This Company Saw Increased Sales with a New B2B Video Marketing Strategy

Glean, a company that provides enterprise search solutions, has found that using video to humanize its team and help make the personal connections that the COVID-19 pandemic has enabled the company to engage with customers and employees in a personal way, when physical meetings are impossible or impractical.

“While the team is still early in its journey with video, the need to use the medium was exaggerated by the pandemic – reducing travel to clients and conferences – which was previously seen as the primary tactic to finding and landing new enterprise clients,” said Dan Fergusson, the company’s director of sales.

“Glean’s account executives, sales development representatives and sales engineers are encouraged to record and share videos with clients throughout the sales cycle to bring the stories or projects to life.”

Video enables the team to have richer engagements with prospective customers and to build strong relationships with existing clients, partners and colleagues, according to Fergsusson. The video strategy is enhanced through a variety of tools, including Vidyard, Loom, Slack & Zoom.

The company initially became familiar with video by using it to engage internal employees – often sharing kudos or celebrations using video in shared channels to build a strong culture Fergusson added.

Glean has found several advantages to using video. The go-to-market team uses it to:

Improve Demand Generation Results

Though Glean uses traditional outbound marketing strategies, including email, messaging, etc., short videos have complemented these efforts by humanizing the outreach to key accounts, according to Ferguson. “It is harder than ever to book time with prospects, due to the amount of noise coming from thousands of SaaS vendors via traditional channels. Video helps us break through.”

Pre-pandemic, there were opportunities to bring client stories to life by revealing them onstage at a big conference, but physical conferences have largely gone away, and even virtual conferences have limited “onstage” opportunities, according to Fergusson.

Related: 2022 Video Trends in Technology Marketing

“Now the opportunity is in using video to humanize our clients and to create an authentic story of our partnership over video or audio. We saw this start to happen organically, with our early clients, sharing their stories on video podcasts like Dev Interrupted’s Engineering Hypergrowth at Grammarly

Accelerate the B2B Sales Cycle

Glean, its customers and prospects have their cameras on for all meetings, Fergusson said.

“This is a drastic change to pre-pandemic, where it was fairly common for clients or prospects to keep their webcams off and to just use audio to interact. This shift to prospects being open to meet virtually over video levels the playing field for remote reps.

“No longer is it necessary for enterprise sales representatives to visit their clients physically — allowing for significant efficiency gains by not having to spend time traveling. Pitches are also all recorded and provided to new sales hires to accelerate their training, instead of waiting to sit in on live calls.”

Product demonstrations are more efficient, too, Fergusson said. Previously, the demonstrations often needed to be conducted multiple times to ensure that all relevant audiences could see the product before initial tests.

“This process of gaining consensus can often take weeks or even months, depending on the scheduling and how many audiences need to see the platform, Ferguson said. Now Glean’s go to market team creates product videos that can be viewed asynchronously by stakeholders unable to attend the centralized demos. An example is a video created to share before launching a pilot.

Successfully Starting New Clients

“Implementation of enterprise software can often be complicated and require hours of consulting or meetings to do correctly,” Fergusson said. Recording complicated setup tasks fast track a company launch. Working asynchronously using video to complete the remaining tasks required to launch has enabled Glean implement its unified search app at clients within one hour.

To launch a pilot, Glean will join a company’s live all-hands meetings to demo the product, train staff on features and instruct users company-wide on how to get the most value from the product, Fergusson said.

“Since it can be difficult to get 100% attendance at a company town hall meeting, these kick off sessions are recorded and sent to employees after the fact. Through an engaging live kick off, Glean is often able to onboard a majority of employees to use the product, but with an asynchronous recording to share, staff can learn to use Glean, even if they missed the meeting.”