How Veo increases sales and lowers lead costs with automation

Have you ever been late to your child’s sports game and worried you’d miss an important moment? For Keld Reinicke, co-founder of Veo, missing his son score a soccer goal sparked an idea: Create a simple and affordable way to record sports games at all levels. 

Keld, and fellow Veo founder Henrik Teisbæk, realized not everyone had access to the advanced technology needed to record games. Recording games typically require a camera operator, expensive equipment, and sometimes duplicates of each to get play-by-plays for each player. That's often why you only see game recordings at the professional level. 

But at Veo, they're working to change that. Whether you’re playing soccer in the Champions League or in a weekly recreational league, Veo makes it simple to capture high-quality video and access game-changing (see what we did there?) analytics to improve your performance.

Since 2015, Veo has expanded its service to more than 80 countries, grown to 275 employees, and recorded more than half a million matches at all levels of play. With this fast-paced growth came thousands of monthly leads that needed personalized follow-ups and nurturing. In the wake of all this exponential growth, they quickly realized they needed a little automation help.

“Generating that many leads creates a lot of repetitive day-to-day tasks for our marketing team, so we automate many of our lead-generation processes using Zapier, which connects apps and helps automate work that doesn't require technical expertise,” said Lars Christensen, Social Ads Specialist at Veo. 

A faster sales cycle powered by automation

Since most of Veo’s potential customers are part-time coaches, Lars found success using a mix of Facebook and Instagram ads to increase leads. In these ads, Veo encourages potential customers to fill out an in-app contact form. This form gives Lars and the Veo team essential info to nurture each lead. 

Thousands of leads fill out these forms each month—in addition to leads from Veo's other channels like email—so manually moving all this valuable data from one tool to another is tedious and time-consuming. The sales process slowed down, and Veo lost out on deals as leads lost interest.

The team realized they had to break up this bottleneck. So, instead of manually exporting data from Facebook to ActiveCampaign, their customer relationship management (CRM) tool, Veo relied on Zapier to automatically transfer thousands of leads in real time.

“It's helped us accelerate our sales cycle and saved us thousands of hours and costs because we didn't have to hire a developer to make multiple systems talk to each other,” said Lars. 

Automating lead management from start to finish

Once a Zap automatically moves each new lead to ActiveCampaign, the workflow sorts them into a personalized email flow based on the lead’s country, sport, role, and what campaign it came from. Funneling leads into one of the dozens of tailored email flows creates a more customized nurture experience that feels like it's just for them. 

“When I first started, we had maybe 10 email flows which were pretty generic. Now, we’ve been able to create around 50, which makes it more specialized for each person,” said Lars.

Previously, Veo's sales reps would have to follow up with marketing for important details on their leads. This often resulted in lags in outreach and a less-than-smooth experience for leads. But Zapier also automatically moves leads to Pipedrive, their sales CRM tool, which sales use to manage leads and open deals. With this process, the sales team can quickly and easily pull up the most up-to-date info on each qualified lead. This includes where they are in Veo's marketing funnel, so the conversation will be seamless. 

“With automation, we’re at the point where our sales team doesn’t need to ask us [the marketing team] questions all the time about different leads because they have access to all of the information needed,” said Lars. 

Automation tackles real-time language translation

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken across the world. And as a global company, Veo boasts customers (and prospective customers) from all over the globe. But having such a broad audience creates its own bottleneck since the team has to translate a lead’s info before following up. 

At Veo, when a lead submitted info in their native language, someone from the team had to translate it manually. Not only was this a major timesuck, but this manual process left a lot of room for error. Plus, it slowed down the sales cycle for all those valuable global prospects.

Veo’s Growth Specialist, Abhimanyu Daga, knew there had to be a better way. Veo was already using Zapier to automatically move lead data from one tool to another—why not add one more step to the workflow to nix this manual workload altogether? 

By adding Translate by Zapier to their Zap, the workflow translates a lead's data to English before automatically moving it to their CRM. This one extra step didn't add time to the process but ensured the data is accurate, so every lead has the same great experience.

Zapier lowers costs and increases conversions

After automating the entire lead management process, Veo began seeing results quickly. In July 2022, Veo ran an ad campaign that generated more than 10,000 new leads. The cost per lead was around $3 less than their previous average using their manual processes. With this automated lead nurturing, Veo converted 7.5% of them into paying customers. 

Lars says he's most proud of building Zaps to automate the entire lead management process and creating a more tailored experience for their prospective customers. 

“A lead’s entire journey goes all the way through Zapier,” he says.

Thanks to the success of its lead management and customer nurtures, Veo was confident enough to grow its team. Since Lars started at Veo less than two years ago, the company has doubled in size to nearly 300 employees and added new members to the marketing team to continue developing its lead management processes. 

“There’s been a lot of growth at Veo, which is one of the reasons we have tried to automate everything—to make it work smoothly and remove manual work,” Lars said.

With automated lead generation and nurturing processes, Veo has been able to create a seamless experience and increase its customer base. From the Premiere League’s Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. to the Tennessee Soccer Youth Club in the U.S., Veo is able to further its mission of democratizing video broadcasting—with a little help from Zapier.