Imagine the traditional Learning and Development (L&D) programs as a dusty library, filled with towering shelves of text(y) training manuals. Though it’s as dependable as gravity for learners to seek information, it is not something that inspires them to keep learning as a continuous activity.

Imagine an AI-powered video tool like a futuristic librarian who, with an AI-magic wand, transforms scripts into stunning videos, data into engaging stories, and complex topics into multiple, easily digestible microvideos. Sounds impossible?

Today, we have many text to video platforms that make creating personalized, scalable, and engaging training videos as effortless as writing a video script. No more green screens, expensive studio setups, and editing expertise — just brilliant ideas and a dash of AI magic.

This is the dawn of a new era in L&D, where learning becomes an interactive journey tailored to each individual’s needs and preferences. Let’s explore how this will transform the once-static L&D landscape into a vibrant, dynamic ecosystem for growth and development.

The Current State of L&D: Challenges and Limitations

L&D departments today operate in a complex and rapidly evolving landscape, facing a multitude of challenges that hinder their ability to deliver effective training and development programs.

Creating Engaging Content

A primary hurdle for L&D teams today is creating content that resonates with a diverse workforce. Because catering to different learning styles, generational preferences, and cultural nuances requires a deep understanding of the audience, which is often difficult to achieve. And churning out video content that ticks all the boxes is a resource-intensive task.

Scaling Content

Scaling content to meet the needs of employees in various roles and geographic locations is another major obstacle. Developing tailored learning experiences for different departments, job levels, and regions requires substantial resources and expertise. Moreover, the shift towards flexible work arrangements and the need for platform-agnostic content has intensified the need for versatile learning solutions, putting L&D teams under increased strain.

Video Content Production

Video learning has become increasingly popular among learners. However, producing high-quality videos is resource-intensive. On average, producing one hour of e-learning video takes about 130 hours and costs approximately around $2200, which is a significant investment for many organizations (Source). Additionally, the technical expertise required for video editing, production, and distribution can be a bottleneck for usually compact L&D teams.

Measuring Impact

Demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of L&D initiatives remains a persistent challenge. Quantifying the impact of training on business outcomes is crucial for securing budgets and support. However, traditional metrics like completion rates and satisfaction surveys may not provide a complete picture of the impact of training programs.

Addressing Skill Gaps and Filling Them

Identifying and addressing critical skill gaps within the organization is an ongoing challenge. Plus, rapid evolution of technology necessitates continuous upskilling of L&D professionals to leverage emerging tools and platforms effectively. Following traditional video creation methods L&D would feel like walking on a hamster wheel, but getting nowhere.

Why do You Need AI Video Tools in L&D

The Forgetting Curve, a phenomenon studied since 1885, highlights our tendency to rapidly lose learned information. Within a week, learners often retain only 10% of the initial content. To counteract this, effective learning strategies must prioritize information retention.

Videos offer a compelling solution. Their visual and auditory components engage multiple senses, enhancing memory and comprehension. AI-powered video platforms or tools further streamline the video creation process, making it easier to produce engaging content.

Below is a memory pyramid that shows why you need videos in L&D:

The pyramid clearly demonstrates that videos are far more effective for long-term retention. By incorporating videos into your L&D programs, you can significantly boost employee knowledge and skills. 

Here are a few benefits of text-to-video AI that L&D teams can use to meet the diverse needs of their learners and drive business success.

Video Personalization

Personalized content can make learning more engaging and effective, as learners feel seen and understood. And with Text-to-Video AI, creating personalized videos based on individual learner needs, preferences, or learning styles is significantly easier. This way, when content is relevant and tailored to specific needs, learners are more likely to retain information.

Production Scalability

Text-to-Video AI can produce videos at scale, allowing L&D teams to create a large volume of content without significant manual effort. Creating new videos or refreshing the existing ones, all of it can be done quickly, meeting the demands of fast-paced learning environments. AI can ensure a consistent level of quality across all videos, even with increased production volume.

Accessibility

Text-to-Video AI can create videos in multiple languages, voices, and accents, accommodating diverse learners and global workforces. Plus, automatically equipping videos with captions and subtitles makes content accessible to learners with hearing impairments. Additionally, modern AI platforms like Hippo Video are compatible with different devices and systems, enabling employees to learn effortlessly on the go.

Cost and Time

As we’ve seen above, creating video learning content is a resource-intensive task. But AI-powered tools lower overall costs associated with video production by obviating the need for expensive equipment, studios, and professional crews. Moreover, they streamline the entire workflow, from conception to deployment, enabling L&D teams to rapidly churn out training materials, ensuring employees stay up-to-date with the latest information.

Video Content Updatability

AI-powered video generation tools are a boon when it comes to video content updatability. By automating much of the creative process, these tools enable rapid content updates, version control, localization, and scalability, which was once unimaginable. This empowers L&D teams to produce more flexible, adaptable, and updatable videos, especially in areas where frequent and timely changes are essential.

Consistency in Production

L&D videos are produced for a wide variety of topics ranging from employee onboarding to sales training and security compliance — and in large quantities. Given the diversity of subjects, maintaining consistent branding and messaging across all training videos is crucial. Text-to-Video tools help ensure a uniform tone, look, and feel, enhancing the overall learning experience and creating a cohesive, professional training environment.

Localized Content for Diversified Workforce

By tailoring training materials to specific cultural contexts and preferences, you can ensure that learners from diverse backgrounds can relate to and understand the content. This not only improves communication but also fosters a more inclusive and engaging learning environment. Additionally, localizing content helps you reach a global audience and expand the reach of your training programs.

In-depth Analytics for Informed Decision-making

A video provides a close-up look into your learners’ minds. Metrics like total views, unique viewers, average watch time, and more help to gauge overall video popularity and engagement. Heatmaps and CTRs help to identify moments of interest and disengagement within videos. By analyzing completion rates and quiz scores, you see how well learners retain information. These data points in different combinations and permutations help L&D teams to tailor learning paths, measure ROI, and identify hotspots of training programs.

