Scaling Sales Meetings with Videos

It is incredibly difficult to gain traction as a new and unknown brand in a blood-red and highly competitive B2B ocean.

In this post, I’ll describe my approach, what I’ve found to work, and how I’ll try to scale it.?

It’s my impression that most B2B SaaS founders dream about building a company based on PLG (product-led growth), meaning you grow with inbound leads (marketing) who self-onboard and self-service with the help of built-in support tools in the product (guides, videos, product tours, etc.).

I have the same dream, but as I suspect many others have learned before me, it’s not quite so simple.?

By now, Herodesk has more than 50 paying customers. A loose estimate is that I’ve given personal demos and onboarded 40 of them, which is ~80%. I want Herodesk to keep growing, but me doing manual demoing and onboarding 80% of the new customers simply doesn’t scale.?

Herodesk’s current marketing strategy

We currently have a four-legged strategy:

Paid advertising

A good friend is helping me manage our paid advertising. I know next to nothing about it, so I’m super grateful that he’s helping me out with keyword analyses, setting up the right ads, bid strategy, follow-up, etc., and everything else needed to run efficient paid advertising.?

We’re currently advertising on Google and Meta.?

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Our website's technical SEO is somewhere between “okay” and “not that bad.” We’re working to improve it.?It's an ongoing process...

On top of that, my paid advertising buddy helped hire a freelance copywriter who’ll start creating great articles related to customer service, comparison pages, and lots of other great content. It’s super important to me not to spam the Internet with even more AI-generated bullshit content but instead to put in the effort to create some great content that gives something to those who read it.?

The purpose is to position ourselves as industry leaders and hopefully attract people to our website who could be future customers.

Organic LinkedIn

I’m much more active on LinkedIn now than ever before. Partly because I love to write and share the journey I’m on… Trying to build a new company from scratch. And partly because I want to position myself as an industry leader, share my knowledge, get feedback and spread the word about what I’m doing and how that can help our customers.?

Outbound sales

At this point, Herodesk has a pretty clear ICP (ideal customer profile): webshops with 2-10 customer service people who serve customers across multiple channels.?

With that knowledge, it is obvious that I should try to reach out to them. I’ve engaged with Mindmil.dk to help me do just that.?

The “Mindmill setup”

Mindmill 's job is to book meetings with leads (potential customers who fit the ICP). I’ll take the meetings and try to close the sale.?

I chose Mindmill for this task due to its 360-degree approach to outbound sales.?

Based on a list of interesting people and companies who I think I can help with Herodesk, Mindmill helps me:

• Reach out to them via LinkedIn.
• If they accept and reply, I try to book a meeting with them if they’re interested.
• We call those not on LinkedIn or do not reply to my messages to ask if they are interested.
• I also use Leadinfo to see who’s visiting our website and might be interested. Then, they are added to the call list.?(This is a great tip for any B2B SaaS, by the way.)
• Those who are not interested right now are offered a seat on an upcoming webinar so that they can learn more later.

This works really well. It’s super important to me that we strive to only reach out to people we really believe we can help, and it’s a great way to “get out there” and talk about our company and what we do without spending insane amounts of money on paid advertising.?

The only problem with this strategy… I have to do a lot of demos, sales meetings, onboarding, etc., where I often tell the same things.?

This leads me to the next step in this process…

Using videos for online demos and scaling presentations

I’ve spent a day in Mindmill’s studio to record professional demo videos of Herodesk. Those are now online at https://herodesk.io/da/demo (the original Danish videos)

It’s a great way to let people see how it works and understand how it might help them on their own time and at their own pace. This won’t replace the sales meetings but will help scale them and make them more flexible. Hopefully, people will have seen these videos before entering a sales meeting with me, so we can go straight to how we can help relieve their customer service pains.

The videos were recorded in Danish (my native language). The whole Herodesk universe is currently available in Danish and English, and as we grow and expand to more countries, it will be localised to every audience and language.

Translating the videos

This section is what made me think: “I should write a post about this”.?

So, I got the raw videos from Mindmill of me speaking Danish with all overlay texts, etc., removed.?

First, I used Heygen.com’s AI engine to translate my voice into English automatically. That tool is mind-blowing! I uploaded the video to their tool and told it which language I speak in it and which language it should output. Then, it used my voice to speak the chosen language and even modified the videos to make the lip movements fit. Mind-blowing!

Finally, I opened the translated videos in iMovie on my Mac, added English texts, etc., and they were ready for the English site.?

Time spent? 2-3 hours in total.?

Imagine the time and cost of doing this just 2 or 3 years ago. Wauw!?

You can see the English results here: https://herodesk.io/en/demo

I must say that I’m quite satisfied with this myself.

When the time comes to make videos in Swedish, Norwegian, German, etc., I’ll simply repeat the process.?

—-?

The original goal was to create a company with only a Growth (marketing) and Product (development) team.?

The reality is that I need sales, onboarding, and support, and I have no problem having these functions as part of the team as long as they serve the company and are executed as efficiently as possible—Fx by using videos to demos and self-onboarding to the extent possible.?