Case Study: Kiva Systems Harnesses Video for Lead Qualification

For Kiva Systems, the Woburn, Mass., developer of robotic solutions for distribution and order fulfillment operations, the maxim "seeing is believing" permeates the marketing process. With a technological solution for order picking that deviates from the norm and can seem a little space age, the company knows words and pictures alone do not suffice in the selling process.

"If you wanted to convey an important but incremental innovation, you could compare your technology to another conventional offering. People usually form a picture in their mind when it's something that's quite familiar and essentially an improvement over a well-understood product. But Kiva's technology is not merely an improvement, and so people won't believe our claims at all until they see the robot automation in action," says Mitch Rosenberg, Kiva Systems' vice president of marketing. "Short of flying people to a distribution center, that's often in a remote and hard-to-reach geography, the fastest way to give them that experience is with video over the Internet."

While the B-to-B marketer has been using video to reach prospects for years, its prior method consisted of creating custom DVDs or CDs and mailing them to leads. With the implementation of video-sharing technology from Lexington, Mass.-based Wistia, Kiva Systems has moved this process online and gained immediate benefits.

"With online video, the time lag [between prospect interest and video fulfillment] is very short, the quality of the video is high, there is no incremental cost to sending additional video and there is very little labor, since there's no separate person who has to spend their day replicating video," Rosenberg explains.

But even more valuable is the tracking tools that Kiva Systems' sales force can leverage for additional insight into prospective customers' levels of interest. Rosenberg notes that with the old method of mailing DVDs, the sales team had no idea if the video was "viewed once by a low-level person or seven times up the hierarchy of the decision-making process." Now, sales representatives can see if their leads watched the videos, how many times they watched, which parts of the videos they watched more than once, whether they shared the videos with colleagues and who those people are, and more.

"The most important question to us," notes Rosenberg, "is who viewed [the video] and when. If we send it to a prospect and they never view it, then that's a signal to our sales force that, in fact, it's not time to spend attention on that prospect. Because we have a lot of prospects, choosing which ones to spend time with is a strategic consideration."

By being able to track which parts of a video a prospect watches repeatedly, the sales person can better understand what that prospect's concerns might be and then address them with follow-up communication. Also, it offers insight into what Kiva Systems' advantages are compared to its competition, selling points the representative might want to emphasize during future contact.

From an internal management aspect, the video-sharing technology gives Kiva Systems control over what video gets distributed in the sales process. Since some of its videos display its automation system in place at customers' warehouses, the firm needs to ensure certain videos are not shared with these customers' competitors while still leveraging the footage as widely as possible. Such a strategy could not be implemented on a Web site, so the ability to e-mail specific videos was critical.

The majority of Kiva Systems' marketing videos are delivered via e-mail from the sales team, Rosenberg says, but the company does offer a couple basic, informational videos as well as nearly a dozen more technical, nonclient ones on its site. The latter are used for lead generation and require visitors to share some contact information before they can view any of the videos. These videos also leverage Wistia technology to help Kiva Systems track prospect engagement.

"It's a strategy to not put much video up on the site, because it forces prospects to interact with Kiva's sales team," explains Rosenberg.

While Rosenberg hasn't pinned down any quantitative measures of improvement to sales by implementing Wistia's video-sharing and tracking solution, he's certain it has saved his company money. By not burning and mailing DVDs, he estimates an ROI of well more than a factor of 10 or even 100. And the cost savings, he emphasizes, are the least valuable benefit.

The qualitative rewards include added productivity for the sales team and a more educated prospect base, two aspects that Kiva Systems can see and believe in without mathematical proof.

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