The Future Landscape L&D: A Hippo Video Perspective

Hippo Video’s Text-to-Video platform offers a promising future for L&D content. By combining human expertise with AI capabilities, these AI tools can create engaging, personalized, and scalable training materials that meet the evolving needs of learners. However, besides embracing this technological advancement, it is crucial to prioritize ethical considerations to drive positive outcomes in learning and development.

Powerful Duo of Human + AI

Hippo Video’s ability to generate lifelike videos from text is a testament to the synergy between human creativity and AI technology. While humans provide the content and context, AI handles the technical aspects of video production, such as lip-syncing, facial expressions, and voice modulation. This collaboration allows for the creation of engaging and personalized content at scale.

Progress-based Suggestions

One of the key advantages of AI-powered L&D platforms is their ability to tailor content delivery to individual learner preferences and progress. By tracking learner behavior and performance, these platforms can suggest relevant content, ensuring that learners stay engaged and motivated. This personalized approach can also help organizations identify knowledge gaps and provide targeted interventions.

Interactivity

Text-to-video tools can enhance learner engagement by incorporating interactive elements into training content. For example, quizzes and polls seamlessly integrated into videos provide opportunities for learners to test their understanding and apply their knowledge. This interactive approach can also make learning more enjoyable and effective.

Preferred Form of Learning for Gen Zs

Gen Z, immersed in a diet of visual content, has a strong preference for video learning. A Pew Research Center study underscores this inclination, revealing that 95% of Gen Z individuals believe technology enhances their learning. Text-to-video tools, adept at creating visually engaging and dynamic content, are well-suited to cater to this demographic’s preferences of learning style.

Ethical AI Considerations

As with any AI-powered technology, ethical considerations are paramount. Organizations must ensure that text-to-video tools are used responsibly and in compliance with relevant regulations. This includes adherence to data privacy standards such as GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISOC. By prioritizing ethical AI practices, organizations can build trust with learners and maintain a positive reputation.

L&D Use Cases with Text to Video AI

Compliance Training Videos

AI tools can quickly generate videos for various compliance topics, such as anti-harassment, health and safety, and more. Hippo Video’s interactive elements can help you incorporate quizzes, scenarios, and simulations into compliance videos to enhance learner engagement and retention.

New Employee Onboarding Videos

Create personalized welcome videos for new hires, introducing them to the company culture, team members, and expectations. Automate the creation of videos explaining company policies, procedures, and systems. Incorporate interactive elements, such as clickable hotspots, to guide new hires through complex processes.

Performance Review Videos

Performance Review videos can provide personalized and constructive feedback to employees. These videos can highlight strengths, areas for improvement, and specific recommendations. Additionally, AI can assist in creating performance goal-setting videos, outlining individual objectives and strategies. Furthermore, AI-powered tools can generate recognition and reward videos, celebrating employee achievements and fostering a positive work environment.

Security and Compliance Videos

AI-generated videos can create engaging training materials on cybersecurity, phishing prevention, and data protection. For example, a video could simulate a phishing attack, demonstrating how to identify and avoid malicious emails. AI can also be used to develop videos for emergency preparedness drills and incident response procedures.

Customer Service Training Videos

Videos with realistic customer service scenarios can help customer service agents develop empathy, problem-solving skills, and effective communication. From routine inquiries to complex complaints, AI-generated videos can effectively explain product features, benefits, and troubleshooting tips. By equipping agents with accurate and helpful information, these videos contribute significantly to providing exceptional customer service.

Conclusion

The global AI video generation market is poised for explosive growth. According to Grand View Research, the market size is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 19.7% from 2024 to 2030.

As technology continues to advance, AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible, revolutionizing the way we create and consume visual content. By embracing AI video generation, L&D teams can save time and resources, enhance creativity, improve learner engagement rates, and stay equipped with current skills and trends.

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of Text to Video AI in your L&D efforts? Start your journey today by signing up for a free trial, or contacting our team.

The post The Future of L&D with AI Video Tools appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

Benefits of Hippo Video’s Text to Video AI

According to findings from a survey conducted by Academy Ocean, businesses that employ AI for training purposes are experiencing significant advantages like a 20.41% reduction in time spent, an 18.87% increase in productivity and cost-efficiency, and a 15.30% enhancement in personalized learning paths. Hippo Video takes this a step further by offering:

Enhanced engagement and retention

Videos with captivating visuals and interactive elements boost learner engagement and retention. Hippo Video’s Text-to-Video technology seamlessly transforms text into dynamic videos, making complex concepts understandable and facilitating learning and knowledge retention.

Accessibility

Studies have shown that inclusive training programs can lead to a 30% increase in overall employee productivity. Which means accessibility is paramount in today’s diverse learning environments. Hippo Video’s automated captioning and multilingual capabilities ensure that training content is accessible to all learners.

Cost-effectiveness

Conventional video production processes demand a lot of time and resources. However, Hippo Video simplifies the video creation process through its intuitive platform and automation capabilities, substantially reducing costs and the need for specialized expertise. As a result, organizations can optimize resource allocation and enhance their video production for learning and development purposes.

Customization and flexibility

Hippo Video offers unparalleled customization options, allowing organizations to tailor L & D content to specific audiences and learning objectives. Plus, the efficient, quick, and DIY video production mechanism makes tweaking and updating videos in the future effortless. 

Scalability

With text-to-video technology, it’s easier to scale video production to meet increasing demand. Whether it’s creating multiple videos for different platforms or translating content into multiple languages, Hippo Video’s automation capabilities streamline the process.

Interactivity and assessments

Hippo Video facilities incorporate interactive elements, such as quizzes and simulations, to reinforce learning and measure progress. Research has shown that interactive training methods can lead to a 20% improvement in skill acquisition.

