Karthi Mariappan on Mastering Video Prospecting in the GenAI Era

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Wonderful, Wonderful. So before I let you begin, I will do a quick introduction of yours so people should know what you have done and where your energy and all your creativity comes from. I think people should know that, and then I will leave you to the session, Okay?

Karthi Mariappan S    

Sure.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

Karthi is a seasoned product strategist with over 23 years of experience. He’s the CEO of Hippo Video. They’re our partners for this event. Thank you, Karthi. His dynamic career includes A transformative tenure at Zoho where he led the development of products like Zoho Recruit, Zoho People, and Op Manager into multi-million dollar successes. Karthi’s expertise in market identification and alternative marketing channels has been pivotal in these achievements renowned for scaling teams effectively. He emphasizes mentorship and team growth, blending strategic leadership with a passion for nurturing talent.

At Hippo Video, Karthi continues to innovate in the video customer experience sector, driving both product excellence and team development. In his session today, Karthi will elaborate on how to get ahead of the curve in prospecting, leveraging how GenAI is redefining the video landscape and its impact on your selling strategies. Over to you, Karthi. I’ll be back at the end of your session to do some questions and answer.

Karthi Mariappan S   

Sure, thanks Subhanjan and thanks everyone for joining this session. I’m glad that I’m able to share our thoughts on our experiences we had with our customers and the transition that is really happening in this prospecting market segment per southeast. So glad, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

So I’ll get started with a quick intro about who Hippo Video is, right, or what Hippo Video is. So Hippo Video is an interactive video customer experience platform. We enable businesses across functions to engage and communicate with interactive videos. So the interactive video is of two components, One is the interactivity part, dropping some components for interaction, it could be a form branching or it could be a calculator. The second part is the personalization aspect of it. So how do you personalize the outreach, how do you engage with them with the data that they are known about or the contacts with it. So that is what we have been doing, and our organization is in the business for almost 7 and a half years, and from the beginning, we have been focusing only on the video check enabling businesses, right, from small businesses to enterprises globally. And we are a global team sitting across the US, Abu Dhabi as well as in India.

And we have been on a growth path in enabling these businesses by including interactive videos. So today we are going to talk about mastering video prospecting in the GenAI era, right? So mastering prospecting versus GenAI is kind of an oxymoron, right. The GenAI itself is able to understand on its own what to be told, how to be iterated on the process, how do you include your personalized messages like the chat GPT has changed the world around right? So mastering prospecting with generic so how does it coexist right. So when you talk about videos, I’ll start helping you understand what it is. I’m new to this luck. I’m sorry.

So the key part to understand is how well the videos have been adopted in the ecosystem, not just in the B2C right? You have Tik Toks of the world you have the YouTube shots of the world where people consuming information in the B2C world but that has already percolated into the B2B segment and for a good reason that of course the old saying says right thousand words is equal to 1 picture and thousand pictures is equal to 1 video. So that still says good.

So videos have been a very engaging medium able to transform the information that you are trying to do in a very easy and engaging way. And there have been a lot of data points, not just from a single source, but across it could be Cisco, it could be HubSpot. Talking about how videos have been very engaging in the communication aspect of it, right? Be it like how executives are taking the decision after watching a video, how long they have been watching. All of these point to one important thing, that video is inevitable in your B2B interaction. You cannot stay away from it. Whether you include 100 % of your interaction or 20 % of your interaction, that depends on your business, geography, and the type of customers you’re reaching out to. It all varies.

But the key point to understanding these videos are here to stay as an important aspect of better communication and engagement and the data also point to that. Now how does any organization generally include videos in their journey, right? I said the customer experience. So the customer experience starts from your above the line interaction to the below the line interaction into the funnel. Once they convert, how do you actually onboard them? All of these are the journey and customer takes and we have seen many customers include videos across these customer journeys, be it in your acquisition, which is your top of the funnel engagement. How do you embed videos on your site? Or it could be embedding a form on a video site or sending out video campaigns. There are many more examples in which videos have calculated that stage and engagement. That is the topic for today where we talk about how do you engage once someone understands what you offer, how you offer or help them understand how you are different. All of those things are where the engagement comes into picture, then comes conversion.

