MarTech Interview with Karthi Mariappan S, Co-founder and CEO of Hippo Video

Hi Karthi. Welcome to MarTech Interview Series. Please tell us about your journey in video technology. How did you conceive the idea of starting Hippo Video?

I’ve worked in the technology space for the last 22 years, and quickly found my passion in product building and strategy. At Zoho, where I spent 16 years, I met my other co-founders and we all recognized a major opportunity for video in the B2B market. We felt that video was a much more compelling and engaging medium than text for businesses to communicate. At the same time, we understood that passive videos alone cannot make the cut, but a personalized interactive video will really make an impact by making the video active and engaging. So in 2016, we founded Hippo Video together with a mission of helping B2B companies leverage interactive video to communicate and engage with their audiences.

What are your core offerings? What additions have you made to your product suite in the last 3 years?

To increase video adoption and effectiveness in business, we built the Hippo Video platform to solve three key issues: viewer engagement, the ability to send videos for different use cases, and increasing productivity by scaling video creation and sharing.

While the Hippo Video platform consists of several different product offerings, the core features that enable us to address these issues are our Humanize AI, AI Editor, Video Flows, and Video SDK. All of these have been introduced in the last 3 years and deliver various benefits to our customers.

1. Increasing productivity

With Humanize AI, our generative AI engine, sales teams can create hundreds of hyper-personalized videos in a single day, leading to an increase in meetings booked, higher engagement, and improved win rates.

Our patent-pending AI Editor removes the complexity associated with scalable video editing, seamlessly transcribing video audio for sales teams to edit faster and create professional-looking videos in just a few clicks.

2. Increasing viewer engagement

Also, by offering the inclusion of buttons, links to forms, polls, or call to actions inside the actual videos, we make communication with prospective customers significantly more engaging and impactful.

3. Creating videos for different use cases

The Video Flows feature enables users to send videos for different use cases with varied content and context – instead of only 1:1 webcam videos. Additionally, it eliminates the frustrating task of having to tirelessly redo videos by allowing users to record personal introductions and stitch them with pre-recorded videos for a tailor-fit output for every prospect.

And with our most recent upgrade, the Hippo Video SDK, developers can easily implement the Hippo Video platform into their existing infrastructure with just 10 lines of code in as little as 24 hours.

Could you please tell us about your “Ideal Customer Profile” and the markets/industries that currently use Hippo Video?

Currently, we serve over 5,000 paying customers and over 1.5 million active freemium users across many industries and sizes (from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies). We have seen success in several verticals across business and technology but particularly in the  computer and software industry, banking, financial services, insurance, and more. Our satisfied users include a leading European airline, a world-leading contact center software provider, and a global logistics leader, among others.

In terms of our “ideal customer,” we are incredibly industry-agnostic, so it would really be any business with a sales team trying to increase their engagement with prospective clients and/or eliminate the resources currently being used to secure leads.

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Congratulations! You recently acquired $8 million in funding. How do you plan to use this funding?

In addition to continuing to innovate our product portfolio, we plan to use our recent funding to expand our presence in the US, across 3 different buckets:

1. Our team: With headquarters in Delaware, we currently have around 5 employees based in the U.S. full-time, and we’d like to continue building the team out across different regions.
2. Strategic partnerships: We also want to focus on securing more U.S. partners, particularly independent software vendors, to give us a stronger competitive edge in the market.
3. Our brand: By developing micro-branding strategies across LinkedIn and co-marketing with our partners, we will be able to further scale the company across the U.S.

How important is it for Sales and Marketing teams to personalize their sales enablement practices using videos? What kind of results do these personalized videos deliver to customers?

Personalization within sales and marketing is critical. It humanizes the conversation. The last thing a prospect wants is to feel like a victim of another mass produced sales sequence, so by customizing your message, it shows the prospect that time and effort was put into assessing what their needs are.

