Finding a job is hard. And as Johnny Farquhar, Founder and CEO at PreviewMe can attest, a CV and cover letter simply aren’t enough anymore. Video resumes enable job seekers to put their best foot forward and introduce themselves at the beginning of the recruitment process, hero their soft skills, attitude, and aptitude, and ultimately demonstrate their fit earlier in the process.
Originally designed for job seekers, PreviewMe enables thousands of businesses worldwide to create and share videos to supercharge outreach efforts and stand out from the competition. With more human connections earlier in the sales cycle that drive click-throughs, demos and conversions are through the roof for their clients—and for PreviewMe.
Solving growing pains with sales automation
As the PreviewMe team grew, sales pipeline management became difficult to track. The sales cycle was a clunky and time-consuming manual process where the teams used multiple platforms and disparate processes.
When the team was using Pipedrive for deal management and SendGrid for outreach, communication was disjointed and siloed. “I was sort of bootstrapping my own versions of sales and campaign management,” commented Sarah Worthington, Head of Growth at PreviewMe. “We hadn’t quite found that beautiful harmony where our systems feed each other.” Sarah needed a solution to streamline their team’s efforts and enhance performance with marketing support.
From the advice of an agency they were working with, Sarah and her marketing director looked into ActiveCampaign. “It was a very easy decision to make once we spoke with people inside ActiveCampaign.”
To make the most impact, Sarah and her team dove into creating content to take advantage of automations. “It was a lot of internal process change, but applying them into ActiveCampaign was quite easy once we had the processes all ironed out. It was exciting to leave the multiple systems we were struggling to use and instead streamline under one platform.”
Automating with ActiveCampaign has helped PreviewMe improve its sales cycle and fuel rapid growth through their marketing campaigns. They’ve utilized email and task automations, “and the best part of all: we include our very own PREVIEWS in all ActiveCampaign email campaigns to engage and sell to our customers—win-win!” added Sarah. “We’re using lead scoring to engage with warm leads who have also clicked our videos. Video tells a story much more effectively than any words in a marketing campaign.“
PreviewMe uses its keystone product, Previews, hand-in-hand with its ActiveCampaign automations. “ActiveCampaign is the vehicle that puts us in the inboxes of new prospects, warm leads, and existing customers,” says Sarah. “PreviewMe’s video captures their attention in the email, injecting a visual, human cue that prompts action in a way that words can’t. We’ve used video to introduce ourselves and the product, as well as give product and service updates to our existing customer base.”
Here’s one of PreviewMe’s sales funnel emails:
“Previews are easily shareable with GIF thumbnails within ActiveCampaign emails and have increased CTR by 96% with the inclusion of video,” said Sarah. “Hence our amazing new sales pipeline, supported by ActiveCampaign!”
Measuring results & time saved by automating
“The internal disconnect between sales and marketing has been bridged since using ActiveCampaign. Having processes all under one roof has been game-changing,” commented Sarah.
Marketing automations are speeding up PreviewMe’s sales cycles, providing consistency in communication with contacts and removing human error, resulting in warmer leads, quicker sales cycles, and growing revenue. With onboarding support from ActiveCampaign, PreviewMe has created custom tags to track KPIs critical to their business and sales strategy. Flexibility in tracking has allowed the team to pick up patterns in target audience behavior early to improve results and support their team.
Removing clunky and time-consuming sales cycle management was a huge time saver for the whole team, drastically reducing manual and administrative processes and leaving more time for selling. In addition, PreviewMe now has visibility of the entire pipeline through the ActiveCampaign CRM. Forecasting and monitoring success means deals are accurately tracked and automated tasks prompt swift follow-ups, resulting in faster conversions.
“We have reduced our admin time by more than 50%. Our reps can focus on what they do best rather than being bogged down with emails or task reminders,” said Sarah. “As a Growth Leader, I no longer spend hours checking deal status or tasks across multiple channels. Nothing slips through the cracks anymore, and we have consistent comms going out to potential customers and newly landed clients.”
PreviewMe has increased demo bookings from the first point of engagement when a potential customer engages in campaigns from content that is tailored specifically to their needs. To put it in context, PreviewMe has 2 value propositions for their target market, the B2B buyer:
1. Video-led talent attraction (TA), screening, and onboarding
2. Business development and sales
Being able to polish the narrative for each value proposition, distribute it to a defined group, ensure potential customers are receiving the right content in emails, and track engagement has helped PreviewMe focus their outreach and lift demo numbers. “This is in conjunction with other process changes,” added Sarah.
The value-added customer journey
The PreviewMe customer journey includes different funnels, pipelines, and tagging based on behaviors. For example, when someone books a demo through the website, they are put into funnels that trigger automations with different types of email content. Then, based on the lead scoring, the PreviewMe team can see which contacts engage in the content and which do not. “This gives us a better understanding of what direction we should go next with this customer or prospect.”
Every new customer is captured in an ActiveCampaign account manager funnel and receives regular and relevant communications about the product. This funnel also includes a human touchpoint/visual cue with the help of embedded PreviewMe’s Previews. With this personal approach to the customer journey, PreviewMe has seen churn drop continuously month over month.
Sarah added, “It’s given us back our time. As a small business, we all wear lots of hats. ActiveCampaign has enabled us to set up our systems, so we are not only saving time by automating workflows, but we can also intelligently communicate with our customers so they can give us value-added feedback. We then relay that feedback to the product team and get the product in the right direction. So we have a bit more time to think about our product roadmap and respond to feedback thoughtfully.”
Everything is going in the right direction
The PreviewMe team is a fast-growing startup and a tight-knit team that still wears many hats. But with ActiveCampaign, they’re ready to take the next step to serve larger customers as they continue to scale the company.
“Sales and marketing are feeding each other in a way that’s driving our business growth for the first time with ease,” concluded Sarah. “We have only scratched the surface as a startup, but we have the foundational processes to scale with ActiveCampaign as our sole CRM system.”
If you want to learn more about the platform that PreviewMe uses to generate more leads and close more deals every day, try ActiveCampaign for free starting today.