We have seen people converting case studies, converting white papers into videos for better engagement. So across the funnel, we have seen videos explode for a good reason and we have seen many enterprises as well, any kind of businesses in different verticals, not just restricting to high tech or real estate. It’s across the segments. In fact, we have a data point we had 120 types of customer bases across industries that use our product, right. So that’s the key here. So the businesses have understood that you need to start including videos in your customer journey. As I mentioned again before, it may not be 100 %, but it should be part of it whether you do it in the first stage of the engagement or the second step of the engagement, that is all dependent. So it could be a case-by-case scenario, we have to understand that. 

But the overall thesis is videos have been part of this customer journey and when you come to prospecting, right, what really changed today, right, going from 23 to 24 not much of change has happened between 23 and 24 the system is still wobbly.

People are re looking at how they actually engage with their prospect. How do they actually do the prospecting for many good many different reasons right? It could be your budget constraint, doing less with more, sorry doing more with less. So all of those come into an important play.

How do you leverage your existing tools in better engagement and prospecting? And one of the key aspects is videos being included in this engagement and prospecting sector. So we have seen people use videos as a welcome message or it could be a LinkedIn message that they say hi, this is Karthi from Hippo video. I’ve reached out for this reason or someone holding a placard saying with the rain written on it and trying to engage. Those are all good openers, right? Those are all very good openers and.

But is that enough in this newly changed world? No, because there are as a, as a as a part of prospecting, right. Two things we have to understand. One, to get people’s attention right you have to stand out. Get the attention, make them here to your messages it could be email, it could be video, it could be audio messages, or it could be LinkedIn reach out. Whatever it is right, you have to stand out and help them get that attention and listen to your message. So that’s the first part.

The second most important part is about educating the problem, the pain point versus solution. You could take any methodologies, right you could take a challenge in mythology or method. There are so many methodologies you can take, but still it’s all about educating your customers, helping them understand what value you are providing in helping them solve their pain points and make a better world for them, right defining the ROI. The second aspect is the most important aspect.

So we have seen people use videos in the openers all along, right? And even our customers also do that. But more and more now we see it’s all about educating as well so how do you educate better? That is where videos are coming in the bigger play today. So you don’t restrict videos just to say hi welcome versus how do you educate your products and services can you include your marketing video with the opener from the SDR or your A or how do you send out a contract where people talk about the different aspects that you’re trying to include or it could be about the differentiation you see in the market, how the people have changed gears, how do you pitch that in all of those videos has become an important aspect of included in these education aspects, right.

So how this GenAI is helping this video in both these angles getting the attention and also getting into this education aspect. So if you take in our case we have provided a lot of templates for people to get that attention. One of the best examples is when I create a video and I’m reaching out to Subhanjan. Can I bring in the website of Subhanjan’s pitch dot link or can I bring in the LinkedIn page of Subhanjan that gets that attention. So yes, you can do that fully automated with people’s videos.

Now there are other templates as well like bringing in the personalization points that you have entered into your HubSpot or sales law, automatically picking those things into the video and sending it across. Now all along what we have seen is people are still, I would say hesitant to create videos for very different reasons, right? One could be, hey, how do I show myself on the video that’s the basic reason we have seen or I don’t have the time to create a lot more videos or I don’t see how do I create videos at scale for everyone, right?

There are different reasons in which people are hesitant to create videos. That is what we solve through GenAI. So here you could upload your picture, or you could upload 10 seconds to 30 seconds of your video actions into the product where it picks it up, the GenAI picks it up, understands your emotions, your lip syncs, all of those. Then you feed it with a script, it creates a video with these templates as the background or foreground personalization aspect of it all at scale.

So you could do it for a hundred prospects versus a thousand prospects now there comes this question hey, is it not very artificial? No. That is where you ought to limit how you use this GenAI. Can you introduce it just for 10 seconds? 30 seconds? Get their attention and move on with the regular engagement aspect of it. That is what we suggest our customers don’t rely fully on GenAI; it cannot replace humans. Human interaction is always on the top.

Now, how do you balance your GenAI versus your human interaction? So it could be top of the funnel engagement if you try to create a lot more GenAI videos with 30 seconds of engagement. Then once they enter the funnel, you can create very personalized videos. Here again, you can use GenAI to pick those personalization points, put it at the right scenarios and send it across. So that is what we call the AI avatars.

And I will show a couple of examples at the end of this session because I have to share the screen, so I’m on the PDF mode, so I’ll share those examples as well. Now is this enough? As I mentioned right, getting attention is 1, getting that opener is 1, but the most important aspect is also following it up with education content. How do you help them understand your value, props and services?