In ensuring videos are hyper-personalized, sales and marketing teams can expect to increase engagement with prospective customers, develop meaningful, long-term relationships with decision makers, and secure more wins. Hippo Video customers have seen real results including:

• 3-5X response rates (higher response rates = more pipeline)
• 2X more meetings (increased engagement = higher win rate)
• 2X $ per meeting (ability to achieve revenue targets)

What kind of training should a sales team have to benefit from using AI and video capabilities?

The beauty of the Hippo Video solution is that no special training is needed. Any user can easily create a video leveraging our Humanize AI, AI Editor, Video Flows, or Teleprompter features. Additionally, we are already integrated with 25+ popular sales and marketing tools that our audience already uses including email clients (Gmail, Outlook), Sales CRMs (Salesforce, Pipedrive) Marketing Automation (Hubspot, Marketo), and Sales Engagement tools (Linkedin Sales Navigator, Outreach, Salesloft).

We also offer a variety of training materials in the form of blogs, webinars, and e-books to help our users craft the video that will meet their unique needs.

Video helps in getting more meetings but we haven’t seen it becoming mainstream yet. What’s holding sales teams back? Why aren’t they adopting it?

There are a few common misconceptions associated with using video for sales functionalities that often deter sales teams from adopting it. What they don’t realize is that by leveraging the power of generative AI, these “hurdles” can be eliminated.

The first misconception is that video is a one-way, passive communication vehicle that the viewer cannot engage or interact with. However, with Hippo Video’s features, viewers can interact with the videos by responding to surveys or submitting requests for information. The ability to provide two-way communication will help keep customers engaged throughout their journey.

The second misconception that businesses typically have is that video sales outreach is time-consuming. And this is true when it is being done manually. But with a platform like Hippo Video, hundreds of hyper-personalized videos can be created in the same time it takes to create just one, without using up the valuable time of sales representatives. Importantly, our platform lets users  send hyper-personalized videos with varied content and context so each video can be tailored to the viewer’s specific use case.

The third is that scalable video outreach is complex, when in fact, it can actually be quite accessible and straightforward. By implementing tools that not only help sales representatives easily create, personalize, and share videos for outreach but that also seamlessly integrate with their existing infrastructure, sales teams can scale video outreach without added complexity. In fact, with Hippo Video’s features, sales representatives can actually improve their productivity and easily reach hundreds of customers with a custom-made video for each one.

And finally, the last misconception is that using video for sales outreach is expensive. In leveraging an all-in-one solution, like Hippo Video, that can be used across every phase of the sales cycle, sales teams can increase productivity and efficiency and eliminate the need for additional resources. 

What should GTM and sales leaders do to enhance their ROI from video tools and how can Hippo Video assist them?

GTM and sales leaders can enhance the ROI from their tools by using video with every single phase of the engagement (not only for the opening stages) and for all of your contacts (not just the top 20 percent). Hippo Video’s main focus is on enabling customers to create videos faster and easier than ever before with our pre-designed templates, video flows, and generative AI that enable videos to be stitched together and customized for different scenarios and use cases. We had one customer tell us they were able to cut video creation time down to less than two minutes each – down from 21 minutes using other tools. This also helps increase productivity for the sales representatives who are able to connect with more prospects each day to increase the pipeline and achieve revenue targets.

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Your take on the future of video personalization tools for sales.

Our vision is to bring video to all business communication and capture its full potential in business by making the content even more personalized to the individual recipient. There are three ways to personalize the video content – 1:1, data-driven, and contextual personalization.

In 1:1 personalization, a sales rep records a custom video specifically for one recipient, recording a different video for each new recipient. Data-driven personalization is where we can customize a video to an extent, asking recipients to provide details like age, salary, location, etc., and based on these inputs, the video that they receive changes. And lastly, contextual personalization, the most important route for video personalization, can be achieved by bringing relevant clips into the video to create the right message for the right viewer based on their individual needs. Hippo Video is the only tool available today able to add contextual personalization dynamically and at scale. Also, because video is a passive communications medium, we believe an essential step is to make video more interactive to enable users on both sides of the table.