Using Video for Disruptive and Quirky Prospecting

What’s Rant & Rave

Rant & Rave provides customer engagement solutions with a difference. Created with the belief that brands and consumers fundamentally want the same thing—to deliver and receive great service—half of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) rely on the Rant & Rave platform to proactively communicate with and gather fast feedback from their customers.

Rant & Rave are also the only customer engagement vendor in the UK to be ISO 27001 accredited, the international standard that describes best practice for an Information Security Management System.

Rant & Rave’s platform provides solutions for customer engagement, frontline engagement, voice of the employee, and candidate experience. It is relied upon by such iconic UK brands as Vodafone, Barclays, Sky, and Fortnum & Mason, as well as global brands including Linde, HomeServe, and Sage.

Standing Out From the Crowd

“Here at Rant & Rave, it’s our mission to shake up the customer experience industry and provide our clients with a disruptive customer engagement model,” says Kirsti Anderson, Rant & Rave’s Brand and Campaign Manager.

“Whilst most voice of the customer vendors stick to traditional, lengthy surveys, innovation is at our core. We want our marketing efforts to emulate this innovative ideal. Just like our name, our campaigns are quirky in nature and designed to appeal to like-minded brands that are ready to take a fresh approach to their customer experience. They help us to stand out from the crowd!

Rant & Rave was looking for a communication method that complemented it’s quirky and disruptive messaging and campaigns. Then, one day, Kirsti received a prospecting message in her inbox. It was a message from a Vidyard business development rep. He had found Kirsti’s details on LinkedIn and sent her a personal video.

“It is always interesting to be on the receiving end of a prospecting message,” says Kirsti. “Normally I delete cold emails. But this caught my eye. I thought to myself, ‘Ohhh this is different. This is novel.’”

Hugely Positive Feedback From Prospects
and a More than 6,000% ROI

“We are very lucky to have such a hardworking and successful business development team,” says Kirsti. “It is safe to say, however, that video has made them more creative and has even more greatly aligned their outreach methods with our disruptive and quirky brand values.”

She explains that as the team often engage with corporate audiences in more traditional industry sectors, there was a risk that prospects would be less receptive to playful messaging. “Our experience since using Vidyard has been quite the opposite,” says Kirsti. “We’re getting hugely positive feedback on our use of video.”

She relates one success story: “We are still early in our journey with video and primarily use it as a campaign element. Recently, we launched a campaign to some of our top prospects, where we sent a direct mailer with a quirky message about the importance of customer feedback. We then used the Vidyard platform to send all the prospects a follow-up video message featuring one of our reps explaining the campaign and why they should talk to us. I recall we sent the direct mailer on a Thursday and pushed the video out on a Friday.

“Within two minutes of receiving the video, we had a message back from a prospect saying. ‘I absolutely love the video.’ We had a meeting with the company booked by Monday and 25 days later, closed a major deal with the account. It was unheard of. The lead didn’t come from a referral. It was someone we had never spoken to before and, based on the closed deal value, I estimate we had a 6,000 percent return on investment.”

Kirsti also relates the story of another rep who was using video to try and land business with a large retailer in the UK. Retail is a particularly tough vertical to crack as prospects are always inundated with sales calls and marketing messages. Says Kirsti, “The rep had this clever idea where she had her dog, Belle, star in her video. She used simple paper messages in between video clips of her dog, to share a message with her prospect that said ‘Hi I’m Belle. I’m your customer. I’d like to have a better way to give you feedback.’ Within 11 minutes of receiving the video message, the rep got a response from the company’s director of operations saying, ‘OK, you caught my attention, let’s talk.’”

Kirsti and her team are now building out some video templates with plans to use the Vidyard platform to do a broader personalized email campaign to prospects. “We see it as a distinctive alternative to cold emailing and cold calling,” says Kirsti. “Video is a far better way to achieve our prospective goals.”

Kirsti offers up three tips for any sales rep or marketer looking to incorporate video into their prospecting campaigns:

• Use animated gifs rather than thumbnails to grab a prospect’s initial attention.
• Be brave. Don’t shy away from the quirky. Try filming something other than yourself (like Rant & Rave’s rep did with her dog) to really personalize your video for your prospect.
• You’re going to trip up and that’s ok—make it a part of the message. It’s no different than stumbling over your words on a sales call. Being imperfect is part of the charm, so let the human element shine through.