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Over 250,000+ companies use Vidyard, so how did they get so many people using their product? Their secret is product led growth, but it wasn't always that way.
In this episode of the Product Led Revenue podcast, our host Breezy Beaumont welcomes Tyler Lessard, VP of Marketing at Vidyard to talk about getting executive buy-in for PLG, some of the challenges and incredible growth they've experienced, as well as getting your data actionable.
Guest-at-a-Glance
💡 Name: Tyler Lessard
💡 What they do: VP of Marketing
💡 Company: Vidyard
💡 Where to find them: LinkedIn
Watch Episode
Transcript
TYLER
2:45 Good to be here. Breezy. Hello, everyone that I haven't met. I'm Tyler, I get to be the guests of honor here today and I'm stoked to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation. So, thanks for joining. And I brought them with me to get a thumbs up here post thanksgiving low.
TYLER
3:06 Yes, sir.
BREEZY
3:06 Just a minute… that fade out. Most of them that it's like he's done it before.
KARL
3:16 Okay.
BREEZY
3:22 It's great. It's great. Alright. Well, we have a little smaller group today, 20 folks or so, but that is okay. Well, let people keep joining in. Might take them a couple of minutes. Everyone is getting back from their Turkey comas, I believe. So, we won't blame them this time today. We have Tyler and also I, this joke has to have been made before, but your last name? Are you? Just like it's marketing's job to make things less hard, I guess so.
TYLER
3:57 First time, first time I ever had that.
KARL
3:59 Yes.
BREEZY
4:01 Yes, thank you very much. See you do the music. You have, the DJ, I'm the comedian. This is this how this works… alright for anybody joining your, this is your first time. I'm being on camera is great. Awesome. If not, if you don't want to, that's okay.
Call Setup ends
BREEZY
4:17 But if you're good to have food, drinks, dogs, cats, kids running around. It is all good with us. You can ask questions in the comments, raise your hand, just start talking whatever you want. So, yeah, so excited to have Tyler here. You then we'll figure out for about nine years now. Is that right?
TYLER
4:39 95 years, yeah.
BREEZY
4:41 Exactly. Exactly. And running marketing over there. So with that, why don't you give a little intro background on yourself? And then maybe we can just sorta jump into, you know, the history of a video card, where did product lead pros kinda come into play here? And how y'all got started with that?
TYLER
5:01 Yeah, perfect. So again, it's really great to be here. Great to see so many great faces Tyler with our VP marketing at video card. I have been here for just about nine years. Now, video card was founded in 2010. I joined a few years and when it was about 30 people or so. And at that time in our early days, we were very much enterprise sales lead SaaS organization. So if you're not familiar with Vidyard, we started off actually as a video hosting management and analytics platform for marketers. So I had the honor of being able too market to marketers which was a great pleasure. And, you know, in our early days, again we built the organization around, you know what we consider kind of modern demand gen programs had very heavy focus on content marketing, seo, thought leadership. We were really doing a lot of category building if you will. We built out a very robust sales development, business development teams. We did a lot of Outbound, a lot of events, things like that and a lot of work in our partner community, which was a big sort of boon to us kind of finding our way in the market. We did a lot of partnerships with folks like the Marketo and Eloqua, as in Salesforce. Is that many of you will know. So the first let's call it five years or so that I was here a very much a traditional enterprise top down, you know, marketing and sales lead organization, call it four to five years ago. Before years ago, we launched a pretty simple tool to be honest, that was an extension to our video platform, that was a video messaging tool. So it was initially to solve a customer problem. Some of our customers were saying we want to do more video, but it's really hard. And so we actually released a Chrome extension to make it easy to record videos, upload them into your video card account and then share them. And we quickly found that this was actually a more effective tool for salespeople, not as much for marketers. And so we found a lot of salespeople that were like, this is great. I could just record a quick video. I can drop it in an email and send it off. And then we already have the tracking to know, hey, we'll tell you when somebody watches it. And so what was interesting was that was like the Dawn of our PLC strategy, we built this really simple Chrome extension. We started giving it away for free as a way to sort of get people into the platform. And we quickly realized that it was really a product opportunity unto itself. Fast forward. The next couple of years, we, you know, started to also like many of you. We looked at the market and really started to believe that the future is product lead for most SaaS companies not because that's what we wanna do, but it's because that's what buyers want. I'm a buyer as well. And if I can try something, if I can use something that I can see value in it before I commit, I will do that 10 times out of 10. And if there are two different solutions I'm evaluating. And when I can actually use first nine times out of 10, that's going to be the product I end up buying. So we all do it as consumers that this is the way it's gonna go. Buyers have too much power. These days. So we really leaned into an about again about three, four years ago. We said, you know, what we're all in, we believe that the future is product lead and we've been evolving our strategy ever since fast forward to today. I'd say we are a product growth first organization that it's still very much an enterprise sales company. And our PLG strategy, we have free products that is what we focus on promoting, but the free products aren't just to get, you know, paid users are free products are way to get into enterprises and find enterprise opportunities for our sales team. So it is a very much an alliance marketing product and sales strategy… which I am obviously, I'm sure many of you are very much, very passionate about product. Like growth doesn't succeed if it's also not a sales and marketing and finance and everything strategy frankly. And that's what we've spent the last three years doing like we're still not appear PL, gee company. When you look at our systems, the way that we operate, it takes a long time to get there. But that's been our journey.
