Episode Summary
Daniel sits down with Sherri Schwartz, Head of Marketing at OvationCXM, to talk about how she’s built a video-first marketing strategy from the ground up, and the surprising places video has driven results beyond social media and campaigns.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How Sherri rebranded an entire organization in three months and used video to generate excitement during the transition, not after it.
- Why partnership hype videos can accelerate early-stage relationships and how one landed OvationCXM a showcase spot at IBM’s One Madison office.
- The case for treating video as a content channel, not a one-off project, and how to bake it into your quarterly planning alongside written content.
- How AI is changing buyer behavior: up to 50% of buyers now start their search on LLMs, and what that means for your content and website strategy.
- Where AI falls short in replacing creative video production today, and where it actually helps small marketing teams move faster.
- A practical framework for getting started with video: start at the 50,000-foot view with brand and hype videos, then go levels deeper into product, objections, and thought leadership.
Episode Transcript
Daniel: Today’s guest is Sherri Schwartz. She’s the head of marketing at OvationCXM. Sherri brings more than 17 years of experience in B2B SaaS with a background spanning marketing, revenue, and sales. She’s helped scale teams from the ground up, sharpening positioning and driving growth. So I’m super excited to dig into marketing strategy and how software companies can create stronger video content and a strong brand.
Daniel: Sherri, how are you doing?
Sherri: I am doing well. Thanks for having me.
Daniel: Nice. We’re so glad to have you. I’ve been waiting a long time to actually start talking with people like you, and so I’m glad to have you here. It’s been what, three, four, going on four years of a relationship with SparkPortal. Now I’m happy to be on in chat.
Sherri’s Path from Broadcast Journalism to B2B SaaS
Daniel: For people in our audience that don’t know much about you, tell us a little bit about your journey.
Sherri: I was a broadcast journalism major in college. I knew I was gonna be the next Katie Couric and be a news anchor. I graduated in 2008 when the financial crisis hit, and it was really hard to graduate college and try to find a job. So I actually face planted into sales by accident.
I started my career in sales, selling to the military, selling everything from boots to body armor to underwater robots and mine detectors. Super cool. I was one of the top producing sales reps selling to the Navy for four years. But my husband was relocating and remote wasn’t a thing.
So I said, you know what? Let’s just go into marketing. And that’s when I started my journey in marketing, working for a capital markets firm. I left the financial services organization and then went into financial technology. So I’ve been in technology now since 2015.
Rebranding OvationCXM in 90 Days
Sherri: I’ve now had the opportunity to be the head of marketing at OvationCXM for, oh my goodness, almost four years. It seems I blinked and we hit four. When I came on, the company was named BoomTown. And it was, “Hey, by the way, in three months we would like to try to rebrand this organization.” We were primarily a services organization and built our own SaaS technology, and we wanted to pivot to SaaS.
I was the first hire to really grow a marketing team. So within three months we rebranded the entire organization, all the way from its brand, like the name, to the color choices, to our value proposition, and launched a new website.
The first six months, the team helped bring in a million dollars of new revenue for the business, obviously with a non-existent marketing team in the past. That was major success, I would say. I don’t know if I slept. I think I did. It’s a blur, but what a journey it’s really been.
Daniel: Thank you so much for sharing that story. As you were talking about that, I remember when we first met. When a new marketer hires us and they’re doing a rebrand, they usually wait until the rebrand is done to then start creating content. But I remember with you, I said, “Listen, we can create some stuff. It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry so much about the branding itself. We can still create stuff so that you can actually take advantage of that transition.” You were coming in already a champion of what video could do for a business.
Why Video Became Central to the Strategy
Sherri: Firsthand, I watched our engagement soar on social media from the usage of video on our LinkedIn strategy, or the usage of video to tell the story about why we existed, and how the sales team loved being able to share assets like that, or to be able to utilize the video in our ad strategy.
People like consuming video. It’s easier for me to watch it or listen to it sometimes than pivoting and reading something long. It’s not that I won’t get to the long thing, but I have to go find a little bit more time for that attention. It’s easier for me to consume video.
