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Your CFO is going to ask "what's the ROI on video?" Here's the answer that actually works.
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Let's get the uncomfortable truth out of the way first.
You will never get perfect attribution for video. HubSpot can’t solve this problem for you, neither can Salesforce. Neither can your $200K martech stack and a team of three data analysts.
And it’s because B2B buying doesn't work the way attribution models think it works.
Your buyer watches a LinkedIn video on their phone during lunch. Two weeks later, they read a case study on your website from a Google search. A month after that, their colleague forwards them an email with your demo video. Three weeks later, they book a call. Attribution says the call came from "email." But the real journey started with a video on their phone. Also, who knows what conversations they had in the two weeks they weren’t engaging?
Forrester says B2B buyers need an average of 27 touchpoints before purchasing. Dreamdata puts it at 62. Video is woven into that journey in ways that no attribution tool can fully capture. If you wait for perfect measurement before investing in video, you'll wait forever.
So what DO you track?
Forget views. Forget likes. Here are the four things your CFO actually cares about, translated into numbers they understand.
This is the one that makes CFOs shut up and stop bothering you.
Measure the average days-to-close for deals where the prospect engaged with video content vs. deals where they didn't. You don't need fancy attribution software for this. Just ask your sales team: "Of the last 10 deals that closed, how many of those prospects watched our videos or mentioned them?"
(Pro Tip: Use tools like Wistia or Vidyard to track how much of these videos were watched. There are free plans).
If deals where prospects watched video close 20-30% faster, that's a metric that actually matters because it means real money in your pocket, faster. A sales cycle that goes from 90 days to 65 days means your sales team is closing more deals per quarter with the same headcount.
How to present it: "Deals where prospects engage with our video content close 30% faster. On our current pipeline, that's the equivalent of adding one more sales rep without the salary."
This one is sneaky because it's a leading indicator. If your sales team is voluntarily dropping videos into outreach sequences, follow-up emails, and Slack conversations with prospects, the content is working. If they're not using it, it's not.
Track it simply: How many times per week are sales reps sharing video links? You can pull this from your CRM's activity log or just ask in your next sales meeting.
How to present it: "Our sales team used video content in 47 prospect conversations last month. That's 47 conversations where they didn't have to spend the first 20 minutes of their calls answering the same questions.”