BREEZY
9:09 So take me back to the conversations that are happening internally when you're starting to think about sort of like the shift or product lead? Where are you getting pushed back? Where it was? The interest? Is everyone's hands, sort of just forced into it because of consumer demand. What does that look like?
TYLER
9:26 Push back literally everywhere every single department, right? So product, the product isn't built for product lead growth. It's not built to be signed up by an individual user for us to like self onboard them. Like they're like cool. We could turn on a free product today, but they're still gonna have to spend eight hours with an onboarding manager to figure out how to use the damn thing, right? It wasn't built for users. It was built for an enterprise sales process. So product was a big challenge. It was like they're like we're going to have to re factor the whole platform. We were like, yeah… you're right? Like and that's the reality of it. And then thankfully, they understood that, right? Which is actually a blessing because a lot wouldn't then they'd be like we'll keep putting band-aid on it, which is tough product was a big challenge. Sales, needless to say, right? It was like, you know, cannibalizing my potential revenue, having a free product and market. I don't understand how that could give me more sales opportunities. So that was a big challenge. And then from a marketing team perspective as well, right? We didn't have the where with all to do what I now considered to be much more consumer based marketing, right? We were built to do enterprise demand gen. We weren't built to do scale, get free users into the product and then nurture them via the product that wasn't emotion we were familiar with. So the whole organization frankly had to adapt and again right down into finance and legal, like our legal terms weren't built for a user to come on, sign up and get going, right? And so the whole organization had to change top to bottom, no question.
BREEZY
11:01 Yeah, it's definitely a big shift. So.
TYLER
11:04 Sorry for all of you starting to go through this. It's not.
BREEZY
11:06 No, no. I think for the people on, I saw Danica and maybe one other saying, you know, there's sort of making this spot now. I know a couple of others on the call are sort of in these talks internally as well. So, it's not a secret. It's you know, there's the reasons why we choose to move this direction that we all know of, you know, it's better for the buyer, that sort of thing demanded from the market. It reduces friction in that buying process et cetera. But that doesn't mean that, hey, everybody's going to agree with you and be that it's at all going to be an easy feat.
TYLER
11:43 The big thing for us Breezy as we went through this, in hindsight, I'm not sure how intentional this was but the big when was and again, this probably obvious to a lot of you but was when we built out that like longer term vision for this is how a product let gross strategy not only makes it better for our buyers but it actually creates more value to our sales team and it's integrated with the sales process. It makes the product better and it enables us to market better, right? And it's hard. It's very hard to see that in the beginnings of it, right? And especially sales, right? It's like, how the hell is this actually going to make my salespeople happy here, right? Like I'm just hoping they don't freak out and, you know, and lead let alone, can I actually make this better? We were able to get to that point. I think across the board where we're like the product is better, the product team is happier in the products they're building because there's this relentless focus on user experience instead of like platform and all these things. And for sales, right? We had to really focus on this and say, okay, how is this going to make the sales teams job easier rather than harder? And we knew they'd be a transition where it would be harder because there would be like this free version and they're still trying to use the role models but, you know, the real focus there was okay, if, in this future, you know, wonderful world. What if we are using product signals to tell the salespeople who the most engaged leads actually are. And instead of them getting leads from marketing saying, hey, this person attended a web and are there hot, right? It'll be like a roll your eyes. It's hey, this individual has actually recorded 300 videos in the last four weeks and, you know, there's actually a cluster of five people using the product at this company. We're like which leads or companies would you rather follow up on? And they're like all day long, door number two, like if I know they're actively seeing value in the product, my job as a seller is a lot easier provided that the incremental value in moving up to the paid version is high enough. And so we were very intentional and thinking through all those things early on to say, we gotta do this in a way that we're confident is going to make sales easier and more efficient. It's going to enable us to market better and it's going to make the product better. And until you have a line of sight. Into those things you don't quite unlock what your fields you motion is really going to be.