Creating training videos with Text to Video AI

Hippo Video’s user-friendly interface makes creating L & D videos a breeze. From recording and editing to customization and sharing, it streamlines every aspect of the video creation journey. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Crafting the script

Studies have shown that organizations can save up to 60% of scriptwriting time by leveraging AI technologies. Employ Hippo Video’s Gen AI-powered Script Generator tool to create compelling scripts for your explainer videos, instructional videos, training series, and more quickly and efficiently.

AI Video creation

Upload your script to Hippo Video’s platform and watch as it transforms into a polished, professional-quality video in minutes. Choose from our library of avatars and voices and get high-quality, lifelike videos featuring AI presenters effortlessly within minutes.

Personalization

Personalized learning experiences can lead to a 45% increase in knowledge retention. With Hippo Video, you can personalize your own video avatar by uploading the required media files. Our advanced algorithms ensure seamless audio-visual sync for precise output. Plus, tailor training videos with interactive elements to enhance learner engagement.

Conclusion

As organizations navigate the ever-changing landscape of training and development, Hippo Video offers a beacon of innovation and efficiency in video creation. By harnessing the power of AI-powered Text-to-Video technology, organizations can create engaging, accessible, and cost-effective training content that drives real results. Join the revolution today and experience the future of Learning & Development with Hippo Video.

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The Software as a Service (SaaS) industry has undergone a transformative journey over the last decade. Once a budding sector, it has now blossomed into a vast ecosystem teeming with innovative solutions across diverse categories. As businesses worldwide turned their focus towards digital transformation, the demand for SaaS solutions skyrocketed, with startups and established players alike releasing a plethora of products to address a myriad of challenges faced by their customers.

Central to this evolution is the project management category. Amidst the clutter of tools and platforms, Atlassian has distinguished itself as a luminary, having carved out a niche with its powerful suite of tools like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Over the years, Atlassian’s commitment to facilitating seamless collaboration and streamlining workflows has enabled it to gain a sizable market share and an enviable reputation.

Parallelly, in the realm of communication tools, Loom emerged in 2015 with a promise to redefine how professionals connect. Offering a novel approach to communication, Loom combined the immediacy of video messaging with the convenience of asynchronous communication, making interactions more personal and efficient. The platform’s unique value proposition quickly garnered attention, allowing Loom to amass a dedicated user base and establish itself as a formidable player in the SaaS space.

Atlassian + Loom

The convergence of these two giants’ paths, as evidenced by Atlassian’s recent acquisition of Loom, brings forth a fascinating chapter in the SaaS narrative, one that underscores the sector’s dynamic nature and the relentless pursuit of innovation.

Loom, with its focus on enhancing communication for internal teams via video messaging, has undoubtedly found a fitting home within Atlassian’s suite. Especially for software developers using Jira, the integration of Loom’s video tools offers a more interactive way to communicate about bugs, code feedback, and other software development concerns.

Hippo Video: Where Video Communication Scales Seamlessly

While Loom is a powerhouse for internal communications, Hippo Video’s capabilities stretch even further, serving both internal teams and those interacting directly with customers. Hippo Video presents itself as a unique offering in the video market with its AI-powered capabilities and diverse use cases for customer-facing teams of all sizes. For those who have been using Loom, or even those considering Loom specifically for external communications, here’s a deeper dive into why Hippo Video might be worth your attention.

Leading the way with category-first features

Ready-to-Use Templates: Time is of the essence in today’s fast-paced world. With a library of pre-built templates tailored for diverse scenarios, Hippo Video ensures you’re never starting from scratch. This accelerates video creation, ensuring you can communicate effectively without unique delay.

AI-Powered Personalization: At its core, Hippo Video uses AI to help businesses connect more intimately with their audience. Personalized videos can lead to deeper engagement, ensuring that your message resonates with each individual viewer.

AI Avatar by Hippo Video

Pioneering Generative AI Technology: As one of the early adopters of Generative AI technology in the video tool segment, Hippo Video offers groundbreaking features like the AI Script Generator, AI Editor, and AI Avatars.

AI Script Generator: Unsure about scripting your video or trying to figure out how to respond to an irate customer? Simply provide some basic prompts, and Hippo Video will generate a script for you. This not only makes video creation simpler but also ensures the content remains engaging.

AI Editor: Video editing can often be a cumbersome process, but with Hippo Video’s AI Editor, it’s as simple as editing a document. The tool transcribes your video into text, allowing you to edit it seamlessly. Want to remove those unnecessary “ums” and “ahs”? Just a click, and they’re gone!

AI Avatar: For times when an instant video is needed, but you’re not camera-ready, Hippo Video’s AI Avatar comes to the rescue. Choose from a range of digital presenters, input your script, pick a voice, and have a polished video ready in mere minutes. 

Empowering all customer-facing teams with video

Hippo Video’s wide array of features and AI tools make it an invaluable asset for businesses, seamlessly catering to diverse teams and their specific needs.

Sales: Hippo Video’s personalized videos boost prospecting and lead nurturing, making the outreach more memorable and engaging.

Customer Support: With Hippo Video, the team can easily create knowledge base videos and product tutorials, simplifying complex topics and improving customer understanding.

Customer Success: From onboarding new clients to sharing product updates or quarterly reviews, Hippo Video ensures that the Success Team communicates effectively, enhancing client relations.

L&D:  Training becomes more dynamic and digestible with Hippo Video, allowing the Learning and Development Team to produce content that resonates with its audience.

Product Marketing: The platform empowers the marketing team to create clear and compelling explainer videos, ensuring products are presented in the best light.

Sales Enablement: With Hippo Video, sales training becomes more interactive and valuable, enabling teams to grasp concepts faster and apply them in real-world scenarios.