So we knew we needed to gather excitement. The best way I feel to gather excitement for a product launch, for a company launch, is to create hype videos. I knew that I couldn’t do it with one videographer, but once I found you guys, I knew I could produce as many videos as I wanted, or could handle giving to you, for the cost of one videographer. So it didn’t not make sense for me to partner with an agency, because I had a long list of ideas.
Honestly, our first two years together, we’ve produced over 200 videos a year, each year. And that’s long form, short form. That’s taking an interview and slicing it into 20 bits. It goes on and on for the varieties of different types of content. And it’s been instrumental.
Video has absolutely been instrumental in getting our brand awareness out there. It was one of the best decisions I think we’ve made as a business.
Using Video to Build Partnerships
Daniel: Since we’re already talking about video, let’s go into video for partnerships. You guys have also leveraged video specifically to acquire partnerships. When did you start to notice, “Hey, this could be an opportunity for us”?
Sherri: We have some amazing partnerships. From the financial services large integration side, we have a major partnership with IBM. From our payment side of the house, we have a great partnership right now with a company called ScanSource, and another one with Red Iron.
In both of those instances, our marketing team took liberties of trying to draft up the art of the possible of what these partnerships would look like. While we built some slideware to really launch what we thought the partnership could be, we also accompanied it, in both of those instances, with video.
So we used video to create partnership hype. When these partners from IBM and ScanSource saw these videos, it got them excited and sharing them. So what happened to be a very early stage partnership with tiptoed excitement became great excitement, which then energized the partners to wanna do more, hop on more calls, figure out how we can even create another video.
The fun thing was, once they saw the first video, even in IBM’s instance, it was, “Okay, but can we create this video, and can we create another video?” They loved the video so much that, as they did work at One Madison at their New York office, they wanted to be able to showcase that video at one of their mezzanine levels where some of their financial service banks come in and have meetings, so that while they’re waiting for their meeting, they can interact with partners of IBM.
Our video is now showcasing in the mezzanine level at One Madison. It wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t taken liberties to utilize video as a great way. Many organizations can say, “Okay, yeah, but our partnership is at its infancy stage. It takes a while to figure out what the message is. A few weeks for production. Is that worth it? Is it time spent?” It is amazing time spent. It might not give you fast ROI, but it’s amazing time spent on a relationship builder for a partnership.
Daniel: We have another client that’s very close to Palantir, and for them it makes sense to spend as much time as possible building and showing them that they’re worth Palantir’s time. We’re not saying that you should approach every partnership with massive amounts of effort and resources, but for the ones that matter, video could be a great vehicle.
Why? Because you stand out immediately. It’s a beautiful experience for them. You’re giving them something of value that is way more valuable compared to the rest. They probably have 15 other partnerships, but you are the only one that came in and put them on this pedestal like, “Wow, we can rally behind this thing.”
Sherri: To your point, there’s a variety of different types of partnerships. There could be a partnership where that partner is potentially going to resell or bring you in on joint deals. But you have to still incentivize their sales team to garner interest, because what if that partner is also reselling or co-selling with a variety of other companies? So I am also competing for attention. A partnership hype video is an excellent way to garner the attention of that AE, so that they wanna consider bringing you in on co-deals, where they have a variety of things to sell, but hey, they really remember you. You’re leaving that lasting impression.
But then if there are partners on the other side where this is an actual product integration partnership, where their company does one piece of it and you do another piece of it, bringing that together to tell the whole story of how that would work and the benefit makes it easier for you to sell, easier for them to sell, and easier for that joint customer to also understand.
Bringing Video into Customer Strategy
Sherri: I’d also challenge businesses to consider utilizing it in their customer strategy. We had a customer sign on really quickly with us. They were a customer of ours previously. They moved roles and joined a different bank. Within six months we had a deal signed. It was probably one of our quickest deals because they were already a champion, but they were getting ready to have business kickoff meetings. So we strategically worked with them. We took one of our hype videos and we made it a little bit more bank specific, with their logo on it and some of their partners on it. We made some changes, and then they leveraged that to gather more excitement and enthusiasm at their bank about what they just launched.
If you’re not in a video first strategy, you’re really just kind of in a video here, a video there, a video on social media. You’re missing out on other ways to utilize it for your business’s benefit.