TYLER
14:23 So I encourage you all to thinking that way, right? Like an partner. Like if you don't partner with sales on, it can be a, does, it can be a train wreck, right? And they always feel like they're on the short end of it that they're not part of the process and therefore, they don't sort of ultimately sort of have, you know, by in and help you create value. And we went through a while where those like awkward teenage years of our PL gee were those years where we were like really pushing sign up for free but we didn't have all the instrumentation on the back end to surface leads effectively to our sales team. Yet those are like those ugly growing years where we were like sales, we're sending everybody to free and they're like that's great. But I don't know who these people are and I'm not getting leads from it. So what's going on? And we're like, well here's an export, a spreadsheet of 800 people who signed up last week and they're like, you gotta be kidding me, right? And so there was a period of that where we were like we gotta just like brute force it. But once we got the instrumentation right, where we were able to do the automation behind it and automate those processes and say, based on these conditions in terms of usage and product that's going to feed their qualification, that's going to feed their lead score and you're gonna start getting leads automatically based on their engagement in the product coupled with other lead scoring things that we do around behavior and all those kinds of things. So it's hard to get there, right? We all know it's not as easy as just like, hey, cool. We turn on a product that it all works. But that's the path that we went through. And, you know, again, there were some tough times in the middle where we didn't have everything going but we really wanted to push the limits. But giving sales that line of sight is like here's where we're going with it. Does this make sense to you getting them on board early? Really does?
BREEZY
16:08 One of the shift that I would have to imagine took place is thinking of like your leads and you're talking about your lead scoring. So where are you working with MQL? Is before, did you change that terminology internally? How did that go with sort of bringing in this additional data set? Right? Because historically we think of an MQL as a combination of maybe demographic or firmographic data. So things about the person or about the company combined with actions that they took like that they go on our website at attend our events, right? But now we're putting in this product usage data as well. So how did that, how did the marketing team take that shift and then also working with sales? Because of course, they're the recipient of those.
TYLER
16:49 So we think about it now. I mean, honestly, we've just gotten rid of that first letter of the acronym, but it's qualified leads and qualified accounts, right? Leads are getting qualified based on a variety of different inputs. Some of those are the same things traditionally we did for MQL right there, the things you talked about, the firmer graphics demographics, their activities that they're doing. But that's now paired with product usage data and trends in terms of, and signals from actual product usage. And so a lotta people will call it a product qualified lead, but I just call it a qualified lead because it's a merger of the two, right? Somebody could come in and use the product all day long, but if they're not the right firmographic demographic, they're not doing anything else. They may not bubble up as quickly or at all, frankly, right? Because there, we know with our sales team, hey, this is like the most active user of Racine, but they're like an individual entrepreneur. They have nobody, they have no team or nothing. Our sales team doesn't want to talk to them, right? So we've been, you know, very intentional and saying, we have qualified leads and qualified accounts. And each of those, we are sourcing data for marketing, we're sourcing data from the product and we use third party intent signals as well to augment all of those. And that ends up being, you know, really important. And then you just gotta, you know, come to alignment again with your teams on which signals are more important than others and you weigh things accordingly, equally important is making sure all of that data is transparent to the sales team, so that they know when a lead does get flipped or bubbled up, they can very clearly see why and they know they can open up the record, right? Right? In Salesforce, in our case, they can see the product usage, right? So they don't have to like go over into the product to see what this person's been doing, right? So if you know, Aaron was really active inside of his video card account, then, you know, he get pushed over to our sales would open up the Salesforce record and they'd actually see in Salesforce, errands made this many videos. He's been using the free product for this long. There are three other people at errands company also using video card, right? So all of that data becomes transparent to them. But they can also see what marketing actions, errands done, what events, errands attended, and any past opportunities with errands company. So that becomes really important that this stuff gets federated. And again, easier said than done to really operationalize that. And we have a pretty big rev ops team. Now. I'd say rev ops is grown the most of any of the different organizations over the past two or three years to support the shift to a product lead first organisation.