Try Hippo Video for Free

Conclusion

In summation, while Loom offers robust solutions for internal team communications for those looking to expand their video capabilities externally, Hippo Video brings an array of innovative tools to the table. Its AI-driven features, coupled with ease of use, make it a compelling choice for businesses aiming to elevate their video communication strategy.

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Despite the slow adoption of digital technologies, Sales is emerging as the leading adopter of generative AI. AI-backed tools and systems are on their way to becoming every sales professional’s digital assistants.

Today’s business landscape is customer-centric, and this makes customer engagement the cornerstone of success. Engaging potential customers with personalized experiences has become a selling practice that no salesperson can overlook. Generative AI, with its tectonic capabilities, promises to help sales professionals achieve their sales targets with remarkable productivity and success rates.

Sales is a highly variable and people-driven function that generates volumes of data from email trails, phone conversations, video interactions, etc. And this interactive and transactional nature of the function makes it well-suited for generative AI models to learn, connect, and create new opportunities in various permutations and combinations.

This blog explores the potential of generative AI to transform the future of sales engagement.

Enhancing sales content creation

Salespeople constantly strive to create content that can hook their prospects and keep them engaged with their products. Generative AI tools help them automate content creation for emails, contextual follow-ups, proposals, video scripts, sales pitches, FQAs, etc. Apart from this, it also aids in inspiring creativity and bringing fresh perspectives to their sales processes. With every passing day, we are witnessing amazing possibilities for content creation born from human creativity and AI assistance.

For instance, Hippo Video offers a number of video personalization capabilities that can transform your video creation journey. From tailored text overlays on video to generating sophisticated personalized videos, our AI capabilities help you deliver bespoke-like video content to a massive audience with minimal effort.

That said, these smart tools also help businesses cater to their global audience with localized content and expand their reach. By using specific AI models, businesses can generate localized versions of their content—at scale—and explore uncharted territories that were forbidden due to linguistic barriers.

Personalizing user interactions

Personalization has emerged as a fundamental pillar in any sales process, and generative AI acts as a catalyst in helping salespeople do it at scale with efficiency. Based on prospect preferences, past interactions, and user behavior, these AI models help salespeople create or curate user-specific experiences that can unlock maximum conversion potential and forge stronger relationships.

Systems powered by generative AI have strong lead scoring and prioritization capabilities. Therefore, based on buying behavior and engagement levels, salespeople can identify and categorize their high-intent prospects from the exhaustive list and focus their efforts on prospects that are most likely to convert. This data-driven approach helps them maximize conversion efficiency, sales outcomes, and productivity.

In the context of video selling, AI-powered video analytics tracks customer interactions with video content, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. This data enables sales teams to optimize their video content and sales strategies, delivering more engaging and impactful videos to potential customers.

Facilitating conversational selling

Conversational selling aims to build strong relationships with prospects by driving meaningful discussions, addressing their concerns, and moving them towards a buying decision. Generative AI plays a pivotal role in facilitating this method by empowering natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Through AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants, prospects can engage in real-time conversations, receive prompt responses to their inquiries, and get guidance throughout the buying process.

These AI-led interactions are not only efficient but also highly personalized. The sales systems have the capacity to analyze the prospect’s communication style and customize their responses accordingly. These automated systems are available for prospects at the click of a button 24/7, which significantly enhances customer engagement, delivers immediate support, and accelerates the overall sales process.

Improving sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is crucial for businesses to make better-informed decisions, optimize operations, and stay ahead of the competition. Unlike traditional sales processes, modern sales cycles have many structured and unstructured datasets to be analyzed to arrive at accurate sales forecasts. Plus, the agility to adapt to changing market conditions makes sales forecasting all the more tedious.

But generative AI offers sophisticated and accurate forecasting capabilities that can understand and interpret existing patterns, generate new (relative) datasets, and model complex relations with precision. Also, its ability to learn the typical behavior of sales data and detect anomalies helps businesses respond to unexpected events quickly.

Is AI a productivity tool or a potential substitute for salespeople?

“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”

And this stands true for the way in which AI has changed the world at large. Generative AI is ushering in a new era of customer engagement in B2B businesses. 

By leveraging this innovative technology, companies can streamline content creation, deliver hyper-personalized experiences, foster meaningful conversations with prospects, and gain valuable insights for sales forecasting. If you’re looking for a cutting-edge AI-powered video platform that can level up your sales engagement, then talk to our experts to see how you can leverage this aspect of generative AI into your business growth.

The post The Rise of Generative AI in Sales: Transforming Customer Engagement appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

Buying patterns have indeed evolved, and according to Gartner, modern buyers spend an average of 15% of the buying cycle time reconciling different information sources, often from the same supplier. However, emerging sales technology like Digital Sales Rooms helps you minimize this unproductive time and facilitates presenting a seamless experience to your prospects right from the first encounter and shortens the deal cycle.

It unifies all the required collaterals in one location to move the deal forward, making it convenient for all the decision-makers to collaborate and make an informed purchase decision. Plus, it also helps in creating a self-service buying experience that instills a sense of control and confidence in the buyers throughout the deal.

Digital Sales Rooms can help to:

• Simplify the buyer evaluation process through a centralized buying resource hub.
• Delight modern buyers with a branded and one-to-one buyer experience.
• Deploy the power of videos to personalize messages and provide context for assets.
• Establish a secured virtual environment for successful deal collaboration.
• Help in the consensus-building process to gain buy-in from all the stakeholders.
• Mitigate buyer concerns actively and increase the frequency of communication.
• Track buyer engagement in real time and prioritize follow-ups individually.

Get started on creating a Digital Sales Room

Creating a Digital Sales Room with Hippo Video is easy. Follow this four-step process to initiate the setup and ‘Drive Sales Results’ faster than ever.

