How I Got a Startup + Enterprise Marketing Team to Adopt a New Creative Tool

1. The Opportunity Wasn't "We Need a New Tool"

Short-form video was becoming an increasingly important format across TikTok, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, and other platforms. For our marketing team, there was an opportunity to experiment with short-form content as another channel for awareness and lead generation.

But there was an immediate problem.

Creating an entirely new short-form content engine would require our content marketers to brainstorm ideas, write scripts, coordinate recordings, review edits, and maintain another publishing pipeline.

They were already busy producing webinars, educational resources, articles, and campaigns.

So instead of asking:

"How do we create more content?"

We started thinking about:

"How do we get more value from the content we've already created?"

We already had an answer sitting in our content library: webinars.

In reality, teams don't adopt tools because they're new or impressive. They adopt them when the tool solves a problem by shortening the process.This was a lesson in workflow design, stakeholder buy-in, creative operations, and how to introduce new technology into an organization without asking everyone to completely change the way they work.

Eventually, I found myself making the case for the same tool again, this time inside a much larger enterprise organization at SPS Commerce.

2. Start With Content That Has Already Proven Itself

Our webinars contained hours of educational content, subject-matter expertise, presentations, and conversations. More importantly, we already knew which webinars performed well. That meant we didn't need to guess what topics our audience cared about.

The audience had already told us.

Instead of creating dozens of brand-new short-form concepts from scratch, we could take our top-performing webinars and turn their strongest moments into short, educational videos.

One webinar could potentially become:

• several educational clips

• quick tips

• key statistics

• expert commentary

• LinkedIn videos

• Reels or TikToks

• supporting content for existing campaigns

The strategy wasn't simply "make short-form video." It was build a repeatable system for multiplying the value of content we had already invested in.

3. Our Existing Creative Workflow Wasn't Built for Volume

Technically, we could already create these videos. The problem was how much work it required. A traditional workflow meant moving between webinar recordings, slide decks, Premiere, graphics, captions, review tools, exports, and file storage. Multiply that process across multiple webinars and dozens of clips, and a simple content experiment quickly becomes a production problem.

That distinction became important:

The problem wasn't whether our team had the creative skills to produce short-form video. The problem was whether our existing workflow could produce enough of it to make the channel sustainable.

That's when I started experimenting with Descript.

4. Don't Just Introduce a New Tool. Introduce a Better Workflow.

Descript caught my attention because it fundamentally changed the way someone could interact with video across all stakeholders. Instead of navigating primarily through a traditional editing timeline gate kept by a designer with endless revisions and uploading/exporting, you could work in real time.

That mattered because the people identifying the best moments in a webinar weren't necessarily video editors/designers.

They were content writers + marketers.

I designed the workflow around the people who knew the content best. Content marketers could focus on identifying the moments most likely to make the new channel successful, while designers could focus on what they do best: turning those moments into visually engaging, high-quality content.

The webinar recording and presentation assets already existed.

Inside Descript, marketers could review the transcript, highlight the strongest moments, and leave notes or suggested titles.

From there, design could take those selections and turn them into polished clips using a standardized short-form template.

Captions, layouts, speaker positioning, titles, branding, outros, naming conventions, QA, and exports became parts of a repeatable system rather than decisions we had to remake for every video.

5. Evidence Beats Enthusiasm.

When you're advocating for a new tool, it's easy to focus on features.

-AI transcription.

-Templates.

-Captions.

-Text-based editing.

-Faster exports.

But features weren't the strongest argument for adoption.

The workflow was.

Using the system I built, we were eventually able to turn multiple webinars into roughly 20+ short-form assets in around an hour — work that previously could stretch across weeks or even months when handled through a more fragmented production process. I tried using Adobe Express, Premiere, etc. Each tool had it's own pros and cons.

In my experience, if a tool takes weeks just to build a workflow that accommodates every stakeholder, that complexity may be a sign the tool isn’t the right fit. Even if you narrow down who needs to be involved.

Suddenly the conversation isn't:

"Descript is a cool AI editing tool."

It was:

Here's a workflow that allows us to get dramatically more value out of content we're already producing. That is a much easier business case to understand.

6. Adoption Meant Removing Friction for Other People

One of the biggest things I learned was that successful adoption isn't about convincing everyone to work like you. It's about designing a system that fits the way they already work.

For content marketers, that meant they didn't need to learn traditional video editing.

They could read a transcript.

Highlight a section.

Leave a comment.

For designers, it meant we didn't have to rebuild the visual system every time.

We had templates. "Layout Packs."

For marketing, it meant one webinar could support an entire pipeline of additional content.

And for leadership, it meant the team could test a new channel without immediately adding significant production overhead.

Everyone had a different reason to care about the workflow.

Understanding those reasons was just as important as understanding the software.

7. Then the Startup Became Part of an Enterprise

Eventually, SupplyPike was acquired by SPS Commerce. And suddenly I had the opportunity to think about the same tool from a completely different perspective. At a startup, adoption can happen quickly.

You find a problem.

You test something.

You show the team.

You iterate.

Enterprise adoption introduces a different set of questions.

Can this work across teams?

Can it fit into existing systems?

Can non-designers use it?

Can the workflow be standardized?

Can we document it?

Can we demonstrate enough value to justify broader adoption?

I found myself advocating for Descript again, but this time the conversation wasn't simply about improving my own creative workflow. It was about showing how the technology could fit into a much larger organization cross functionally.

8. The Second Pitch, hits Different.

The startup version of the story was about speed.

The enterprise version was about scale.

I could point to an actual workflow we had already tested.

I could demonstrate how marketers and designers collaborated inside it.

I could show the templates.

I could explain the production bottleneck it eliminated.

And most importantly, I could show the output.

That changed the nature of the conversation. Instead of asking an enterprise organization to take a chance on an unfamiliar creative tool, I could show them a real use case that had already survived contact with an actual marketing team.

The conversation became less about software and more about operational impact.

9. Change is Inevitable. Learn to Adapt.

Looking back, I don't think my biggest contribution was simply discovering a faster editing tool.

It was learning how to recognize when an existing workflow had reached its limit.

Creative teams naturally become attached to the tools they know. Expertise is built around them. Processes are built around them. Sometimes entire careers are built around them.

But knowing a tool extremely well doesn't necessarily mean it is still the right tool for every problem.

Sometimes the harder skill is recognizing when to stop optimizing the old workflow and start designing a new one. The process I followed was surprisingly simple:

Find the opportunity → identify the friction → test a tool → design the workflow → prove the value → document the system → expand adoption.

That framework has changed the way I think about creative technology.

I don't evaluate tools based solely on what they can create.

I think about what they can unlock for the people around me.

10. Conclusion, I love Descript.

Descript gave us a way to make the economics of that experiment work. And the workflow we built around it turned an individual tool experiment into something other people could actually use/adopt.

That experience taught me that introducing technology into an organization isn't really about being the person who finds the newest tool. It's about being the person who can connect:

technology → workflow → people → business value.

That's the part of creative work I'm increasingly interested in, not simply making the thing, but designing better ways for teams to make things together. <3