Moving Forward
BREEZY
19:26 So I'm gonna open it up here for a couple of questions. So I'm just reminder for anyone who as we're going through this, any sort of questions that are coming up there's no bad question. We'll still hansard it. It's okay. So feel free to put them in or feel free to ask them as well. So I will ask one here to kind of shift the conversation a bit, but feel free to go back to anything we might have already talked about. So I'm curious, I live for you to talk a little bit about one of the big shift. If you're thinking of, you know, you're doing enterprise sales and now you're kind of layering in product led to help feed those enterprise sales. Yeah, how do you think about pricing packaging and how you know, much you want to bring that to the forefront and be really transparent about is, how did you all sort of solve that problem?
TYLER
20:18 Yeah. I mean, it's always a challenge but I think particularly when there's like free products involved.
Moving Forward ends
TYLER
20:24 And so in our case, just to set the table when I say we're product lead growth, we have a completely free product. It's not time bound. It's you can use video card for free forever. It has usage limits and it has feature limits. So in our case, usage limits are primarily the number of videos you can, you know, have hosted recorded saved hosted in the system at any time. So if you're a salesperson, for example, you can start using for free. You can record up to 25 different videos and send them to people. If you want to keep making more, you have to delete older videos and, you know, you can make some new ones, but those older videos will no longer be viewable.
Pricing
TYLER
21:06 So if you're a marketer, same thing, you can use us for hosting and publishing video. Same thing. Once you get 25, you have to removal once that new one. So there's usage limit. And then there is again feature functionality limit. Of course, right? There's all sorts of premium features that aren't in the free version. And so we landed on a free always instead of a free trial because we really felt that was in the best interest of the users. I'm personally not a big fan of free trials in general. I think anytime you can have a free product and you're not forcing artificial… urgency on creating a by know by decision. You're allowing people to realize value when the timing is right for them. I think that's a better model personally. So we have a free version. We then do have a pro version which is for an individual who really likes the product who wants to unlock premium capabilities, remove usage restrictions, add some more functionality that's a per user per month model that's fully transparent on our website. The price is right up there and all the features equally import and have to be there. And then we have teams and enterprise models for our enterprise customers. And the way we've approached it is we have the baseline price on our website. So starting at X dollars for our teams and enterprise packages which gets you these capabilities. And then, you know, talk to sales to learn more about the specific, you know, pricing beyond that depending on your needs. And we've gone back and forth of like having different tiers and our enterprise publicly price versus not, you know, there is no right or wrong answer. I think at the end of day, having some level of transparent pricing is really important.
Pricing ends
TYLER
22:44 I think it's a great tool for the sales. Team to be able to reference for prospects and say here's exactly why you would consider upgrading, not hiding anything. I'm not trying to, you know, it's like right there, go check it out. And so that's how we price it. And if you're interested yet is going to be our dot com slash pricing and you'll see how we do it.
TYLER
23:06 Now.
BREEZY
23:07 See, I have a question.
MILES
23:08 Yeah, I do Breezy. Thank you so much. Hey, everyone. Sorry for being a couple of minutes late here. Tyler, great to reconnect here that we met at rainmaker in Atlanta back in 2018. I think I wanna say maybe seven cents, yeah. But anyways, up in a huge my or video card watch guys grow for quite some time myself being a modern seller, you know, following predictable revenue kind have seen that kinda get uptick in the industry. And now I feel like product with growth. It's kind of like, I don't know, it's almost like predictable revenue two point and it is such a dramatic shift even though a lot of the same mechanics are the same. Yeah. So I guess, you know, my question is very open ended for you, Tyler. I think we're both kind of like traditional modern, you know, sellers. But if you can go back, right and let's say like your to start the company today, right? And leaning first into this, you know, product like growth motion, what would you have changed? You know, what steps, you know, what would have been important to you to kind of take a look at what you have done differently? So it's generally an open ended question. But I'm curious, you know, if you've thought about that, and yeah, some of these might be man.
TYLER
24:07 Awesome. Love the question. And yeah, great to see you again. Miles great memory. Thank you. So the one big thing which I underestimated and, you know, I would do differently is the importance of the product. It's a pretty obvious our product like growth. Of course, the product is really important but I think I, and organizationally I think we underestimated the amount of work that goes into building a really great PL, gee product that is truly users can sign up. They can adopt it, they can get value, they can learn, they can grow with it without ever having to talk to a salesperson or spend a whole bunch of time digging through an… and I think that's easy.
Moving Forward
TYLER
24:56 It's easier said than done. And so I would have earlier on probably increased our investment in our Indy, been more focused on user experience. I'm glad we did. I mentioned earlier that we did take the time to do a lot of refactoring of the platform and that was really important. So I am glad we did that. But I think we could have gone even further with allocating more and more resources into the product team to make sure we're creating a really scaleable experience. Even from a marketing team or prep perspective. Right now. We are like, we really love like, can we do this in the product?
