How OctoClean stays personal at scale with video

Overview

OctoClean is a commercial cleaning franchisor that supports 70 franchise owners serving medical facilities, schools, universities, and offices across Southern California and Arizona. For the past five years, OctoClean’s team has used Vidyard to bring video into nearly every part of the business, from the first sales conversation to franchise onboarding to the community OctoClean now runs for other cleaning business owners.

What started as a way to host video securely has grown into the connective layer between OctoClean’s sales, marketing, and training workflows.

You need video within your sales and marketing strategy right now. If you aren’t taking advantage, you’re going to fall behind. Video is how you stand out, resonate with people, and show that you’re a modern company. — Andrea Horning, Marketing Director, OctoClean

Challenge

Building a sales and training process that could scale

Previously, OctoClean’s sales team relied solely on in-person relationships, walking prospective clients through their facilities. Video played a role in marketing, mostly through YouTube at the time, but it didn’t yet have a role in sales outreach or internal training.

As OctoClean grew, that in-person approach became harder to scale across a wider footprint of prospects and franchise owners. The company needed a way to keep outreach personal without requiring a meeting in the room every time. Marketing Director Andrea Horning and her team also needed more control over video than YouTube could offer, since a shared YouTube link kept prospects on a public page that could surface a competitor’s content or pull them away from OctoClean.

“We needed something internal, something we could host our videos on and have control over,” Horning said. That search led OctoClean to Vidyard.

Solution

Video woven into sales, onboarding, and marketing

OctoClean’s team now uses video at nearly every stage of the buyer journey. Before a walkthrough meeting, prospects get a video outlining what to expect from the sales team, so they know how to prepare and how much time to set aside. Later in the process, reps walk through proposals on video before a prospect signs, and once a deal closes, a video introduces the new customer to what service delivery will look like. Vidyard’s Chrome Extension makes it easy for reps to record these videos on the fly, capturing screen and webcam footage without extra setup whenever a personal touch is needed.

That approach paid off with a university, one of the large accounts OctoClean was pursuing. As Horning explained, these deals don’t start with a cold prospecting email. Her team goes in person, meets with decision-makers, and builds the relationship first. Early in the sales process, Horning’s team built a video specifically about the university’s campus and how OctoClean’s services could support it, then sent it to the people they were already in conversations with.

“I think that helped move the needle, because they were able to see how much effort and time we were putting into actually building that connection,” Horning said.

A secure, branded Video Hub for training

OctoClean hosts a dedicated Vidyard Video Hub that franchise owners share with their own employees, hosting internal videos the team doesn’t want searchable online. Because OctoClean can choose for the hub to not be indexed, it won’t turn up in search results and is only discoverable through the direct link, which keeps sensitive training content private. The branded landing pages also give everything a professional appearance, which their team has found easy to organize and brand.

That same hosting control solves another problem of OctoClean’s. They have training videos linked through QR codes posted at the facilities franchisees clean. When a training video needs an update, their team can replace the video behind the same sharing link, so every QR code keeps working without reprinting.

New hires get access to a training catalog that includes screen recordings like how to correctly create a contact in HubSpot. Customers get their own onboarding videos, walking them through their point of contact and how to submit a service request.

“It’s really reassuring to new hires to be able to have a catalog of videos they can reference,” Horning said. “And it’s reassuring to customers that you’re taking that effort to make everything clear.” As a manager, she’s noticed the same benefit day to day: “If you get a question, instead of sending a long email back, you can just film a video and send it in seconds.”

Video as a marketing and brand-building habit

Embedded Vidyard videos show up in nearly every marketing email OctoClean sends. Horning has noticed the difference in video upload speed, noting how much faster Vidyard is than other tools they’ve used previously. “It’s really fast uploading videos to Vidyard, way faster than like Google Drive, I’ve noticed,” she said. “So there’s not that waiting time either.”

Video has also become a way to build culture internally. Their team creates spotlight videos of team members and franchise owners and shares them across the company, which she says has helped strengthen the sense of community within OctoClean itself. OctoClean’s team also records an annual Christmas video to build internal team culture while being able to measure engagement. From a mock interview with Santa about his janitorial needs to a blooper reel set to holiday music, they share it with customers and franchise owners and it’s a tradition employees and customers look forward to each year.

Turning video views into HubSpot signals

Because Vidyard integrates directly with HubSpot, OctoClean’s team can see who watched a video and how much of it they watched, right inside the CRM. “Being able to see within HubSpot itself that the video was watched by that person, you can measure a prospect’s interest,” Horning said, whether that’s a prospect deciding on a deal or a franchise owner working through training. That gives their team a clear signal on when and how to follow up.

Results

A video habit that touches every part of the business

Video has changed the pace of OctoClean’s highest-stakes sales conversations. Personalized videos, like the walkthrough OctoClean built for their prospect, help the sales team show the relationship-first approach that wins large accounts like universities and medical facilities. The data flowing back into HubSpot gives the team a read on intent so they know when and how to follow up.

That same approach to control has made training easier to scale. OctoClean’s Video Hub keeps sensitive content private and looking branded and professional, while persistent sharing links let the team update onboarding and training content anytime, without reprinting QR codes across facilities.

On the marketing side, video has become a matter of brand control as much as content, since nearly every marketing email includes video. That habit of using video well has even grown into a business of its own. OctoClean now runs a paid coaching community of more than 200 members, teaching other cleaning business owners how to build what it built.

Video is what has empowered us to be more. We’re not just a cleaning service, we’re an actual partner. We’re an educator now, and we’re able to show how much we care about our service through video. — Andrea Horning, Marketing Director, OctoClean

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About OctoClean

For more than 30 years, OctoClean has provided commercial cleaning and janitorial services to medical facilities, schools, universities, and offices across Southern California and Arizona. OctoClean supports 70 franchise owners with sales, marketing, training, and administrative resources, and runs a coaching community that shares its playbook with other cleaning business owners.