Daniel: I wanted to jump in and say yes, yes, all the time. But for us specifically, it’s often a little bit of a fork in the road in terms of our sales process. We have to let our clients and prospects know, “We’re gonna do this video stuff for you, but it matters and it’s important that you believe in video.” Because if you don’t, you’re gonna go to the comfort zone. You’re gonna check the box, but it’s not really gonna rally people behind excitement, like you said. Whether it is customers, partners, prospects, whatever audience, even your own internal people, it’s not having that effect unless you make it part of how you function as a marketing team.
Once you take that first step, don’t just stop there. For instance, I just recently had a conversation with you about, “Hey, I love some of these B2C videos.”
Sherri: And I think sometimes when you’re selling B2B technology, it can be boring. It’s some screens, it’s some clickables. I don’t wanna take ourselves too seriously. Let’s look at examples of some really great B2C videos, and let’s look at how we can make ours even more fun. Here’s a challenge that’s going on in banks today, and here’s a really fun, easy way to show how we’re gonna solve for it in a much more entertaining way.
Now I’ll be the first to say, is that going to resonate? I don’t know. I’d like to think that I’ve taken lots of liberties and they’ve paid off a little bit. But I’m also not scared to try it.
AI and Marketing: Hype vs. Reality
Daniel: Okay, so let’s move on to AI and marketing. What would you say is the thing to keep in mind in terms of hype versus reality?
Sherri: First things first, I would never sign a one year contract. You need to test, you need to see what’s out there, and you need to see what’s good enough. There is going to be no future not with AI. So we need to adapt and we need to figure out how to best work with it, and how it best works with us.
I do believe the best thing for AI to do today in any organization is the compression of process and workflow. But it has not perfected every facet of marketing yet. For instance, have we considered utilizing AI video? Sure. But what I’ve actually seen is that a lot of the AI video technology today is the kind where you have your own background, you’re doing your own demo, but you have an AI avatar.
I spent all day arguing with a video AI tool. I gave it the very specific five words to use. It was written in English, and what I got back was gibberish.
You’re always asked, is there a way to replace a video agency with a tool? The answer I would find, in some of the creativity aspect, is we’re not there yet.
Daniel: You touched on different points, specifically about AI and video. Video is not a one step thing. It’s multiple roles that are involved to do video well. That creates an additional layer of problem for the AI to really do well in. I think eventually it will get to that point. But by the time it does, the bar is gonna be higher.
How OvationCXM Uses AI
Sherri: Yeah. Look, we are an AI forward organization. We orchestrate operational efficiencies for customer experience and financial services. Those gaps, those silos, those poor handoffs, the utilization of email for task management, the utilization of spreadsheets for your handoffs and tasks. We’re simplifying all of that. But we also utilize AI for chat, for customer and case and information summarizations. We’re looking at, where can we take the chaos of what’s going on in your organization and provide simplicity, provide more efficiencies that are revenue critical? But it’s never to create me as some automated thing that loses myself in the process. We’re intentionally building our AI capabilities to be value adds, to work alongside you, to compress the process, and to solve some of those horrible handoffs that create those silos and frustrations.
When I look at how I utilize it on our marketing team, we’re a small four person team. Where are our gaps? Where are our handoff gaps? What processes are taking longer? Where are we best? Where are we weakest? Let’s utilize it for our weaker points, so that we can maintain a really strong and efficient team.
Daniel: I think to go along with that, in smaller marketing teams, AI becomes a very big help because you’re constrained with time. AI is good at helping you hand off stuff when you’re like, “Hey, I don’t have the time to contextualize this before I hand it off.”
Ranking on AI LLMs vs. Google
Sherri: And it’s been instrumental for us. We have a smaller budget as a team. I can’t compete against large enterprises and their multimillion dollar ad budgets or SEO budgets. But we took big bets two years ago on middle and bottom of funnel content, really understanding and concentrating on how our buyers think about their challenges, what they’re searching for, very persona driven. We wrote content for that. And that’s the way that people search on AI LLMs.
They do not search on AI LLMs the same way they do Google. Google is way more higher level. These LLMs already know that person’s persona, because they talk to it all the time and ask it questions. They just get right to the point: “I have a churn problem in my business. I’m looking for a merchant service solution. What’s out there?”
