Jessica Cohen on Elevate Your Prospecting Game: Crafting Custom Videos to captivate and wow your audience!

Subhanjan Sarkar   

I will quickly do an introduction and then I’ll let you take this forward, Okay.

Jessica Cohen    

Perfect.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

After 10 years as a sales leader in the B2C space, Jessica joined Lead Feeder, now Dealfront, as an account executive. We got to learn the world of SAS. She quickly realized that sales is about one thing first and foremost across industries, human connection. We have had a lot of talk about this today, by the way. He has now been at Lead Feeder for over 2 years and leads the North America sales team where they strive to deliver a personalized experience for all of their prospects. Not only does she love the products they sell, but she’s aligned with the company’s core values, especially in being a remote-first workplace. You’ll often find her traveling the globe, and when she’s not working, she’s outdoors exploring. Jessica lived and worked in over 10 countries and visited over 30 every day. Laws are getting stricter and stricter about how we can connect with our prospects. Things like bans on 3rd party cookies and Google and Yahoo both releasing new rules in 2024 that will make mass email marketing harder and make it nearly impossible to get in front of your buyer.

In our automated world, we feel that the human touch today is even more valuable, and our numbers and statistics of our results agree. During her session, Jessica will talk about how her team spends under 20 minutes a day to send customized videos to their prospects, yielding a 50% response rate. She’s going to show us how we prepare for, record, and send our videos, making sure that they end up in front of our buyer and are actually opened and viewed. Our video, paired with personal touch and a bit of intent data, has yielded results that they have not seen with other outreach approaches. Over to Jessica.

Jessica Cohen    

Thank you so much. What a great introduction. I’m very excited to be here and talk about this with everyone. You know, as mentioned, I have over 10 years of experience in sales, and I started in B2C. I think what’s really important to mention is that I was working in the hospitality industry, working with big hotels and group sales, event sales, things like that where you are customer-facing first and foremost. And it’s really important to make that connection and make someone really comfortable working with you, and that’s how you’re going to get the sale.

And I realized when I entered the world of SAS that there’s no difference. You really need to make that connection. You have to show someone why they should give you their time or time is so valuable. And I think having that background and selling big corporate events and things like that really helped me, and so we heard in my introduction a few different company names. We are Dealfront; we went through a big merger this year, and our product that I work most with is Lead Feeder. You know, bringing with this, when I joined this company and joined this team, one of the things that I bought was a KPI around videos and creating custom videos and sending them out because I knew that we had to have a creative way in getting in front of our customers. So I’ll go through how we do it. It’s crafting custom videos to captivate and wow your audience. It sounds a little like we’re doing magic; maybe there will be some grand show there, but really it’s simple, and we’re not doing anything spectacular. We’re just really being personable and taking a little bit of time to show someone that when we’re reaching out we took the time to learn about them, their business and are going to show why we can help.

So going into why we start sending customized videos, well, the data shows that in the US market over 75% of phone calls from unknown numbers go unanswered. We didn’t need to look up that data; we knew that we were making lots of phone calls, especially in a post-COVID world of people working remotely, and we’re not getting a lot of answers, and we needed to find a way to sell a training call to customers that would override the email spam blocker. So of course, we have a wonderful marketing team at Dealfront; they do a great job with email campaigns, etc, but we really wanted to get in front of that, and then if we can get a trial user, so someone who has an active trial, but if we get them on a training call with us, they convert that deal over 100%, so it’s an insane number. We know how valuable those training calls are, but we’ve got to get the customer to want to talk to us, and we had to find the creative way to do that.

So as said in the intro and if you’ve been here all day, I’m sure this has been mentioned, but Yahoo, Gmail, they’re going to both enforce a spam complaint threshold of 3%. Essentially, I don’t work for either company; I don’t want to speak deeply about what they’re doing, but it’s going to be a lot harder. A lot more emails are going to be blocked or directed to the bulk folder send. So how are we going to circumvent that? How are we going to navigate this world where no one’s answering their phones and our emails are going into spam? We need to customize; we need to make that connection; we cannot rely on our marketing teams and their email campaigns and mass emails anymore. And that’s something that we already know over here.

