We recently developed a free unmanaged package for Salesforce called the Marketing & Sales Accelerator.
We initially created the package as a way for marketers to manage and optimize existing digital assets and improve website backlinks.
We soon realized the functionality also works well as a sales enablement platform, giving sellers easy ‘find and share’ access to assets — blogs, product pages, customer stories, videos — that they can use to accelerate sales cycles.
Many marketers say their content is under-utilized by salespeople. Many salespeople say they can’t easily find the right content to share with a prospect or customer.
Video content falls into the under-utilized, hard-to-find category.
After testing Salesforce email templates with several video hosting platforms, we found Vidyard to stand out for two reasons.
1. Thumbnail Code
First, it’s easy to embed Vidyard’s thumbnail code — with name and ID merge fields — into a Salesforce email template.
Whether static or animated, the thumbnail selected for a video on the Vidyard platform becomes the thumbnail the recipient sees from a Salesforce-originated email.
<a class="viewedit-link" href="https://share.vidyard.com/watch/{{{Marketing_Content__c.Asset_ID__c}}}?" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="display: block;" target="_blank"><img alt="{{{Marketing_Content__c.Name}}}" src="https://play.vidyard.com/{{{Marketing_Content__c.Asset_ID__c}}}.jpg?email=1&" style="width: 400px;" /></a>⇩
The thumbnail also has a play button overlay, a meaningful visual. We were able to create thumbnails for other video platforms, but they did not include a play button.
2. Minimal License Cost
Second, only one Pro license is needed for the Salesforce sales enablement use case.
Each salesperson can still have their own Vidyard license for 1:1 engagement.
A marketing user can have a separate Vidyard license for hosting 1:many video content for marketing-generated educational and empowerment content. This content may already exist on the organization’s YouTube channel.
YouTube is an excellent platform for video content found through search, but it’s not ideal for salespeople to share due to the lead-in ads.
So, it’s a matter of adding a subset of YouTube content to the marketing’s Vidyard account and making the videos easily findable and sharable in Salesforce.
In addition, the marketing department gets aggregate per video data, such as video play rate and average percentage watched. In turn, this data can be shared with the sales team.