We are actually ranking higher than some of these large enterprise businesses on AI LLMs, and driving more traffic month over month and year over year from these AI LLMs. Our brand shows up stronger there than when we had a large ad budget or SEO budget. And it’s because we’ve purpose built our content to really work for and with these AI LLMs, because that is how people are searching now.
A year ago, zero people started their search on ChatGPT. Now, up to 50% of buyers start their search there. That doesn’t mean they don’t go to Google, and it doesn’t mean they start in Google and then don’t pivot and go to the LLM. These LLMs can surface the data and even rank and provide a spreadsheet of pros and cons of your business and other businesses. It’s incredible.
Daniel: Yeah. And they didn’t even visit your website. They don’t even know who you are.
How AI Is Changing the Buyer Journey
Daniel: It’s interesting because we heard the same thing starting middle of last year. We were doing video libraries, video resources, things like that for different clients. The people that come in and touch our video resources convert at a way better rate, and those deals are way faster.
The interesting part about this is that people who were not on their ICP list, in the personas list, were actually consuming the video and they were also affecting deals. Now because of AI, people that are not on your radar are actually being part of the buying committee. Also, people are coming in a little sooner than you were expecting. They’re building their perception of you. So by the time they even go to your website, they already have a good idea of what they’re looking for.
So that informs your website strategy too. You can’t just be all high level. They already know about you because they’ve consumed information that ChatGPT gave, and ChatGPT can give some pretty detailed info.
Sherri: So now they’re coming to validate it. Do you have great thought leadership video? Do you have detailed FAQs? Do you have customer testimonials? They’ve consumed enough to say, “Hey, you might be it. Now I’m more middle of funnel in my self-guided discovery. I know about you and I have a problem. You might be it, but I’m still trying to figure it out.”
That informs what you do need to write about. It informs what you do need to visually show. It informs the different other types of content that they need to be able to see, clickable demos for example. Give them the experience to want to validate, so that by the time they do click in and say, “Hey, I wanna go talk to somebody,” they are more likely to respond to your email as well, when you reach back out and say, “Hey, thanks for reaching out, let’s schedule that demo.”
Daniel: Yeah. It creates a better experience for both sides, for your salespeople too, ’cause now they come in more informed about what they don’t want.
A Framework for Video Strategy
Daniel: This makes me think about the amount of work that we’ve done. You and I talked about covering a framework. I wanna pivot to that now. Can you walk us through how you see video working in your strategy?
Sherri: I look at it as very much how you would plan your quarterly goals for your business. It goes exactly as to how you should think about planning for your video strategy.
If I’m looking at written content, for instance, what are the pillars and what are the topics that I need to cover for that month? I would also argue that if you already have time with your content manager and you’re discussing what your content is coming up, if video isn’t already part of that, that’s where you’ve already messed up. Video is a content channel. For anything that you write, why wouldn’t you create a video version of it as well?
I think that you need to create pillars too for each quarter. What is your company’s objective? What’s going on in sales? What deals are almost across the finish line? What deals are early stage? So you can also understand, what are your objections? Because, by the way, why aren’t you creating video based off of objections?
Then what are your content themes? What’s going on with product? So if product’s doing a big release and you wanna amp up from that, why not create a product interview with your head of product on what’s coming with the releases? Why not create a hype video, or even a promo of “something’s brewing,” so that you can put a time clock down to when your product releases?
There’s a variety of different ways to think about it. It’s gotta be part of your content and your revenue strategy every single quarter. You slice and dice it based off of company objective, sales objections or sales deal velocity, and then thought leadership.
If you’re creating anything, anything, think about where video plays in that. I would argue too, the best way sometimes to also do it is just do a 30 minute interview with your subject matter expert. That recording can come into 10 snippets. But maybe he had a really great idea in that discussion that leads to a short form blog, that then can compartmentalize and create a short form video. You don’t know unless you actually just go ahead and get somebody in the room and hit record. It can be a simple Google Meet, you hit record, and you’re just listening in and you have the transcript, and then that launches into everything else that you can do video-wise for it.
I would always compartmentalize those into thought leadership buckets, sales and sales enablement velocity buckets, and then overarching company goals.
Where to Start with Video (First 90 Days)
Daniel: You said compartmentalized, but I look at them as levels of priorities. The top priority is obviously more vague and more only about the business basically. Then as you go down, it gets more tactical, more about what’s going on today.
