Your Sales Team Has A Video Problem

People buy from people: a core sales principal that is getting more difficult each year.

Best-in-class sales teams understand the importance of connecting emotionally with customers. However, today’s customers are leveraging the vast information of the internet to research, compare and review solutions without any sales assistance. Which means sales teams’ profound skills in connecting with customers, and using emotional connection to influence are greatly diminished in today’s world. We have less time to make an impact.

Further, as customers’ day-to-day behaviors have changed, the human brain remains the same as they were thousands of years ago: evaluating friend-or-foe exactly like New World explorers or African tribesman of days past. Anyone we interact with is deeply analyzed on physicality, tonality, and verbiage in a matter of seconds.

Our sales teams are increasingly in situations where they have a minimal amount of time to make emotional customer connections. A further challenge is today’s efficient sales teams transacting more telephone-based sales, reducing our customers’ interpretation of us to simply tonality and verbiage.

Physical presence is the anchor tenant of our brain’s interpersonal analysis, representing 55% of our observations, even when there is no physical stimulus. When we speak to someone on the phone, we attempt to determine what they look like, their age, and the details of their location. In the absence of physical cues, our brain will narrow its focus to tonality to help extrapolate hints about physicality. As a result, we teach our sales teams things like “enthusiasm sells” or “the customer can hear you smile over the phone”. Selling over the phone inherently limits our ability to create the deepest possible emotional connection.

Until now.

Video is the next best thing to being with a customer in person. Best-in-class sales teams create competitive advantage by establishing physical interactivity, via video assets, in remote sales situation.

Top Ways to Use Video in Sales

Here are some of the best ways we have seen great sales teams use video:

• Customer Testimonials – Portray smart people who trust your product or service with strong, in-person customer testimonials.
• Company Culture Videos – Convey your strong culture through interviews with executives and employees.
• Seller Videos – Introduce yourself, your approach and your beliefs to every new client.
• Video Proposals – Bring physical connection and trust to your proposals by delivering the executive summary in video format.
• Product or Services Demos – Include your sales people, or product experts, in online video tours.

Plus, top sales teams are tapping into the unique power of video: if you know what they are watching, you know what they are thinking. Today’s sales people are tracking content, like email opens or whitepaper downloads, and trying to guess what it means. With video, you can track second-by-second what your customer watches, or re-watches, or when they lose interest. There is no better insight into your customers’ thoughts and feelings than what they choose to watch.

How Video Supports the Sales Organization

Let’s take a look at how video can play a pivotal role in supporting a high performance sales organization.

Sales Development

• Increased Prospecting Conversion: video helps your emails stand out from inbox clutter
• High Quality Lead Conversion: Video highlights the customers who are truly interested, helping refine the message to qualify the opportunity

Sales Reps

• Improved Pipeline Management: Video can help AEs prioritize the best deals based on amount of video consumed at a given account
• Faster Closes: Video can help get at the truth of how interested a prospect is, where their interest lies, and focus on the topics that the customer cares about

Technical Pre-Sales

• Increase Pre-Sales Productivity: Sales Engineers can record a collection of micro demos that can be combined to create a custom demo experience tailored to an account
• Grow Bigger Deals: SEs can focus their time and resources on helping close deals and creating bigger deals – where they add the most value (vs. giving top of funnel demos)

Managers

• Lower Cost of Sale: Video can be used by AEs for early stage demos – eliminating the need to pull an SE in until a later time, speeding up the deal
• Increased Sales Effectiveness: Creating on-demand training assets helps arm new and veteran reps with the latest in competitive, product or sales best practices

Your marketing team is likely on their way with video since 90% of marketers say video is becoming more important to strategies and 74% of marketers agree that video converts better than other mediums. It’s time for sales to play a role in video operations.

In many organizations, sales teams are thinking about video as a tool, not a strategy. Video is seen as ‘a marketing problem’, however sales needs to be very vocal, and involved in video creation, distribution and analytics operations or they’ll miss out on massive benefits that video provides sales.

Sales teams that deploy video as a strategy will powerfully adapt to the reality of today’s fast-moving and remote customer, and outperform those teams that continue to sell without the emotion, efficiency, or deep customer insight that video delivers.

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