So I got this question a lot, and I think when I added this as a KPI for my team, something that they had to do. We even do video power hours where we’re sending out videos rather than phone calls. Is it going to consume our time and resources? It sounds like it would take a lot of time to send customized videos. On average, we’re sending about 50 videos per month. We’re very strategic in who we send them to, why we’re sending them so we pick those accounts knowing that our time is valuable as well. We send, so it’s about 2 and a half videos a day. We take about 5 minutes to prep for a video. I think when my team starts, when we have a new member, it takes a little bit longer, but we start to learn really quickly what we need to do to prep, and it doesn’t take much time at all. And if the video is going to be under 2 minutes, we really try to keep a Max on it. We’re looking at 17 and a half minutes of prep recording. It’s not much time at all; we all have 20 minutes in our day. 65% of our videos get viewed. 75% of those lead to a response or what we call in our pipeline a connection. 

So 50 % of videos are getting a response that is better than any of our other outreach tactics that we have seen that customization when that video goes out in an email to someone that they answer us so we’re going to keep doing it over at our company.

So how do we do it? This is the part where I said maybe while captivating your audience, all the magic, it’s actually just really simple. We are all our teams so when I say all teams, we have our STRS, our outbounds, the cold calling, the teams that are really going to grab our customers and then we have our account executives a lot of times working with customers or prospects, sorry, already on trials.

So all the teams go and check our prospects website. If you’re not doing that before reaching out, I feel like you’re doing something wrong. You should really know who they sell to, what they sell and where they sell. We have to know these three things. For my team, it’s in our CRM. They’ll put these notes right in there so I know that they’ve done their research and that we know. You know what they are doing? What company is this? And then for our account executives, when someone is already on a trial, we’re looking at our own product. So what integrations have they set up? What features are they using and what features are they not using?

That does not take a lot of time at all to figure out. I said 5 minutes, I think that would be pretty that that’s giving a lot of extra time to do that research but it’s usually the people, the businesses that we work with have pretty clear websites and we’re able to figure this out really quickly.

And then we record, we’ve realized that there’s some sweet spots with this and so one, we always start with the prospects website as our background so the system that we use to make videos, right we’re sharing a screen our little, you know, video of us are down at the bottom. But we’re going to put their website as our background. It’s as simple as that so that when we put the little GIF in the email that we’re sending out, they see that it’s a custom video this is not another email marketing spam, anything like that we’ve taken the time.

We keep the video under 2 minutes and they can see that right then in there, we usually put that in the email as well so they know that it’s just going to take a little bit of time out of their day to watch what we put together custom for them and then we show just one feature of our product that’s going to benefit this prospect. I think that’s something that we’ve really like honed in on this year and done a lot better from our sales team.

We really love our product. We love what we sell. We think any company that’s B2B will love our products. We get excited about it. A lot of times there’s multiple benefits for both marketing and sales teams to use our product and we want to talk about all of it. But the point of this video is to make that connection and just show that one thing.

Once we get them on the call, we could dive deeper and we can talk about everything, but what is the biggest thing that’s going to show value? And I’m sure everyone can, you know, relate here how many emails you get, how many messages on LinkedIn. And sometimes it’s really annoying when you get one where you’re like, this doesn’t align at all with what we do. This product doesn’t make any sense and you could just tell that they’re going through the numbers and that’s really what we’re trying to avoid here.

So I took a look, some screenshots of my team’s videos so you can see what it looks like when the little chip is there. And I love how each of them does it slightly differently so you can see over here, this is my boy Tony he’s doing a great job he joined our team this year with the company’s background right there.

Harris, she’s been in our company for two years. She doesn’t like having her camera on, and that’s OK. I’ve decided that it doesn’t have to be part of our video that we put out. But she does have a beautiful picture of herself. And she starts it off really large and her video shrinks it down when she’s showing things and I think it still shows that personalization in that touch that she cares about.

And then the one person who does things slightly differently, but I think it’s still customization, It’s great is my man Joe over here. He uses a program with his videos and rather than having the company’s website, he puts the prospects name, he puts click play. Sometimes he’ll put their logo there and he likes to have his first video going out of just I’m not a robot, I’m someone here that you should talk to, This is why and then you have me down at the bottom there again with the prospects website in the background.

This I think 100 % is why we’re getting the open rates that we’re getting because you know that this is a video we made specifically for you and that’s the part that is captivating people as we say in the title.

The other part to pair with our video is a short to the point email that’s really important for us. We found that the more writing the further down our video is in the email, it’s not going to get through to someone. So we try to keep it short, sweet to the point the video is going to show everything we don’t need to put much in the email so I have two examples that I pulled from my sales team here one being from an outbound team for someone that’s not on a trial with us where they did their research.

We saw on LinkedIn that they hired their first SDR and just a simple hey saw you hired your first SDR congrats. How are they keeping track of their pipeline? I made your two-minute video to show you how our SDRS use our tool at Dealfront to prioritize outreach based on their engagement on your website. That’s it, the video there and then a link to book a call.

