Vidyard Hires CRM Industry Veteran as New Vice President of Sales

KITCHENER, ON--(Marketwired - Apr 15, 2015) - Vidyard, a global leader in video marketing and video analytics solutions, today announced it has hired Kris Lawson, former Microsoft and Salesforce executive, as the company's new Vice President of Sales to help address the exploding demand for video platform solutions across marketing and sales organizations.

Following more than 1,000-percent revenue growth within the last 24 months and a new $18 million venture capital investment led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Vidyard is experiencing unprecedented momentum in the market. Modern marketers have realized that video engages audiences like no other medium, and sales teams are increasingly using video to educate and nurture prospects. Vidyard helps sales and marketing teams turn those audiences into customers by tracking who's watching what, when and for how long, and exposing that data as actionable insights within marketing automation and CRM systems.

"Video is a critical asset for today's marketing and sales organizations. As we have seen with consumer video platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, today's buyers are living in video content and this opens up a unique opportunity for businesses in both B2C and B2B markets," said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard. "We're thrilled to have Kris on board to help guide businesses as they embrace video as a strategic driver for marketing and sales programs. Kris has an incredible track record of helping enterprises experience CRM success, so I am certain he will deliver similar success for Vidyard's customers." 

Lawson joins Vidyard from Microsoft Canada where he was National Director for Microsoft Dynamics. Kris doubled the growth rates for the CRM business in two years and helped secure the largest CRM transaction in Microsoft's history. Prior to Microsoft, he spent over eight years at Salesforce, most recently in the position of Vice President of Commercial Sales. During Kris' tenure at Salesforce, the company revenues grew from $50 million to over $3 billion with Kris helping lead the opening and expansion of Salesforce's largest office outside San Francisco. As Vidyard's new VP of Sales, Lawson will help drive the success of its existing customers while growing the Vidyard sales team across North America to drive growth among mid-market and enterprise accounts. More information about working at Vidyard is available on the careers page.

"Vidyard correctly predicted four years ago that video would be an essential medium for the modern sales and marketing organization," Lawson said. "Today, the companies that create video-leveraged customer operations benefit from lower cost of customer acquisition, increased sales productivity and greater marketing ROI. I am thrilled to join Vidyard as we help advise and transform sales and marketing organizations into Video-Leveraged Enterprises."

Vidyard goes beyond basic video hosting solutions by helping marketers optimize their content for engagement and conversion while using video analytics to generate customer insights. Through its integrations with leading marketing clouds and CRM solutions, including Salesforce, Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Act-On, sales and marketing teams can track video viewing activities for each individual contact and use that information to identify their most engaged leads as well as their best performing content.

"By tracking video engagement data for each individual lead and opportunity, businesses can not only learn more about their customers, but they can start to understand which content is driving the most pipeline and revenue," added Litt. "These insights will help marketing and sales teams produce better content and continuously drive better results."

About Vidyard
Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry's leading video marketing platform that helps marketing and sales teams drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data that can be used to turn viewers into customers.