone. Well, my essentially what you're doing is you get to deliver price a certain way in front of your champion where you get to explain the value, all the problems they want to solve, and then give them the price. So it's framed the right way. And then when you get off that call, look, sometimes you get to deliver price to the decision maker or the budget holder, but maybe half the time you don't. And usually what will happen is you will hope that you can coach your champion into delivering it the same way to power if you're a good seller. But the realities oftentimes they don't. And so what you can do is you can literally contain that message in a video so that you can deliver it directly to Nick, the angry CFO, and almost like personally address them, even if he was not in the room as if you had the chance to actually present price to him. I think one of the things I've learned on these ones is Mike, I appreciate that you added the point of like keep it really tight, keep it two minutes because when I first started doing this, I would send over these like seven, eight, 12 minute proposals. And I will never forget one of the most embarrassing moments ever was I sent over a, I think it was like a nine minute proposal. And it was to a VP of marketing who was going to put it in front of her CMO. And she literally emailed me back and she was like, can you please make it shorter? He's not going to watch that. And so I think that was a lesson for me of like, you don't need to cover everything. You need to cover enough. And if they want to learn more like you can absolutely send more, but you're you're actually probably better off hitting on the most important three notes and leaving out the 50 other footnotes that like are probably better served for a live conversation. On that note too, when you're closing out your call and next steps, the next step is for pricing to be reviewed by our CFO or whoever that finance person is, ask your champion. What are the three most important things that are your CFO is going to care about? And how can I on this proposal? How can I deliver that to them? And getting that information directly from your champion is just a great way to like make sure you're not spending like all that time recording a super long video that's at the end of the day not going to get watched. Yeah. I mean, that's one thing that we've been doing with our champions recently is like any time we are sending over materials, whether that's a business case, a proposal, or something similar, we are trying to get our champion to like, sense check it before they socialize. And so we're sharing this stuff in the context of like, hey, this is a draft. I want you to beat this up a little bit like we basically invite them to beat up what we're sending over. And then I'm going to go take your feedback, make this thing even tighter. And then I will give you something that you can go socialize. And so that's one of the frames we've been using to get our champion to co-create the proposal or the business case is saying, hey, I'm sending a draft. Let's get it to V2 before we send everything else out. My question for you then is you would have the ability to see whether or not somebody watches your video. And I think there are times you can not only see if someone watched, but who watched the video. And I'm curious like, if there's any plays that you run where you might see Armand watched a video and you've never talked to Armand live before, or you start seeing a bunch of people at their company watching your video. What's some of like the plays that you'll do when that stuff happens? My favorite play right away would be try to get their phone number. And anyway, I could whatever data intelligence tool I have, I'll be searching them up right away, trying to get a hold of them because I now firstly, they just watched the video. Maybe they have questions, but it's also probably a really good time when I see that view notification come in. They might be between calls. This could be like the opportunity for us to connect and have a quick conversation. So there's that. And then also following up with a quick email as well. Or, hey Armand, notice you just got a chance to watch the video. Curiously hear your thoughts. Did it cover everything you were looking for? Anything like that. Yeah, those are the fun ones in my opinion. So I would say one one that I have is where I've like just kind of added an elevator background, put some elevator music on it, and just say I'm headed down to another floor because I haven't heard heard back from you. So that's kind of a cheeky one, but anything that I can do to like continue the spark that we had initially had in that conversation, I'm going to do so if it means like me jumping up and down or, you know, like I have one of my favorite and top-performing videos is a video of me spinning around on my chair. And that's what's capturing and re-engaging the conversation. So anything you can do to be creative and stand out. Dude, that is an amazing way to end it. Folks, let's do a quick recap. And then let's talk about one thing you can do to put this into practice. So we talked about the prospecting video formula under 45 seconds, who you are, why you're reaching out, why value, and then a CTA. From there, you use day of meeting confirmations to humanize yourself before that first meeting and reduce no shows. Then in the middle of your sales cycle, you're using case studies where you're specifically calling out the things that are relevant to them. And then you're using pricing videos to make sure that the way you deliver price gets contained the right way when you send it to a CFO. And then lastly, when someone stops responding, you start jumping up and down and spinning in the chair to re-engage or bring back the spark into your sales cycle. Nick, what is one thing everyone can do to get better at sales today? If you're not sending prospecting videos where you are screen sharing, and what you're sharing on the screen is something about them linked in profile, their website, news article about them, start upgrading your videos that way. That will get them to say, wait, that's me. It's the same phenomenon as when you look at a group photo. If you're ever in a group photo, I coach wrestling. And so at the beginning of every season, we take a picture of the whole team. The first person that people look at is themselves. And so the best way to get somebody's attention is just start with them, not with your face, because they're like that person's a stranger, them and then true your face. And folks, one last thing, if you want to take this a step further, Charlie Johnson is one of the best prospectors in the game using video sheep together outbound shrimp with us in the past. And you can see exactly where you might insert videos like this into your outbound sequence. So there's a link to that drip in the show notes if you want to grab it. And we will see you on the next one.