What is send rate? Video send rate explained
Send rate is the share of eligible opportunities that actually receive a video, and the share of licensed reps who send at least one in a given period. It measures adoption rather than performance, which is exactly why it belongs at the top of the report.
Managers usually track it as two separate figures, because they answer two different questions: how much of the work is covered, and how many people are doing it.
How is send rate calculated?
Coverage send rate = videos sent divided by eligible opportunities in the period, times 100.
Rep participation rate = reps who sent at least one video divided by licensed reps, times 100.
The second one is where the arguments happen, because "eligible opportunity" has to be defined before either number means anything. In service it is usually repair orders where an inspection was carried out. In sales it is normally new leads assigned to a rep, or first follow-ups. Write the definition on the report in words. A store measuring against inspected ROs and a store measuring against every RO are not comparable, and neither of them sent a different number of videos to get there.
A third figure is worth carrying alongside them: videos per active sender per week. It separates depth from breadth.
Send rate explained: a worked example
A workshop runs 460 repair orders in a month across 18 advisors, and 212 of those customers get a video. Coverage send rate is 212 divided by 460, or 46 percent. Eleven of the 18 advisors sent at least one, so participation is 61 percent.
Then look at the distribution. Six advisors account for 180 of the 212 sends. The other five sent 32 between them, and seven sent nothing at all. The headline says 46 percent adoption. What is actually running is a six-person pilot inside an 18-person department, and no team average will show you that.
Why send rate is the leading indicator
Every other video metric is a percentage of sends. Response rate, view rate, approval lift, conversion, all of them are multiplied by the number of videos that left the building, and any percentage of zero is zero.
That makes send rate the one number that predicts the others rather than describing them after the fact. A department at 15 percent coverage cannot produce a meaningful result no matter how good the platform is, and no feature comparison, integration or quality score changes that arithmetic. A tool nobody uses produces no results whatever it can do.
It is also the earliest signal you get. Send rate moves within days of a process change. Approval rates and closing ratios move over months, by which point the quarter is already spent.
Where send rate gets misread
- Reading the mean instead of the spread. Two enthusiasts and eight non-users produce the same average as ten moderate users, and require completely different management.
- Counting logins as adoption. An advisor who opens the app daily and sends nothing has a send rate of zero.
- Sending to hit the number. A 20 second video with no findings, fired at every RO to lift the percentage, trains customers to ignore the link. Watch video response rate at the same time and the padding shows up immediately.
- Changing the denominator quietly. Narrowing "eligible" from all ROs to inspected ROs can add 20 points overnight without a single extra video.
- Comparing sales and service. Different denominators, different cadence, different customer state. Report them separately.
What actually moves it
- Put the send inside an existing step. Attached to the write-up or the inspection, not as an extra task once the last car has gone.
- Name the eligible list. "Every RO with recommended work" is a rule. "Where it makes sense" is not.
- Make it visible per person, weekly. Monthly reporting is too slow to correct anything.
- Fix the six-person pilot problem directly. Pair a non-sender with a heavy sender for a week rather than retraining the whole department.
- Remove friction first. If sending takes longer than picking up the phone, the phone wins every time.
Read it next to response rate, which tells you whether the videos that did go out landed, and video analytics for what happened after the customer opened one.
VentaVid reports on this directly. Real-time dashboards, leaderboards and statistics layered by location and region show which reps and service advisors are sending and how often, with a video quality scoring tool on higher plans for identifying the people worth copying.