That is where the new technology with chat GPT, with your video AI, with your audio, voice, cloning, all of these have come together in transforming your content into videos. To give you an example, you have a pitch presentation which talks a 2-minute intro about your product services at a high level right? Now can you record it yourself by sitting across the system and talking about it again and again for every different prospect, prospect? That’s really cumbersome.

So here what we have done is you input the PPT or a PDF or it could be an article. It just converts into a video automatically with your AI avatar being into that you can call it digital twins right? So I’ve seen people using it as digital twin. So if they say Karthi Mariappan digital twin, so that also allays some fear in the minds of the prospects, right? So once you get that, we create that video with your content, with your air and thought walking you through that pitch and delivering greater value. So that is one aspect of it. 

The second important aspect of it is a holistic picture, right. I’m not here to sell one particular feature that could be a support system that I have to pitch to them. That could be the onboarding system, I have to pitch to them that I’ve been very differentiated or it could be the pricing or it could be the geographies that I serve. All of these needs to be brought into this engagement.

That is where we have brought in what we call it as custom templates. So you can create your own custom templates, we call it as interactive pages where you can add multiple videos, multiple PDFs or PPTS into the system and scale it up. So here if you look back, right, GenAI has actually transformed, helped people who have the inhibition to create videos to people who have to be very creative with what goes inside the video, right.

So that inhibition has gone and you can be very creative and that is what prospecting is all about, not just with our product. Any product you take that adopts GenAI, that is where the humans play a bigger role. The first level of onion peeling is done by the GenAI. But how do you make it very creative, the content that goes inside. So can I personalize it for every single prospect at scale? Yes. That is what the GenAI is going to allow you.

So when we talk about mastering prospecting, right, that is what I said, mastering prospecting versus GenAI is kind of an oxymoron or very contradictory. GenAI itself is able to scale things up. Now how do you master prospecting? That is where the content comes into a bigger play. So more and more we have seen people focusing on content that goes inside the video that goes inside your email.

Now what is that personalization I should bring in? What is going to resonate with my prospect is it could be very simple as we both studied at the same college or if we are living in the same area versus new tech both of you are following versus the market change and how they have adopted as an organization. All of these are talking points and engaging points helping them understand and be creative in your engagement. That is what JNI is allowing you to scale.

So that is what I would call Mastering Prospectus, mastering the content that you want to deliver. And GenAI allows you to create videos at a larger scale. So those are the 2 important things I thought I’ll help you understand before I show you the examples so I will share my screen. I hope everyone is able to see my screen. Yes, are you able to see my screen? Any thumbs up or it will help.

So this is 1 typical pitching right? This is our product manager. He has just recorded some 10 seconds of actions and we have inputted an audio script that is being reflected automatically. You could input any kind of script. So here you see this person is still able to reflect the humanized aspects of it, though it’s AI because he’s able to bring that context into the system.

So he’s going to talk about how the personalization pitching is being introduced into the script. So this is where the personalization aspect at scale with GenAI is going to be helping you. Now you can scale this up.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

We’re not able to see the screen so oh, I just thought , I’ll just mention it to you. We’re not able to see it.

Karthi Mariappan S    

Ok, I’m not sure how to share my screen.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

So from the bottom.

Karthi Mariappan S    

Yeah.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Present to the audience and share the screen then it’s pretty much like a tab or window or entire screen.
Karthi Mariappan S   

Yeah, are you able to see it now?

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Yeah, yeah we can see it now.

Karthi Mariappan S   

Sorry, sorry about that.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

No problem.

Karthi Mariappan S   

This system is new to me, so.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

No problem. 

(Video Playing)

Hi, Jason and John. Hope you’re having a great day. So this is an avatar video of…

Karthi Mariappan S    

So here he has just recorded 10 seconds of the actions and we are able to loop it based on the pitch that he’s delivering. So the creativity comes in, the content that goes out. Now how do you scale this for attention? We have some templates like this where you can bring in the LinkedIn page of the prospect or it could be the website of the prospect.

Get that attention because this becomes a zip thumbnail inside your email or in your LinkedIn. So people are naturally attracted to click on this and look at these videos. So the idea to reiterate here is be creative in your content. Be creative in your personalization and the scaling of creating videos delivering the GenAI is able to help you much better overcoming these inhibitions and barriers. So I will stop here and I’ll have.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Okay, oh, this was great. I wish we had time to look at some more samples, so if you decide to share some links, I can share it with the people who are attending. So they can actually get a sense of what it looks like.

