Integrating Video Across Your Business: An Interview with Glenn Elliott
February 9, 2017
Topic tags
Meryl Ayres
Creative
As more and more companies adopt video as a versatile communication tool, Reward Gateway, an employee engagement platform, continues to push the boundaries and stand out with video.
Thanks to their fearless CEO, Glenn Elliott, video has become a norm around the office. Known for his out-of-the-box entrepreneurial strategies, Glenn believes there’s no such thing as “business to business” — it’s all about human to human. From their internal communication efforts to their sales team’s outreach strategy, Reward Gateway is using video to create meaningful human connections.
For this blog post, we asked Glenn about how Reward Gateway is using video, but if you want to learn from Glenn about how to integrate video into all parts of your business, you should join us for this year’s WistiaFest. Glenn is returning by popular demand to grace our main stage, and we’re so excited to see what he’s got up his sleeves.
Wistia:
As the CEO at Reward Gateway, how often do you appear in company videos?
Glenn:
All the time! I have a regular segment on our internal comms hub called CEO’s Blog, which I usually like to film, rather than type. Video helps me to have a personal connection with our 350 employees, and I also find it a lot faster than writing — I can’t be in all 7 of our different offices at once, so this is the next best thing!
I also help our marketing team out with thought leadership interviews on employee engagement, company culture, and leadership. I really enjoyed this interview that I filmed with The Telegraph on how to bridge the employee engagement gap. I turned up in a green shirt, but had to do a quick outfit swap with our photographer, Chris, when I realized we were filming with a green screen. Oops!
I think one of my favorites though is this video where I was interviewed by Anthony Corey — he’s 14, and his mum is Debra Corey, our Group Reward Director. He was a great interviewer.
I’ve been in front of the camera so much now that I don’t even notice it. One time I was pretty nervous was last June when I was thinking about how I’d reach out to our employees following the Brexit announcement — that was a strange day! When in doubt, remember to be authentic, take your time to do a bit of prep, and lose the autocue. I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
“Whenever I’m making a video, I think about what emotion I want to convey.”## Wistia: How do you produce most of your videos at Reward Gateway? ## Glenn: We’ve got a couple of great guys at RG called Rob and Rich who are dedicated to producing beautiful videos full time. Rob works from the in-house studio in our London office and Rich works out of our 24/7/365 Global Support Centre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria — it’s our biggest office! Their workload is completely varied — they work on everything from our Engagement Excellence Live events, product videos, our weekly internal TV show (Boom!Bite), our global staff lottery, and everything in between. The following is a video they made for our quarterly Thank You Awards.
Wistia:
How do you decide when it’s worth the time and effort to create a video at Reward Gateway?
Glenn:
Video is great for building that human to human connection, so if an opportunity comes up where you can’t speak to someone face-to-face, then we often use video. If we’re producing product videos then we spend a lot of time to make them really slick, however, we find that bitesize clips filmed on a laptop can do the job just as well if you’re not able to be at a meeting, or want to send someone a quick message to say ’congratulations.’
“Video is a huge part of our culture at Reward Gateway. We’re always filming.”## Wistia: What makes video a powerful sales tool? ## Glenn: It’s the human connection. People talk about B2B sales, but the reality is it’s all human to human — you have to connect with someone, understand what they need, demonstrate how we can help and then they have to take a leap of faith and trust that we will deliver. Video is irreplaceable in building human connection. Our sales team makes videos every day. Our sales reps use video voicemails to reach out to prospects that they haven’t managed to get through to on the phone first time around. These voicemails stand out in busy inboxes and help the receiver put a name to the face. We’ve seen a huge peak in the number of meetings booked since introducing them. ## Wistia: Can you talk about an exciting client that you won over with the help of video? ## Glenn: Well, I remember that a really big client in Australia (we’re talking a six figure annual spend), told us that in the end they chose us because of this video — it’s a monumental blooper video.
It’s from years ago, so our production quality was pretty terrible. You’ll also notice that Reward Gateway’s original name was Asperity Employee Benefits.
This video is an early episode of Global Briefing which, back then, was the name of our internal weekly TV program. I was a presenter for the first few episodes, and in this one, I got serious giggles with part of the script and it took us hours to film. The client said they loved how it showed how human we were, and it made them really want to work with us.
Wistia:
How do you envision Reward Gateway using video in the future?
Glenn:
We kind of feel we’re a bit late to using and understanding video on Facebook and other social media properly. So we’re learning and trying out more work with subtitles for Facebook, and we’re also experimenting with Facebook Live. It won’t take over, but it will have a role.