Prospect Smarter, Not Harder: Introducing Vidyard’s New AI-Powered Prospecting Assistant

Imagine if you had a virtual sales assistant who could fully automate the tasks of sourcing new leads, verifying contact details, and sending personalized messages on your behalf.

An assistant who used AI to get smarter with each message it sent.

Now imagine if you could start using that assistant for free—with no setup, configuration, or administration required—whether you’re a sales rep, entrepreneur, or business leader.

I’ve dreamed of a product like this ever since I became a founder and a sales rep myself—and I couldn’t be more excited to make it a reality with our newest product: Vidyard Prospector.

Outbound Sales, Automated. Spend less time hunting leads and more time hitting quota with Vidyard Prospector. Learn More

The Challenge of Prospecting When It’s Not Your Primary Role

When we started Vidyard in 2011, I wore both hats of co-founder and sales rep.

I quickly realized that generating new sales opportunities can be daunting and exhausting. This is especially true when you need more brand awareness or inbound lead flow. It becomes even more challenging when those responsible for generating new leads are also handling deal progression, revenue closing, and picking up branded t-shirts for conferences.

In the early days, we spent countless hours each week compiling lead lists, sending personalized emails in the hundreds, and making phone calls from morning EST to nightfall PST.

Sometimes it worked, and often it didn’t. The only sure bet was that it would take up a massive amount of time each week—time we would have rather spent with buyers and customers.

Sound familiar?

Fast forward to today, we now have a robust sales and marketing tech stack with specialized Sales Development Reps (SDRs), Account Executives (AEs), and Account Managers (AMs). We have strong brand awareness and steady demand for our video messaging, video hosting, and digital sales room products.

Yet, we still find ourselves spending countless hours compiling lead lists, crafting personalized emails, and smiling and dialing.

When prospecting for new business, it has always felt like a challenging compromise: should you optimize for effectiveness by manually curating lists and personalizing messages, or for efficiency by automating and scaling the process using cookie-cutter messaging?

As someone who hates to compromise, I’ve often wished for a way to do both: hyper-targeted and personalized, yet fully automated, outbound prospecting.

Sales engagement products have gotten us part of the way there, but they still require a lot of human intervention and manual personalization. They’re terrific for larger teams of SDRs who live and breathe prospecting, but they weren’t designed for individual account executives, small startups like 2011 Vidyard, or people like myself who just want to go-go grow.

But with the recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), we’ve learned that we could finally make my wish come true with a bit of imagination and a lot of engineering grit.

Introducing Vidyard Prospector

We began by building an AI tool to scour billions of online contact records and create daily lists of best-fit leads who match your ideal customer profile (ICP).

It was then trained to use generative AI to write a series of hyper-personalized emails to each lead based on all the available information it could find for them and to schedule the delivery of those messages over a short period of time.

And finally, we added the ability to include a Vidyard video message within each email. This ensures that it is not only personalized but personal. We also included the option to add a video CTA link to your preferred calendaring tool. This allows for automated meeting booking using tools like Calendly, Chili Piper, HubSpot, etc.

Using AI to Automate Outbound Sales Tactics

What started as an experiment grew into a complete product to automate digital sales tasks, including:

1. Contact research
2. Lead data acquisition and enrichment
3. Personalized email message creation
4. Message queuing and delivery
5. Meeting scheduling

And the best part? Using AI learning models, it will track the effectiveness of each message to continuously optimize itself for higher response rates and more booked meetings.

Vidyard Prospector Is Here and Freely Available to Everyone

Vidyard Prospector is the first AI-powered prospecting assistant that automates the tasks of finding new leads and booking new meetings using hyper-personalized emails and personal video messages.

In essence, it’s the ally I once wished for—a synthesis of tech and touch that makes creating connections more efficient, giving humans more time to build genuine relationships with buyers and customers. And now, it’s available for everyone, free of charge.

This launch marks a significant milestone in exploring the future of AI-powered sales solutions, but the journey of innovation is ongoing. I’m excited about what lies ahead and invite you to explore Vidyard Prospector as we shape the future of B2B sales and buyer experiences together.

Outbound Sales, Automated. Spend less time hunting leads and more time hitting quota with Vidyard Prospector. Learn More