1. Create and Customize your Sales Room

The first step towards producing a seamless buying experience is securing a digital or virtual space to create it. With Hippo Video, you can create Digital Sales Rooms in minutes—you simply have to start by naming the room. For example, you can name the room based on your collaboration, i.e., [Customer’s Company Name] X [Your Company Name].

Next, personalize it by adding their company logo, set access permissions, provide a short description explaining the purpose of the sales room, add the Table of Contents to give a brief overview of each of the resource sections, and lastly, add CTAs.

Quick Note: The Table of Contents, along with providing an organized overview of the salesroom’s structure, includes hyperlinks, allowing viewers to click on a section’s title and navigate directly to the corresponding section.

2. Include Documents and Resources

Once you’ve created the sales room and customized it to your prospect’s brand, it’s time to add documents or resources tailored to their business needs. These resources can include case studies, use cases, product presentations, onboarding plans, security and compliance documents, support contracts, and more—anything that could provide stakeholders with the context of every moving step before and after the closure. Using Hippo Video’s easy drag-and-drop mechanism, you can effortlessly upload resources from your devices or cloud storage drives to the respective sections.

Quick Tip: Before uploading the documents to the Digital Sales Room, make sure to name them appropriately so the buyers can identify them and also have context for each of the documents.

3. Add Video Assets

Modern buying experiences are incomplete without videos. Deploy dynamic storytelling using videos to drive buyer engagement, pass on dense information quickly, and create sticky brand experiences. You can add a variety of videos to support your deal, like an introductory video explaining your competitive advantage to the buyers, short product or feature demos, product roadmaps, video testimonials, proposal walkthroughs, videos from pilots, and more.

With Hippo Video, you can easily upload videos from your device or account library or directly record a new one from the Digital Sales Room at the click of a button and upload it.

Quick Tip: Transform your talking head videos into attention magnets by incorporating your prospect’s website as the video background.

4. Share your Sales Room with the Prospective Team

Once your Digital Sales Room is put together, it’s time to share it with the relevant stakeholders. Hippo Video facilitates easy sharing by generating the link and pasting it into emails or other sales-facing platforms. This way, anyone with the link can enter the room, have access to all of its content, and interact with you.

Quick Tip: Before sharing the link with prospects, check our “Require Email To View” feature to have visibility on the new additions in the decision-making team.

Bonus Step

Continuously keep updating the content of the room based on the progression of the deal to maintain its relevance to the buyer’s journey. Track the engagement levels of the buying team with different content pieces and tailor your follow-ups accordingly. Plus, don’t forget to add the learnings to your forthcoming Digital Sales Room experiences.

Digital Sales Room Use Cases

Digital Sales Rooms are primarily utilized by companies as sales channels for seamless buyer-seller collaboration. But this centralized and personalized approach can also be employed by other teams throughout the customer journey. For instance, a customer success team can utilize a Digital Sales Room to share a detailed onboarding plan for implementing a customer’s purchase, while an account management team can use a Digital Sales Room to provide updates to the stakeholder team associated with an account.

Here are a few B2B business use cases showing how to employ Digital Sales Rooms for your team’s success.

Digital Sales Room for Buyer Engagement

Digital Sales Rooms is one of the emerging sales technologies that has generated great enthusiasm within the sales community.  It helps to create a seamless buyer engagement plan to drive successful sales outcomes. Alongside unifying the entire buying process—from research to decision-making—it helps in establishing a process of unanimous consensus among the buying team.

Here is how you can use Digital Sales Rooms in your sales processes:

⚈ Organize and customize the deal room: Log into your Hippo Video account and set up the Digital Sales Room. Customize it to reflect your branding and create a professional and engaging environment for your buyers. Structure it in a logical and intuitive manner, arranging the documents, presentations, videos, and other resources in easily navigable sections. Use clear and concise titles and descriptions to help buyers quickly find the information they need.

⚈ Personalize the buyer experience: Add prospect company’s branding elements and share resources specific to their business needs. Plus, create and add personalized videos explaining your understanding of their company and the value you can provide.

⚈ Upload relevant content: Update the Digital Sales Room with new and relevant content that showcases the value of your products or services. This can include case studies, testimonials, product brochures, pricing and security information, and industry reports. Ensure that the content is easily accessible and presented in a visually appealing format.

⚈ Enable collaboration and interaction: Once the Digital Sales Room is ready, share it with your prospects. Use its collaboration tools to foster engagement and interaction with the buying team—allowing them to ask questions, provide feedback, and have meaningful conversations with you and your team.

⚈ Track buyer engagement: Leverage analytics and tracking features to monitor buyer activity, such as document views, time spent on specific content pieces, and interactions. This data can give you valuable insights into buyer preferences and help you tailor your engagement strategy accordingly.

⚈ Follow up and nurture leads: Use the Digital Sales Room as a foundation for ongoing communication with your buyers. Based on their interactions and engagement, follow up with personalized messages or meeting requests. Continuously nurture leads and guide them through the buyer’s journey.

⚈ Gather feedback and iterate: Request feedback from your buyers and understand what worked well and what could be improved. Use this feedback to refine and iterate your approach, optimizing the buyer engagement plan over time.

Digital Sales Room for Post-sale Engagement

Customer Success Managers can leverage a Digital Sales Room to streamline the onboarding process—provide a central repository of resources, foster collaboration, and ensure access control—for a seamless customer experience. But before proceeding, make sure you’ve got all the necessary documents like user manuals, training videos, Help Documents, FAQs, templates, or any other relevant content, readily available.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that:

⚈ Organize and customize the deal room: Set up the Digital Sales Room with a clear and organized structure. Create separate sections for different topics or stages of the onboarding process. For example, you could have sections for training and tutorial videos, user guides, frequently asked questions, and more. Tailor it with your company’s logo, color scheme, and other design elements to create a cohesive and branded experience for customers.