Karthi, I have a couple of quick questions from you. One is, I mean we have collected questions beforehand, so I’ll first put one of those. This is from a gentleman called Apurv Jain. He says how successful has been the use of video across lead generation qualification, opening conversations and closing any data is available. Would you have any information?

Karthi Mariappan S    

Yeah so I’ll pick the opening conversation which we call it as engagement, right that has been the important aspect of prospecting. How do you engage with them, Vector, how do you help them open the doors and make a conversation with you. So that range from 3X to 5X increase wherever we have deployed and people are able to send videos, we have seen in 3X to 5X increase in the engagement aspects of it.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

There’s the next question here. This is from Eric. He’s here, so I’ll just show you. This is a message from Eric Reynolds. So when embedding a Hippo script into an email message, what keeps the email server from marking the message as spam because of the added script. How do you handle that?

Karthi Mariappan S    

So two things happen. We have been training our domains for a long period of time so that also helps. But the biggest thing is except for exchanges where sometimes it blocks the URL that is embedded, rest of the time for larger enterprises as well. Now they allow these URLs being embedded into the system with the jib thumbnail.

In some outlook cases or exchange cases, we have seen that is being blocked so in such cases we added small links that say click here to watch the video or enable this images that’s one time for that particular domain and it gets enabled. So that’s what we have seen over the seven years that our open rates have been consistently increasing.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Okay, this is another one. This is again part of questions we have collected and I think this is basically something everybody asks that when you are creating avatars, when you are creating the models, when you are trying to scale that, obviously it is doing something with the voice, with the face, etcetera. Is it good enough for people to figure out that this is actually a sort of a clever replacement of the names that used to be replaced by mail servers in the past?

Karthi Mariappan S    

Yeah, that’s a very good question because that is what everybody is also worried about, right. Is that saturation going to happen? So this is where I would say two things, right. Don’t overuse GenAI, especially materials. So I, as I mentioned during the course, keep it very short, less than 30 seconds so that it gets the message across and people are able to appreciate it. The second most important thing is being creative in your content, right?

You need not show your face. So here we have two types: you can create yourself as an avatar or you can use an existing avatar. Now in case you’re using your own avatar, we also allow you to use your own audio. Now part of the video can be with your avatar video on it, but the rest of it could be audio running behind. So that is what helps people listen to you and make it engaging. The third most important thing now is that we have seen some customers using it very deliberately and saying hey, this is a digital twin, so people don’t feel very offended, right? So people also respect other people’s time. So if the message, if the personalization, if the content is right, then people are willing to take that one step forward. So that’s what I would say here.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Right, a quick follow up question from Eric. Which third party email applications does Hippo Video work with?

Karthi Mariappan S    

So we work with all the third party applications, be it on your email service like Outlook and Gmail, all of this or it could be single or it could be engagement platforms like sales, outreach, Hubspot, all of these platforms as well. So we have a wide level of engagement in this.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Okay, great so this was a very insightful session, Karthi i think see, the objective is that people get an overview of what they need to go and dig and we are i mean one of the things that I want to tell everybody is attending is that we have collected resources from all the speakers in terms of what they look at or what they would recommend for people to continue to actually spend time to understand includes books and links and videos and people and so on.

And at the end of this event early next week, we’ll share a comprehensive document with all of you who have attended and who have signed up. This is not a silver bullet. I mean, as I say many times, there is no silver bullet. We all wish there is one, but there is none. This is actually to open your mind to what you are missing out by not leveraging video. Karthi, you are not there when I was doing my opening remarks that of the three hundred fifty odd people three hundred sixty-one people who are registered, I had sent out a request to everybody record a video and send it to us wow what one person used it and right there like you said, what is the why is it that we know video works? Video is better than just sending out mail. Visual is better than non visual. We understand all that logic. Yet we do not want to just click a link, record a test video all you have to do, ask a question it’s no big deal. Nobody, no, nobody’s going to judge you for that. But we didn’t do that and I wanted to share it with the audience because it’s us. It’s me and you who are part of this.

Karthi, thank you very much for joining us and I’m delighted that you could make it despite your movement and so many other things going on and we will continue to talk and continue to engage. Thank you so much.

Karthi Mariappan S   

Yes, thank you Subhanjan and Pitchlink for this opportunity and thanks for the people who are attending. I’ll be happy to answer any questions offline as well. I’ll also share these resources and links that you could make use of. Thank you. Have a nice day.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

We’ll be back with the next session in a minute.

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