Moving Forward ends
TYLER
25:34 Like we want to do this to be able to help us like create a new signal, the qualified people and, you know, no, sometimes the answer is, yeah, and often the answer is no, it just doesn't work that way and there's no way to add that. And it'll be like a three week, you know, thing. And I think trying to get ahead of those, right? As you build from the early days, think about what is this model gonna look like? How is it going to evolve and building it as something that's going to scale and that's something that's kind of have a platform not just for a great experience but that's going to allow you to easily test new features, test new things, pop in notifications to bring the user back in, right? Really focus on usage and adoption and value in the product that is so so important for our marketing team as much as it is for everybody else. So that's the one big thing that I underestimated and I would have changed from the early days. Yeah.
MILES
26:26 Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate it.
BREEZY
26:29 John over to you.
JOHN
26:31 Thank you, Tyler. Quick question on great. So when you open up the fields in motion, Julie's are comped least maybe making an assumption here comped on the initial sale. And so to bring your initial sale price down and you have to change your pricing plans based on the po V stuff happening.
TYLER
26:46 Very, very good question. And we did so, the short answer is we did evolve our sales structure. And so you're right? Initially, in the early days, our sales team was always very motivated to close big deals right upfront, right? And they were often very dissuaded to say, you know, if they wanted to do a land and expand, it wasn't in the best interest of the reps because we did have a, okay, you get, we landed that they're handed over to an account manager and if they expand 30 days later.
Pricing
TYLER
27:15 Sorry. And so we very much change the model to encourage a land and expand within our account team and ensure that they were able too, you know, not only use that effectively, but of course, again, the whole, I can't remember the specifics of how it's evolved. But, you know, my sense is that you do need to move to, you know, maybe like a one year model where when they land and account there, that account owner for a 12 month period and, you know, a lot of our reps will know that if I close small and grow, I can get a bigger deal in that first year, then I could have closed on the first land, right? Like what would have been a 30 K deal before I can now turn into a 50 K deal over nine months because I can show value and keep growing it. And so think about that for sure and make sure that, yeah, the cost model is aligned to the behaviors you want to see related to how the product deployment happens to great point. Very good question.
Pricing ends
JOHN
28:09 Thank you. Yeah.
BREEZY
28:13 I see two questions in here and we only have three minutes. So unfortunately, I'm not gonna force any of you the rest of you up here to ask it, but there's to sort of coming up around product usage and how they're how you're sort of pairing your traditional lead score with product usage to get. And like how you're moving that data around. I also think there's sort of like a changing answer to this, what you probably Bill. Maybe it has been sort of changing into the future as, you know, some other platforms like reverse ETL tools become available and, you know, more product lead platforms including Correlated and others become more available.
Moving Forward
BREEZY
28:54 So this is maybe sort of shifting. But in the two plus one extra minutes left, maybe you can talk a little bit about how you all have solve that so far.
TYLER
29:07 Yeah, it's been tough sort of moving from a legacy model. I as I would consider it to this more, you know, to this current model and we have like implemented to get our rev ops team has grown quite a bit. We've implemented a central customer data repository that data is moving in and out of the different systems into a central platform, which is then feeding a lot of the qualification and scoring and pushing those things back out into the Salesforce is in Marketo. Is that we use, you know, if again, if we could do it all over again and say we're a true PLC company, I would, you know, it would have been built differently and we would probably be using Correlated. So, but yeah, we've had to bolt on and pull the data centrally because we just couldn't get Salesforce Marketo, the traditional tools. They didn't have all the different pieces. So we had to piece things together to say we gotta get all these together and then we can run them through the engines and push it back out stuff.
BREEZY
30:01 Cool. Alright. Well, I know there's a couple of questions left. I guess next time we're just gonna have to ask them early and often… but you can find Tyler maybe on LinkedIn, we do have the slack connect as well. So folks want to sort of follow up with some of the questions that you have there, we can get some conversations going but Tyler, thank you so much. This was great.
TYLER
30:24 LinkedIn. Like you said, any questions? Just connecting me on LinkedIn? And I'll probably send you back a video message with an answer where I can actually speak about it.
BREEZY
30:31 They're about product web growth happening.
TYLER
30:34 Go. And if you want to sign up for free afterwards, have at it.
Moving Forward ends
BREEZY
30:40 Hi, everybody.
TYLER
30:41 Awesome. Thanks everybody.