⚈ Upload onboarding materials: Now start uploading the collected onboarding materials into the appropriate sections in the deal room. Ensure that the documents are well-organized and easily accessible.

⚈ Implement access control: Configure the access control settings to grant appropriate access levels to different stakeholders to prevent unauthorized modifications. For example, provide read-only access to customers, while granting editing rights to internal team members.

⚈ Communicate and collaborate with customers: Share the Digital Sales Room link with your customers and explain its purpose and benefits, highlighting how it will streamline their onboarding experience. Enable the collaboration features of the Digital Sales Room to encourage customers to leave comments, ask questions, or provide feedback directly within the platform.

⚈ Track customer progress: Monitor customer activity within the sales room to understand their engagement and progress. Check if they are accessing the required materials and if they are facing any challenges. This will help you proactively assist them and address any issues that arise.

⚈ Gather feedback and iterate: Encourage customers to provide feedback on the onboarding process and the effectiveness of the Digital Sales Room. Collect their suggestions for improvement and iterate on the onboarding plan accordingly. Continuously refine and enhance the deal room based on customer insights.

Digital Sales Rooms for Other Teams

Likewise, Digital Sales Rooms can be leveraged by other business teams in their functional workflows to streamline their collaboration. Based on their functional area, they can upload videos, documents, or other resources to refine their strategies, optimize conversions, and ultimately reach their team goals with greater efficacy.

Unleash the power of Digital Sales Rooms with Hippo Video

Embracing change can be challenging, yet adopting it in its early stages has opportunities. Hippo Video makes it easier for you to adopt this emerging technology, Digital Sales Room, to empower you to ‘Drive Sales Results’ that you desire.

Using Digital Sales Room, sales teams can streamline their outreach process and collaborate with multiple stakeholders at once. They can engage and educate prospects, track engagement, qualify leads faster, and shorten sales cycles.

So, get started with Hippo Video’s Digital Sales Rooms to unlock the potential of seamless collaboration and set yourself up for sales success.

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Our speakers, Heidi Sopczak Quaschnick (RVP of NA sales, Hippo Video) and Vlad Oleksiienko (Sales Leader, Reply), will show us the finer points of building a strong sales cadence and how to use personalized videos in sales and master this piece of your sales engagement game in this webinar.

Make your sales cadence inclusive 

Heidi: When you’re prospecting, you never know who you’re going to get on the phone with or what their preferences are going to be. As a result, it’s a good idea to include a variety of multimedia in your outbound communications to ensure that the person on the other end receives your content—your pitch—in the manner in which they prefer to learn about your products and services.

Gartner has a standardized report on how you should be engaging your prospects. And, they agree, a good mix ensures that you are going to get more leads, start more conversations by having a variety of touchpoints—chat, video, email, a cold call, LinkedIn, and more. Vlad, we’d like to know what your existing sales cadences look like—do you have a variety or do you just stick to a particular flow within your outbound?

Vald: It depends on your style, whether it’s aggressive or more polite. We stick to a more polite version, I would say. Our sequence lasts for 60 days, which is almost two months, and is email-heavy, focusing on high-priority, high-cost potential prospects.

We start by visiting their profile on day one, and that’s how we show up in their notification center. Then we send them a connection request—typically, a blank one, and it works like a charm for us.

After a few days, we send the very first email that is personalized, and in this case, you can use personalized video to make it even more appealing. As shown on the slide, one channel follows the other, and we definitely have a good mix of channels in our outbound cadence.

Heidi: Amazing! Continuing with your LinkedIn example, once they’ve connected with you on LinkedIn, you can send a video, either via Gmail or Outlook. Besides these, using Hippo Video, you can also send an active GIF through InMail. Maybe because some of your prospects are more active on LinkedIn than they are checking their inboxes, which is precisely why you want to have a good mix.

One-to-one Vs. Mass video personalization 

Heidi: Vlad, what do you think of reaching out to SMB versus enterprise prospects? How much does it make a difference in terms of touchpoints? 

Vald: Of course! It definitely makes a difference. When we talk about SMBs and enterprises, we take into account the most important metric, average contract value. For example, if your average contract value is like $5K, maybe $2K less than $10K, then we can have an outbound cadence with fewer steps. So you can probably send more emails, plus maybe personalized videos, in the middle of your sequence.

Heidi: Absolutely! You can probably use one-to-many personalized videos with variables such as first name and company name for SMBs. However, when it comes to enterprise, you definitely have fewer prospects and fewer accounts, and you have to be more creative in order to reach these decision makers, and you have to go through every possible channel.

Why video-first sales engagement matters

Heidi: Today, close to 59% of decision-makers and executives prefer to receive information about your products and services via video. What do you think about videos, Vlad? I understand that it can be challenging at first. So yeah, tell us about your first video experience.

Vald: I guess my video sales journey started back in 2017 or 2018. I recorded my first video, and it was awful. But, never mind, I had sent it, and I don’t remember what happened next.

But it’s now one of our primary outbound channels at Reply, not just for sales sequences but also for other purposes such as use cases and so on.

Heidi: I totally agree with you, Vald! And once you have gotten the hang of it, it becomes like a walk in the park. Plus, technology has evolved a lot too—not just in terms of ease of usage but also with regard to how you can use it.

For example, with Hippo Video’s Video Workflows, you can personalize your prospect’s video with their own LinkedIn profile or website in the background. And, if I were your prospect, and if I saw myself on someone else’s video in the backdrop, I’d probably click on that to figure out what this person was doing with me in the back, and you’d successfully get my attention.

How to use Hippo Video + Reply

Vald: Once you’ve set your sequence on the Reply platform and have your template ready, you just have to record a video, copy the link with the thumbnail, and insert it in the placeholders, and boom, it’s ready.

The best thing to do is sort of think about who you’re going after this week and finalize the videos that you might want to create and which ones you want to repurpose from your library.. And then, quickly personalize them with the merge fields from your CRM.

