In this interview, Matt Barnett explains why video is a superior communication medium for onboarding and customer relationship management, emphasizing that humans trust facial expressions, tone, and gestures more than written text. He describes his company’s product, which automates highly personalized video messages at scale by pulling data from CRMs such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Intercom and triggering videos based on specific customer actions (e.g., new lead, qualified lead, onboarding step completion). Barnett shares performance metrics: roughly three‑times higher response rates, double conversion rates in some cases, a 30% increase in demo‑call attendance, and churn reductions of 15‑25%. He provides industry examples—SaaS firms, e‑commerce subscription brands, and community‑driven companies—showing how targeted video can boost activation, reviews, and advocacy. Finally, he offers a concrete funnel for SaaS founders: integrate the video platform with the lead capture system, filter leads by qualification score, notify a team member (or founder) to record a short personalized video within an hour, and use the video to prompt the next action (e.g., schedule a demo, complete onboarding, request a review). The conversation underscores that personalized video, when automated, can be a high‑impact growth lever across the entire customer lifecycle.
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Kind of shifting gears to the product, what would you say are the main differentiators or advantages when leveraging video for that onboarding and customer relationships versus those other formats which we typically see, right? The email onboarding, The calls, what are you guys seeing differently there? And what are the advantages?
Yeah. So I'll chat a little bit beyond video because I think, again, like, so video is a medium. If you're not using video, use video. Like everyone knows this. Like we're getting more comfortable with videos today. Different types of videos. So, you know, video that is meant for the masses, scripted video, like recorded video. Video is ultimately a very visual piece of comms. Humans are not meant to— we were not evolved to write. Like that's not what we do. Yeah? Evolve to use facial expression and tone of voice and gestures and everything else that obviously gets you to trust someone and kind of understand who they are and want to work with them. So video gets that across however you go. Where we specifically play is around personalization. So back to that first case, the product essentially does that. We live now on top of things like HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, you name it. We'll drag in data and we'll say, look, this is a great time to drop in a piece of personalization for a customer because they've done XYZ. So it's very much trigger-based. So this could be as simple as new leads coming into a funnel. It could be new leads of a certain like sales qualified lead score who are worth X value, only those ones you want to do it for. But what we're saying is for these certain types of customers at certain points in the journey, like take 30 seconds for them individually. This is kind of like I guess the ethos behind the company.
Yeah.
We always say like automate processes, never relationships. Take that 30 seconds and actually step in and say, hey, Jane. Saw you came on board from Orlando. See that you're the marketing manager for Ontraport. Yeah. Awesome to have you with us. We already work with these other people in the space. This is what we do. By the way, I can see that you've signed up and done onboarding steps 1 to 5, but you haven't done 6. This is really crucial. I'm going to include a link to help you get there. But if you want help, hit reply. I will personally help you get to that point. By the way, welcome aboard. It's a beautiful day. So What you're doing in that is a couple of things where you do something like this. You're showing the customer they care, number one. And if you look at SaaS especially, SaaS and ecommerce is really interesting because they're starting to do more of this. And they're traditionally not relationship-based industries. Like everything's been about scale. And so what you look about here, like that time that I talk for is literally how long it takes. And then you press go and then you're back to work. You're talking about like a very— so you do have to do personalization very, very scalably. Like you don't have to do any sending, no packaging, nothing. data's there for you to personalize it. It's good to go. It's very quick. It's on mobile, it's on desktop, whatever you want. So the idea of being able to do true personalization at scale becomes a lot easier. When you do that, like I would hold the fact that you'll still see, you know, 3 times response rates of anything else you do. That's kind of like, that's the baseline that we see in here for customers like even today. I think just taking that time for the customer and turning up when you're in a competitive space, which you will be, will help you stand out. And this is a whole, you know, ultimately like do you value NPS and customer happiness? Like do you put support as a growth lever? Because in my eyes, like support's like an awesome growth channel. Yeah. Most people think of it as a last-minute thing. It should be a first-minute thing. If that's a channel for you, if that's something that you abide by and you understand, this is just to take it to the next level. And then obviously, you're being very proactive. And so other stages on the customer funnel, if a customer has a relationship with you, what that means then is number one, are they more likely to buy?
Yeah.
Because of trust.
Yes.
They understand the company. They understand you. When they see you turn up and make the efforts, do they think you're a customer who's going to— a company that's going to deliver? Yes, they do. If they have a challenge, are they going to go straight to social and rant or are they going to come and ask you for help? They're going to come and ask you for help because they like you more. Are they going to stay longer? Like we see, you know, churn dropping by 15%, 20% because people just want to stay longer and give you that extra shot. So it ends up impacting the funnel. And then most of all, is this person more likely to become like an active advocate? Are they more likely to go and talk about your company? Yes. And that's actually like the icing on the cake is like if you can get every customer to start to refer more customers down the line, and we'll maybe dive back to this, like that's like the goal that's just like, it's like a secondary impact.
Right.
But then it becomes a growth lever for your company too.
So that exact scenario where you talked about where, you know, you're onboarding the user, you're giving that better onboarding experience and they're using your platform. Do you guys track and do you have any numbers other than, you know, 3 times the response rate? Are you seeing anything in terms of conversion itself lift and actual lead gen growth? Yeah.
