Video-first sales engagement in 2023

Today, prospects are present on multiple channels at varying levels. Do you believe that limiting your sales interactions to just one or two channels will still allow your business to grow?

Our speakers, Heidi Sopczak Quaschnick (RVP of NA sales, Hippo Video) and Vlad Oleksiienko (Sales Leader, Reply), will show us the finer points of building a strong sales cadence and how to use personalized videos in sales and master this piece of your sales engagement game in this webinar.

Make your sales cadence inclusive

Heidi: When you’re prospecting, you never know who you’re going to get on the phone with or what their preferences are going to be. As a result, it’s a good idea to include a variety of multimedia in your outbound communications to ensure that the person on the other end receives your content—your pitch—in the manner in which they prefer to learn about your products and services.

Gartner has a standardized report on how you should be engaging your prospects. And, they agree, a good mix ensures that you are going to get more leads, start more conversations by having a variety of touchpoints—chat, video, email, a cold call, LinkedIn, and more. Vlad, we’d like to know what your existing sales cadences look like—do you have a variety or do you just stick to a particular flow within your outbound?

Vald: It depends on your style, whether it’s aggressive or more polite. We stick to a more polite version, I would say. Our sequence lasts for 60 days, which is almost two months, and is email-heavy, focusing on high-priority, high-cost potential prospects.

We start by visiting their profile on day one, and that’s how we show up in their notification center. Then we send them a connection request—typically, a blank one, and it works like a charm for us.

After a few days, we send the very first email that is personalized, and in this case, you can use personalized video to make it even more appealing. As shown on the slide, one channel follows the other, and we definitely have a good mix of channels in our outbound cadence.

Heidi: Amazing! Continuing with your LinkedIn example, once they’ve connected with you on LinkedIn, you can send a video, either via Gmail or Outlook. Besides these, using Hippo Video, you can also send an active GIF through InMail. Maybe because some of your prospects are more active on LinkedIn than they are checking their inboxes, which is precisely why you want to have a good mix.

One-to-one Vs. Mass video personalization

Heidi: Vlad, what do you think of reaching out to SMB versus enterprise prospects? How much does it make a difference in terms of touchpoints? 

Vald: Of course! It definitely makes a difference. When we talk about SMBs and enterprises, we take into account the most important metric, average contract value. For example, if your average contract value is like $5K, maybe $2K less than $10K, then we can have an outbound cadence with fewer steps. So you can probably send more emails, plus maybe personalized videos, in the middle of your sequence.

Heidi: Absolutely! You can probably use one-to-many personalized videos with variables such as first name and company name for SMBs. However, when it comes to enterprise, you definitely have fewer prospects and fewer accounts, and you have to be more creative in order to reach these decision makers, and you have to go through every possible channel.

Why video-first sales engagement matters

Heidi: Today, close to 59% of decision-makers and executives prefer to receive information about your products and services via video. What do you think about videos, Vlad? I understand that it can be challenging at first. So yeah, tell us about your first video experience.

Vald: I guess my video sales journey started back in 2017 or 2018. I recorded my first video, and it was awful. But, never mind, I had sent it, and I don’t remember what happened next.

But it’s now one of our primary outbound channels at Reply, not just for sales sequences but also for other purposes such as use cases and so on.

Heidi: I totally agree with you, Vald! And once you have gotten the hang of it, it becomes like a walk in the park. Plus, technology has evolved a lot too—not just in terms of ease of usage but also with regard to how you can use it.

For example, with Hippo Video’s Video Workflows, you can personalize your prospect’s video with their own LinkedIn profile or website in the background. And, if I were your prospect, and if I saw myself on someone else’s video in the backdrop, I’d probably click on that to figure out what this person was doing with me in the back, and you’d successfully get my attention.

How to use Hippo Video + Reply

Vald: Once you’ve set your sequence on the Reply platform and have your template ready, you just have to record a video, copy the link with the thumbnail, and insert it in the placeholders, and boom, it’s ready.

The best thing to do is sort of think about who you’re going after this week and finalize the videos that you might want to create and which ones you want to repurpose from your library.. And then, quickly personalize them with the merge fields from your CRM.

Other than the outreach use case, account handoff videos, pre-meeting videos, lead nurturing, and so on, these are a few other use cases where videos can be used to add a personalized touch, reduce no-shows, and keep your prospects warm.

Heidi: Yeah! And I’d like to add some best practices. First, utilize your space. You don’t want to be too close to the camera or  use your hands if you’re calling out. Second, keep your videos between 30 seconds and one minute. Third, use our teleprompter feature to look comfortable on screen and practice with videos by sharing them with your team members.Watch the complete replay of the webinar, “Video-first sales engagement in 2023”, here.