Video is an under-utilized selling tool.
A well-crafted salesperson-generated video can educate and engage a prospect or customer more effectively than a text email.
The video-selling platform vendors have been espousing this for years.
Unlike a phone call or an online meeting, video communication is asynchronous, meaning that content can be created at one moment but consumed at a later time convenient for the prospect or customer.
Despite abundant sales enablement video technologies and vendor evangelism, many salespeople remain reluctant to put themselves in front of the camera in recording mode.
Salespeople are comfortable talking to people but not as comfortable talking to an inanimate object — a camera.
So, lower-than-expected ‘video for sales’ adoption is a human nature problem, not a technology problem.
In addition, salespeople under-share company-wide product and service videos created by the marketing department, for which ‘recording-reluctance’ is a non-factor.
This under-utilization is more of a communication and workflow problem.
Below are two main ways video can accelerate sales and some ideas about encouraging more salespeople to adopt video in their selling efforts.
1:1 Sales Videos
With 1:1 videos, the salesperson is the creator and the sender.
When a salesperson wants to advance the sales process with a prospect or customer, they can quickly record personalized videos on platforms like Vidyard and OneMob.
A 1:1 video can be emailed to a prospect from within the app. The salesperson can then get data about whether the recipient watched the video and what percentage they watched.
This sounds great, but how can a company foster the adoption of a tool like Vidyard?
Here’s a clip from our podcast interview with Ross Simmonds and his ideas about video for sales adoption.
What’s needed are internal evangelists, not just vendor proponents.
It’s one thing for a vendor to publish a stat like “Nearly half of all sales pros report that video increases close rates.”
It’s another thing for a salesperson’s company peer to say, “I closed my biggest deal of the year with the help of a 1:1 video.”
1:Many Selling Videos
1:Many (a.k.a. one-to-many) videos are generally not created with a single person in mind.
Salesperson-created content
With 1:Many videos, a salesperson can also be the creator and sender.
Salespeople can create non-person-specific, reusable videos to share over and over again with prospects and customers.
OneMob takes this one step further. It allows salespeople to create video microsites a.k.a. digital sales rooms.
One use case is to share content with multiple people within an organization — a form of ABM (account-based marketing).
Here’s our podcast episode with Jon Richards of Evolve Video Marketing. Jon’s company helps organizations with sales video strategy and coaching.
Marketing-created content
Marketing departments often create 1:Many product, service, testimonial, etc. videos on Vimeo, Wista, and YouTube platforms.
From marketing’s perspective, salespeople are one of many distribution channels for these videos. But they’re also an essential revenue channel.
It’s up to the marketing department to create a win-win by making it easy for salespeople to find and share those videos—otherwise, they become an underleveraged asset.
One sharing approach is creating video-sharing email templates inside the CRM system that salespeople use daily.
In this scenario, a listing of current videos is available inside CRM as just another view.
With a couple of clicks, a salesperson can share an appropriate video for a persona and the sales cycle stage.
A video thumbnail the recipient can click is an email template merge field.
With this easy CRM-based access, salespeople don’t need to hunt for ‘sales enablement’ videos.
The marketing department should also guide the sales team on what stage to share specific video content in the sales process.
Video has been an increasingly popular platform for entertaining, collaborating, marketing, and selling.
There are no signs of this trend letting up.
There’s a significant opportunity for salespeople to leverage this trend to advance sales cycles.
All sellers need are the right tools, training, and internal evidence that video for sales can produce results.