Other than the outreach use case, account handoff videos, pre-meeting videos, lead nurturing, and so on, these are a few other use cases where videos can be used to add a personalized touch, reduce no-shows, and keep your prospects warm.

Heidi: Yeah! And I’d like to add some best practices. First, utilize your space. You don’t want to be too close to the camera or  use your hands if you’re calling out. Second, keep your videos between 30 seconds and one minute. Third, use our teleprompter feature to look comfortable on screen and practice with videos by sharing them with your team members.Watch the complete replay of the webinar, “Video-first sales engagement in 2023”, here.

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According to Salesforce, Companies that personalize their CX across all channels can see 5% – 15% revenue increase.

However, in spite of personalizing their sales efforts, salespeople are stuck with longer sales cycles. The main reasons for these are lack of Intent Evaluation and Contextualization. And, in this webinar, Sales Engagement in 2023: Real, Scalable Personalisation is Here, our speakers, Sandeep TM (Heads Inside Sales at Outplay) and Karthi S Mariappan (Founder and CEO at Hippo Video), are going to unpack the What, the Why, and the How of Real Personalization, and how you can make it a consistent and scalable practice to produce extraordinary sales experiences in 2023 and beyond using technology.

Also, we’ve with us Jessica Baxter (Sales Team Lead, Genesys DX) and Sam Grimley (Global Head of Sales and Account Management, Horizom) as customer panelists, joining to discuss how they’re guiding their teams on their way to personalization.

Why should personalization at scale matter to salespeople

Heidi: We’re gonna focus on the what, why, and how to personalize. Because I know in my past, for my sales motion outreach, it’s always a challenge, right? How much time should I spend?

Sandeep: I’m going to keep it relatable to our audience here. As human beings we’ve evolved quite a bit. For example, with respect to television, almost 10-15 years back we were just watching what was relayed on cable. But today, with the advent of OTT, we’ve so many options and so much personalization going. We have our own preferences, and even when we log into any platform, we see things that are relevant to us.

We are groomed to that level of personalization and expect the same from every aspect of things in life. And, the same applies in sales. Everyone wants to hear something that’s very, very specific and very relatable to their environment.

Karthi: Yeah. I would continue with what Sandeep said. Thanks to this digital-first world, personalization has become a way of life and this makes the context of outreach the key. The contexts are many—either derived from previous interactions, based on the state they are in, etc.—displayed through what you show on the video or via text email. Indeed, personalization has grown very huge into different aspects of engagement and is going to be vital to stand out and connect with your prospects and customers in 2023 and beyond.

Heidi: How are you managing personalization within your organization? 

Jessica: Well, personalization is extremely important. As a customer myself, I aim to do business with people that actually know me. So, we’ve to step away from those ordinary sales experiences to show people that we know them. And, one of the ways that we’ve incorporated this in our sales cycle is by utilizing a lot of the sales features from Hippo Video. My favorite is video sales pages.  So when prospects are viewing our videos, they’re also getting assets personalized to their persona. 

Sam: I think it’s the main piece. If it’s not personal, don’t bother sending it. Because, what’s the end goal of your outreach? It’s to close a deal, to hit a certain revenue number. It’s not to hit a thousand emails today.  For example, If you’re in a bar, if you’re at a conference, do you walk up to someone and say, “Hello, {{first name}}, and then read a script?” No. You look at the surroundings, who they are, who they’re talking to, etc. and use that to make it a personal introduction, make it really relevant. Mail-merge or mass emails are a big red flag for me. 

Forked Road: Quality Vs. Quantity of Personalization

Heidi: What are your thoughts around guiding your own internal sales organization around sending out mass emails or one-to-one? 

Sandeep: Mass emails, in marketing it can be done from a drip campaign perspective, but in sales it’s a no. At Outplay, we tell SDRs or AEs to invest time in researching the prospect and knowing them to personalize the touchpoint—because the competition is high and it reduces the probability of email getting opened. However, a number of conversations also matter to us, which help us understand the market. 

Heidi: Do you guys, sort of guide the SDRs or AEs, on how much time should be spent on researching and doing this personalization?

Karthi: Yeah. At Hippo Video it’s intent-based, it’s not like a mass email that’s being sent. There is someone who is diligently working on your account to understand why they are reaching out. What is the purpose? Of course, including video is one part of the story, but how do you humanize that becomes all the more important about personalization? The criteria for this are two—1. What state they are in and 2. What kind of engagement they have with our marketing touchpoints. Because, how we personalize is one aspect, but making the prospect help them understand that there is a human behind this email is another.

Heidi: How do you personalize enterprise as opposed to mid-market? What’s that mix for your team, Jessica?

Jessica: Enterprise solutions, those are the harder people to actually reach. Their inboxes are way full. So, here LinkedIn plays a huge role. We try connecting with them here and send them personalized videos their way.

On the contrary, Mid-markets are comparatively easier on the phone. They fall under kind-of 1:Many segments, this where I’m anxious to see how that humanized AI feature comes into place. Because we still want it to feel personal. You know, we still want them to know that we are caring and we are giving the actual time, and we’re still gonna treat you just like every other customer. 

Also, one thing I emphasize on is videos. I believe our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than it does text. Though people are nervous about using it initially, it’s the best way.

Karthi:  One small tip here. Though people are nervous to create a video and share it, it helps your prospect understand that you’ve taken that additional effort to reach out to them. You don’t have to be professional, but be authentic in connecting with them.

How to successfully personalize at scale

Heidi: Real personalization in sales engagement, is it possible? Are there any other platforms or tools that your teams are using to get to the nitty-gritty detail? Karthi, Sandeep. Any thoughts about this? 

Sandeep: Personalization happens at different levels. We don’t only just reach out to only the VPs or the CROs, but also to people on the ground doing the job. And, those ground level conversations, helps us in understanding what’s working and what’s not. And serves as great context to personalized messages to someone at the management level, which resonates.