Where would you say, if a person has new budget, a new role, first 90 days, first six months, they wanna do a rebrand or they may not wanna do a rebrand, but they wanna start using video, where would you start?
Sherri: If you haven’t used video before, and maybe say you’re going through a rebrand, you need to start at the 50,000 foot view. Introduce your company. Have a company intro video. Introduce your product as a hype, gather excitement. I would start at that introductory view of brand awareness.
Who are we? What are we here for, and why does it matter? From there, you can go levels deeper into product specific videos or interviews with subject matter experts. To go levels deeper, you can also learn at that point: what are your common objections? What are the common questions that continually come up? Then go levels deeper into creating video to be able to answer those.
But you have to generate excitement to gather that interest. So I would always start at those overview and hype videos, because they’re 60 seconds or less and they’re easy to entertain as well.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s a great point. Right now we went from doing explainer videos to doing more hype videos. Why? Because it tends to rally people and get more excitement. So instead of doing a regular explainer video, try to see if you can do it in a format that is more energetic. That usually often means maybe not voiceover, maybe a little bit of a higher beat music with text on screen. That usually performs and entertains people better.
Using Video at Events
Sherri: Think about this. Is it in your event strategy? Six months after our rebrand, we were doing a big sponsorship with FinTech Meetup. It was the first time our business was gonna be OvationCXM on a grander stage. Instead of a small booth, we actually took one of the private meeting rooms and built it like a large booth.
So you walked in, you had tables. The old traditional conference room walls? No. We had these pre-branded walls in there. We had a private meeting room, glass in a corner. We also had a big television. On that television we had our hype videos: our overview, and then our new product release on journey orchestration video, on loop.
These videos are, I think, 30 to 45 seconds. Super short, very energetic music, no voiceover. It’s words on screen to capture attention with pop outs of the product. Because think about it, if you are at a booth, people are walking by all the time. They’re not going to be able to gather a large minute and a half to two minutes of a product explainer.
But you will capture their attention with a lot of booms and bangs and large words and your product flying out, so they may have the 30 seconds to stop. That allows you as a sales organization to step forward, introduce yourself, and bring them aside, if they want, a smaller, pop up your laptop, quick demo.
Those are other really creative ways to utilize it. You already have an event strategy. You already have an event budget. But throw that TV on the wall and let that quick ad that’s very engaging capture the attention for you, not just a bunch of sales reps that are like, “Please stop by, please stop by.”
Daniel: That’s great. I’m so glad you brought up events, ’cause that’s really a big aspect of video as well. It’s a good way to repurpose a lot of this content you’re already putting effort in.
Every idea that you gave from how you think through video in this last section, I was like, “Dude, we could do a freaking webinar on each one of those.” Because you and I have done this before. We’ve done the webinar repurposing, we’ve done the interviews, we’ve done the explainers, the hype videos, for promotion, for events, the product announcements. I wish we could do that. Probably we’ll do it in the future.
Closing Thoughts and How to Connect with Sherri
Daniel: I’ve enjoyed this a lot. Thank you so much for coming. Do you have any parting thoughts? Anything that you wanna maybe lead people to go and take action on or learn more about you?
Sherri: Yeah. Look, I love to network. I love to talk through marketing ideas. If anyone in the audience wants to go levels deeper on the framework or where to get started, or even throw spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks, “Hey, what do you think about this?” I’m always reachable via LinkedIn. Would love to strategize and help in any way, because I do believe very much in it and I think it can be very successful for any business.
But sometimes it can be daunting on where to start and how to create the right video, because you may be the one championing it for your organization and trying to get buy-in and make sure your executive team knows it’s a great spend, even if it’s sometimes not the quickest ROI. So I would love to be able to talk at length about that. I can speak for our executive team on this: they love the video. It’s been a game changer. It’s created so much enthusiasm for our organization.
I have to do a shameless plug. If anyone is in the business of wanting to learn more about how to orchestrate the best operational experiences for your business, would love to be able to talk about how journey orchestration, connecting your ecosystem of partners to the journey, and the utilization of AI can really solve for those operational chaos pieces for your business. Would love to chat about that and about how OvationCXM can help.
Daniel: Thank you so much.
Sherri: Thank you. Awesome.