And then the second one, when someone’s on a trial, this is when we have the capability to know what they’re doing, to have see how they’re using our product and just want to show them how they can use it better. So just as simple as, you know, I noticed you saw the hospitals and healthcare, we know that because we looked at your website.

I went on the account and found 34 companies in that industry on your website. That’s what our product does. I made a short video showing how it did it. Do you have time for a 30 minute chat tomorrow? We can use the time to set up how to get these companies right into your inbox. You know, seeing the customization in the email, the video down below of their website, they’re going to click play and then usually we’ll get a call booked from that because they will now see that they want to learn more.

And so what’s the sweet spot? I always have to remember that we have a little bit of luxury here at Dealfront, our product that we’re using lead feeder by Dealfront because we do what our product does is it is providing a first party intent data so the sweet spot we’ve decided is collecting that intent data so you can uncover businesses looking at your company and what they’re looking at.

So we obviously use our own tool here at Lee Feeders so we’re able to see whether someone’s on a trial or it’s an outbound and we’re trying to reach out and they come back to our website we can actually see what they’re looking at, what part of our products, what blog posts, pairing that with LinkedIn to see, you know, if it’s a marketing director or salesperson, we can really customize our outreach in our video to show them something that really fits what they want because we can see what they’re doing on our website and then we send them that custom video and it’s as simple as booking the call with them and making the sale.

So like I said, I think that it’s not a really big equation, it’s very simple, but the numbers that we’re getting are really impressive and it doesn’t take much time for our team at all. If I’m going to talk about my company and what we do, I do want to offer anyone here if you want to learn a little bit more on how we’re using first party intent data to send out videos that are customized, please add me on LinkedIn, shoot me a note if you do and sign up for a trial i’m happy to extend your trial by one extra week so we offer two weeks free, but I’ll give you a third. But more important than that, I would love to chat with you one-on-one and I can show you a little bit more about it. But thank you. That’s all I have on that and I’m happy to take any questions from there but I hope that you all learned a little bit of something on how we’re finding success with this.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

That was a great session, Jessica.

Jessica Cohen    

Thank You.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

You made it look very simple. I’m sure it’s not that simple I think.

Jessica Cohen    

It is. I don’t know, maybe.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Yeah so I have one question which is typically people have. So there’s a lot of technology now which tracks visitors to the website, right so that’s the core of your, what you’re trying to do. My question is how do you actually link it to the right people so what I’m understanding is that there’s a reverse lookup of the IP addresses and thereby you figure out which companies people are coming from. But how do you know which person to go out to do that connection?

Jessica Cohen    

Yeah, there’s a lot of different ways that we can do it. I think the most important thing is we know our buyer persona so we do know that most likely it is going to be the marketing leader or the sales leader at a company. And based on what they’re looking at on our website, I can very quickly just figure out which one is it based on the blog post or their path throughout our website and then a quick LinkedIn search to figure out that person if it’s an entirely new business. We do also show you the IP location of the visitor so sometimes I could be a little sneaky a company like ours that’s remote first, I’m there was their only employee in Montana so if I would have you ever looked at Montana employees, you would find that it was me very quickly so we can do it that way. And then the other side of it is, I think a lot of people look at tools like lead feeder or other tools that are identifying businesses on your website as a way to find new businesses but I think one of the really powerful things is to keep an eye on your prospects. So if I notice the business is on a website, but it’s someone we’re already talking to, I’ll just make an educated guess that it’s the prospect that is already in our pipeline.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

Okay, where do you see this going? I mean there are people who are trying to actually identify the people who are coming there. So in fact if you’re following there is this company called retention, they’re trying to sort of very vocally openly talk about that. Do you think that is something which will be feasible or will it sort of get mired in some kind of privacy regulation?

Jessica Cohen   

I think we’re going in that direction of being stricter and stricter with privacy laws and regulations you know we are a global company, so we follow GDPR laws and they’re getting stricter over there but as we’re even seeing in the US state by state laws on 1st party cookies and all of that are getting stricter and so I think that although in an ideal world, it’d be great, especially as a salesperson, to know the exact person on my website, get me their phone number, I’m going to give them a call. I think we should all prepare for that not to be a thing and how are you still going to use data of the business on your website to your advantage because I don’t think it’s going to go into a direction of those laws maybe loosening up in the future.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Got it great so before I let you go, I’m going to quickly play Expert View and then would you, if you don’t mind, you need to stop the sharing yeah. Ok, that’s great. So I’ll just run this.’

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