There’s always room in any organization for better alignment between marketing and sales. Videos happen to make it incredibly easy to create a more unified outbound message.

While your marketing team might be responsible for producing your creative video campaigns, it’s important that you are sharing them and making the most out of the assets as you guide your sales leads through the funnel.

So how do you leverage video assets for better opportunity creation? At our company, we’ve found it’s very valuable to use automation, such as Salesforce workflows, to maximize the usefulness of video content. Keep reading for tips on how you can do the same.

Set up workflows to trigger outreach

We track our website activity and when we see that people are actively on our blog or viewing our videos, we go ahead and call them up, or send over a quick email. Moreover, we use a simple Salesforce workflow (which can be set up by an admin) to notify sales reps when someone has watched over a certain amount of video content (indicating high interest). With this trigger in place, a salesperson will receive an email or task about the video being watched and knows to follow up pronto with a highly engaged lead.

But isn’t immediate follow up a bit creepy?

In our experience potential customers love when we engage with them right away. By striking up a conversation with your leads as soon as they express a qualified amount of interest (i.e. watching over 75% of your videos, or a large volume of video content in a short time), you engage with them when you are top of mind. While they are on your website, many will welcome answers to questions, and you can gain a great sense of their unique use case for your product or service. 

Why engage right away?

According to research regarding lead response management, it’s best to follow up with leads when they’re hot. The difference can be a matter of minutes. As an infographic published in the Harvard Business Review shows, sales reps who followed up with leads in five minutes (rather than ten) had a whopping 900% increase in contact rates.

Imagine the effect of following up with leads who have just watched a highly persuasive video on your site. Perhaps they’ve seen an entire product tour and it led them to sign up for more info, or to register for your blog updates. A call to these leads within the five minutes they’ve entered their contact details in a lead gen form can be the difference between a deal and a missed opportunity.

Tracking attention span and viewership

With a video marketing platform, you can track attention span rates for each of your videos and push this data into your Salesforce instance. This is especially helpful as you’ll know how long your lead has expressed dedicated interest for, and thereby, how interested they really are. Additionally, once you know which videos they’ve watched on your site (also tracked directly in Salesforce), you’ll have the context for striking up a meaningful conversation (i.e. “Hey, I noticed that you work for XYZ company and, based on working with others in your industry, you might be interested in product X” (specifically mentioning the product highlighted in the videos they watched).

Overall, Salesforce automation is a killer tool to increase your pipeline. When used to alert you of new opportunities based on who’s engaging with your video marketing content, it can optimize your ROI on marketing spend. Give it a go and, as always, if you have questions I’m happy to answer them below.

About the Author

Michael Litt is the CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a video marketing platform helping marketers measure the impact of their video content. Thought leader, surfer, and serial entrepreneur, Michael is passionate about content marketing and changing the way we engage and purchase with video. Chat with Michael on Twitter or LinkedIn to learn more.

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