How Video Helps Sales and Marketing Alignment

It wasn’t very long ago that sales and marketing had virtually nothing in common. They used different tools, employed different tactics, and tracked different metrics. They even sat in different parts of the office at most companies.

And that lack of alignment started to cause problems. With no clear path for collaboration, the effectiveness of both departments started to suffer. Lead quality decreased, sales funnels broke, and bottom lines suffered. It became such a common problem that a billion dollar marketing automation industry sprung up to fix it. But it wasn’t a single tool that bridged the decades-old gap between sales and marketing.

Rapidly changing industries and customers have forced marketing and sales tactics to adapt at a faster pace than any other point in history. Much like a type of career-focused natural selection, both departments eliminated the tactics and strategies that didn’t work, and prioritized those that yielded the best results. The end results for both departments wound up looking a lot like the other. Sales is now more focused on delivering real value to customers and building relationships, and marketing is focused on campaigns and tactics that result in the best outcomes for sales.

Chief among those successful tactics is video.

A Win-Win

With so many tactics, tools, and strategies circulating the business world these days, sales reps and marketers alike can only focus on a very select few at any given time. There’s just not enough time in the day to be on EVERY channel and EVERY medium. Both departments narrow their focus to a select group of tactics that yield the best results. Some of these tactics are exclusive to each department. Marketing will never be heavily involved in cold calling and Sales will likely never spend much time focused on ad buys. But video is the rare exception that delivers value to both departments.

For marketers, there’s few channels more effective at solving marketing problems than video. Need more traffic? Companies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-users, and video drives a whopping 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines. Want to drive more leads? According to 70% of marketers, video produces more conversions than any other type of content. Video delivers results across multiple marketing functions and throughout the customer lifecycle.

The benefits are just as staggering on the sales side, as well. Video is a powerful alternative to the traditional sales email, and is actually more effective. 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text, while four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. And those video views aren’t just vanity metrics. Prospects who view videos of a product are 85% more likely to buy.

A Shared Tactic

This shared success with video makes it a rare opportunity for collaboration. Sales and Marketing teams have grown much closer in recent years, but much of their relationship is still transactional. Marketing will produce valuable assets for the sales team to distribute, while Sales will request specific campaigns or promotions to help them reach more accounts. While this is certainly more collaborative than the old model, the information flow is still one direction at a time.

Video is a rare opportunity for both departments to actively collaborate. Two heads are better than one, and bringing the two teams together yields better results for a wide range of video assets. Shooting a new product demo? Sales reps have run a thousand demos and know the flow and structure that works the best. Filming a personal video for a prospect? Marketers can help craft the story and make sure it stands out. Holiday videos, company updates, feature overviews—the list of potential videos sales and marketing can collaborate on is endless.

Shared Success

While collaboration fosters better relationships and communication, it also has another positive externality at the executive level: it gives both departments a shared marker for success.

It’s hard to ever have two departments align if they are focused on achieving different things. A sales manager will never care about a brand’s Instagram following the same way a marketing manager will never care about a rep’s activity numbers. But with both departments using video, there’s a large area of overlap between the two departments. Both departments care about views and engagement levels. Both departments are interested in any view drop-offs or areas of a video that are rewatched. When a marketer talks about a video’s viewer retention, somebody on the sales team will know exactly what they’re talking about.

Being on the same page for metrics allows sales and marketing to work together to improve them.

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