Apart from this, we also use platforms like sales intelligence platforms, Whatsapp groups, LinkedIn channels, etc. where discussions are happening and prospects are sharing information. And, we leverage those and reach out to them via those mediums.

Heidi: So, Karthi, how do we personalize at scale so that our message resonates, but doesn’t look like it’s mail-merged?

Karthi: There are many ways to personalize. One could be through interactive videos, where you ask the prospect regarding their burning issues by giving them options to choose. And, based on what they choose, you get a context of their problem, which is a great data point to design your outreach. Scalable, yet personalized.

The other way could be to scale your video efforts through Humanize AI. Here AI creates a perfect audio-video sync of your videos and creates different versions of the same video with tweaks and helps you scale your video efforts effortlessly.

Make personalization more personal in 2023

Heidi: So to what extent can people look forward to personalizing messages in 2023 for their sales motions?

Sandeep: I think personalization will be all over the place. But what will come out as a winner is the quality of research that you’ve done, and how you put that into personalization will make a difference as to how you would stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Sam: A hundred percent. I mean, it was when your video email first came out, you could send anything and you were completely different from the rest of the market.

Jessica: It’s definitely gonna be a quality-over-quantity year in 2023, I think. I know one of the things that we’re personally working on is kind of a story storytelling piece, but using video, and also walking customers through their own customer journey using video.

Karthi: So for me, do the right research, and bring the context. And to top it all, by humanizing your messages with videos—put a face to your name. So that’s going to be the best part of the personalization too.

Personalization is becoming pervasive. The best time to take action is now. Watch the complete webinar here.

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Which means, despite having a perfect sales page with an ideal mix of features—a pleasant theme, compelling headline, persuasive copy, fitting offer, and enticing images—the probability of conversion is low. Then how do you get your prospects past the CTA button?

The solution is personalization plus interaction. And this is exactly why you need to have personalized video sales pages to energize your outreach efforts. Videos pack an emotional punch and humanize communication. They help to connect with your prospects better and increase your conversion rate.

Why Video Sales Pages?

Eliminate uncertainty and establish trust

The present sales environment is extremely noisy, and prospects have tons of emails or sales pages soliciting their attention. Hence, they have all the reasons to ignore it—they don’t know who you are, what you do, and what your outreach is about. However, this can be undone by adding a small webcam video on the sales page to warm them up, diffuse the uncertainty, and quickly establish trust.

Share more, fast

According to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. So, if not videos, then imagine how many static sales pages you need to create to get that one lead. This is the power of videos. Telling people about your product or service and making them understand what you do is a time-intensive task. But, showing your product in action would be both effective and easy-to-understand.

Reading Vs Watching

Reading is a passive activity and is driven by our mindset at the moment. So chances are, when you reach out to your readers with a long sales page when they are not in a great mood, they might add a pessimistic slant to it. On the contrary, watching videos is an active act that can provide your viewers with an immersive experience, transporting them to your world. So the chances of conversions with a video sales page are much higher than with a static text one.

Keep your calendar free

One of the biggest disadvantages of the virtual/hybrid sales era is fatigue that sets in after a long day of Zoom meetings. However, videos can be a great counter to it. They provide more visual detail and clarity than text messages, without adding another appointment to your calendar. Plus, they give your prospects the liberty to share the video with other stakeholders and also allow them to watch it as many times as they want. So now your schedule is free for more productive tasks. It’s a win for all with videos.

How to craft an effective video sales page?

Know your audience

You need to devise a video sales page that your prospects will want to watch. Though this is a sub-standard piece of advice, it’s the most crucial one and often gets missed when our focus is just on our product and its sales. So, knowing your audience—who they are, their pain points, and what in your offerings is most important for them to know—will help you go a long way.

Plan your content

These are the main components a video sales page would have—the video, supporting documents, headline and content, and a CTA. But, if all these components are not in sync with a singular goal, then it may confuse your audience and lower your chances of conversion. Therefore, align with your audience’s intent and draft your sales page content and video script. Similarly, include all of the information that will prompt your viewers to take the appropriate action.

A/B test the versions

I just cannot emphasize enough the importance of passing any sales asset through a litmus test. Playing with templates, trying different CTAs, etc., and testing them out to see their effectiveness might be an added task. But, in the long run, being aware of these small changes will not only equip you with best-selling techniques but will also help you understand your prospects’ psychology.

Personalize the message

Imagine when your prospect opens your video sales page and views your video—you address them by their name, highlight the challenges they’re facing, and provide the solution that they have been looking for. Don’t you think the chances of them booking a meeting with you would grow manifold? And, if you agree, but think making personalized videos is time consuming, then check out Hippo Video’s ‘Video Automation‘ Feature. It helps you pre-record the demo pitch and quickly stitch it together with personalized intros and outros as required for each of the prospects.

Optimize your video sales page

Since video is the main hero of a video sales page, most optimization would revolve around it. And so, recording an HD-quality video, adding video subtitles, creating enticing thumbnails (preferably GIFs), adding compelling copies, and personalization fields keeps the video aesthetically pleasing as well as helps put across your message better.

Track, follow-up, and repeat

Digital sales provide us with the biggest advantage in analytics. And, with platforms like Hippo Video, you can add tracking codes to your video sales pages and monitor user behavior. It also provides real-time reporting and notifications on the prospects’ engagement with your video. This way, you can follow-up with your prospects and direct them towards the appropriate action without any delay.

Do you have the right tool to do this?

If you’re wondering that making a video sales page is a tough row to hoe, then check out Hippo Video. We have numerous templates that you can use to suit your outreach needs and record 3X response rates. You can record and edit videos, draft sales pages, and send to your prospects directly from the platform. If you need more information on this or any other video engagement needs, then book a quick demo and talk to our experts.

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