So that 3 times response rate tends to feed down into conversions. It depends a little bit on the business, like obviously. So look, if, look, where it equates, I mean, you never get quite perfect, but Carthage, it's 3 times response rate, double conversions. It's probably quite a safe space to stand. We work with a lot of companies who kind of get that. If helping a customer through your funnel makes a difference, it's definitely going to help. If obviously standing out, it'll definitely help. Look, other spaces we use in SaaS, you know, we use for For making sure people turn up to demo calls, we tend to increase demo call turn-up by about 30%. So the day before a demo call is going to turn up, send a video and just say, hey, I'm Jenny. I'm going to be doing your call tomorrow. Looking forward to it. 30% increase in turn-ups. Pretty simple. Churn. Again, it's very dependent on business. But we've seen stats where churn drops by 25%. So pretty significant. And that's because churn comes from early activation. So this is more activation than conversion. So a lot of your churn is going to come from your first 3-month users where they haven't got activated. So if you're using this with paid users to make sure they're activated, then you've got a significant chance to reduce your churn because that's the point in the funnel where they're losing. And so that's where you get those stats from. I mean like advocacy is harder to measure.
Yeah.
It's a lot harder to measure. But we see people, I mean I see people with communities in SaaS gain like 95% acceptance rates into communities when they're invited in which is kind of nuts. It's kind of insane.
That is.
There's a filter in there. We see ecommerce companies, a lot of ecommerce moving into subscription models now. Let's try and find something today. Who does coffee subscriptions? So very commoditized, like, you know, not like a competitive industry. And they moved their SaaS model from I think $35K to $75K in 3 months doing this. So any second-time buyers, sending them a video and saying, hey, did you know we have a subscription model? Over you go. And they've obviously been trying to push this for the last year. So doubled it in 3 months. You know, reviews. I've seen, we have an e-commerce company in Denmark who went from nothing to number 1 rated company in men's fashion in the whole of Denmark in about 4 months by sending videos after delivery arrived saying, hey, I want to make sure everything's okay and that you got what you deserve. So kind of customer service. And then saying, by the way, there's a link in this video to Trustpilot. Can you give us a review? Like, so like where companies understand their funnel and they're very targeted with what they're doing here, you're not just doing this for the sake of doing it. Like it's a great thing to do. Like have an ask. So you're looking to either convert leads, you're looking to either specifically activate new paid users in the first few months, or you're looking to do things like drive reviews. That tends to be where we sit. And where you're focused to go after that, I mean, I can keep talking about results if you want me to.
Yeah, yeah. Let's go kind of more specific. So I'm obviously a big fan of trying out, you know, your video funnels, and I've seen them work for, you know, engaging new leads. And, you know, we talk about, you know, building these, uh, personalization at scale. So I want to hear specific examples, maybe for SaaS founders, right? We have SaaS founders or marketers listening in today. They want to start using this in their own kind of marketing process, uh, or their onboarding or whatnot. Um, can you share anything, uh, in terms of funnels that they can start using today to start growing their business? We can try out.
Absolutely start with leads just because it's very binary and it's super easy. And this is where every customer starts, to be honest. So forget the rest of that, like, just start here because this is how you decide yes and no. Um, so if you use— so, so leads coming in, um, just decide, depends on the size of your funnel a little bit and the size of your team. So it's generally your customer success team that's gonna be doing this, or supporting if you have those. Um, or if you're an early startup, yes, potentially the founders. So if you're using— so with your leads coming in, if you're using Intercom or whatever you're using, plug it into the system. So you can do this for every single signup that comes in. A lot of people start there. It depends on your funnel and the size. If you're larger, filter those down. If you have any way of, I guess, pre-qualifying signups, so product qualified leads or marketing qualified leads maybe, or sales qualified if you're a sales funnel, you might want to just filter those and say only, you know, a score of X. And then just, just go and try sending these to the 20 people that come in. So we'll obviously like— so we'll, we'll notify your team. So lead comes in, hits filter, and then like Jenny on your CS team is notified on, on her phone straight away, and she can do a video within, you know, an hour or less. Uh, we'll drag in all the information from your CRM, so we'll tell Jenny what they've done. And you can customize this, so you decide— so what's important to you getting a customer to act, to convert?
Mm-hmm.
So is that doing a specific step in your product? So for us, number one thing is somebody has to send a video. I mean, it's pretty binary. Like if someone doesn't send a video, they're never going to become a customer. So everything we do at the beginning is to get that call loop going. So we look and we track the metrics around their call loop within the first hour. If it's the first hour, we wait an hour. If they haven't done that first call loop metric, everything we do in the video is trying to get them to do that one thing. And if they can't do it, to talk to us. And we have like 24-hour support so we can support this. But like we get them to talk to us and say like, and either hop on calls with us or chat to support online and figure out how to do this. So everything for us is about activation. Now after activation, we don't just keep doing videos. You know, it then goes into our funnel and we obviously go through our onboarding like everybody else that comes off this. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to pick up lagging users and get them back in again. We're which I also find, we definitely do have active users too. So anyone who's coming on board and looks like, and is a PQL, so product qualified lead. So they've done all the steps we know means they're going to convert. We'll also spend extra time on them. And then we'll probably be trying to get them to drive team members in. So there it starts to become about like expansion revenue for us because we know that they're going to kind of convert. But leads is binary. If you send out 20, 30 of these versus whatever you're doing normally. Like A/B test it. Look at the results. And there you get your first signal whether it's worth carrying on. And 20, 30 of these takes 30 minutes. So it's quite a quick test.
