Is your sales team using a video strategy to communicate with customers? Why not?
The most powerful tool a sales rep has is video. 75% of the top-performing sales professionals say video increases their response rate. A video can reverse the negative effects of reading text-heavy emails and make prospects feel more open to your pitch.
The benefits of a bigger video strategy are even greater when your entire sales team collaborates. Video not only allows for authentic outreach but also helps teams to increase their collective mindshare and spend more time selling.
HubSpot actually calls video prospecting one the most important skills that every sales rep must master. However, SDRs are not the only ones who will find video useful. Everyone on your team can benefit from creating and sending great videos, from account executives to managers to SDRs.
Although you may not yet have a video strategy, this article will help you understand why it is so crucial to the success of your team. Continue reading!
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A Video Strategy for Sales Teams: The Benefits
Learning how to integrate video into your sales process is worth the effort. These are three reasons video should be an integral part of your marketing and sales strategy.
It increases mindshare by grabbing prospects’ attention, helping them remember your reps and making it more memorable. You can also use video view analytics to track who is watching, how long they’re watching and how engaged they are.
Despite all the tech advancements, it is still surprising to find a one-on-one video in your inbox.
Emails with the word “Video” in their title are still 8x as likely to be opened, and 3x more likely get a response.
It is not unusual to receive one video in your email. However, getting multiple videos from the same person is quite remarkable. That’s memorable. Their company’s reputation for authentic, personable outreach is earned by all of its account executives, business development representatives, and sales consultants who use video.
Videos build trust even if prospects don’t respond to your first message. Prospecting for closed-lost accounts gives a new rep an advantage: They use the same format, videos–as the previous rep. This gives them continuity and increases their chances of getting a response.
It’s worth millions of words if prospects watch the video. Video communicates information in three modes simultaneously: audio, text, and images. One minute spent looking at an email with a screenshot is not communicative compared to one minute of video in which a prospect demonstrates how easy their software is.
It’s difficult to visualize software extracting metadata. Video has been an extremely powerful use case. People see the file when I drag it and drop it. They can see how they would use it.
Ryan SimonBrandfolderAccount Executive
Sell More
A video platform can help sales teams achieve economies of scale.
Instead of recording a video every time they send an email, LinkedIn InMail or other communication, sales teams can save the videos and create playlists. They can also reuse videos and mix and match. Why reinvent a marketing video that does a great job explaining the product? A salesperson can just add a short, personal introduction to the product and hit send.
Video platforms can transmit data directly to your CRM and marketing systems. Alerts can be set up by teams to notify prospects when they have watched certain portions of a video or clicked on a link. Marketing teams can use video viewing habits to score leads and account accounts and personalize their account-based marketing campaigns.
Sales teams, for example, can:
Alerts to be set for leads who watch videosSet alerts when accounts watch videosIncorporate video data in their lead scoring rules
Salespeople will spend less time recording and observing who was watching, which means they have more time to sell.
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Measure sales success
Analytics can be used by sales teams to measure metrics that are important using a video platform:
Email Opens: How many prospects open emails containing videos?Response Rates : Are prospects responding to these messages?Meeting Booking Rates : Are meetings generated by video messages?Win Rate : Does the team win more deals with videos?View Time Percentage : How much do prospects view each video?
To see the performance of individual reps, sales leaders can add video reports into their CRM dashboard. Do a few reps get the most booked meetings? Is it possible that one rep has an unusually high response rate?
You can view their videos and see what they do differently. Then, you can coach the team based upon what you find.
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You can test the effectiveness of video by rolling it out to a specific team or a small group of people to see how it affects their performance relative to the rest.
Leaders can view the video performance of their entire team and ask questions such as “How does it influence deals?” or “Where does it show up in deal cycles?”
Take a look and learn
Chalk Talk’s Director of Growth Marketing Terrance Kwak explains how sales can use video analytics in order to learn more about prospects, buyers, identify most engaged leads, and have more productive conversations that move deals forward.
Business development managers can see how video influences responses and meetings booked. Sales managers and customer success managers can view win rates, renewal rates, and even measure the dollar-value video adds to pipeline and revenue.
Sales enablement organizations also benefit. They can see which videos work best at each stage and advise sales reps accordingly.
The data can be as granular as they want: Sales enablement teams can view which parts of videos individual prospects view, skip, or repeat, to fully understand how they consume video and how the team can use it to drive more sales.
The key is to maintain the mindset of continuous testing and measurement. Look at how individual teams or reps are using video and how many meetings they’re booking. If one person is sending a lot of videos and their engagement rate is low, I want to know what’s happening. Same with someone who sends fewer videos, but gets higher response rates. Analytics can help you discover pockets of excellence on your team, and when you find something that’s working, you can immediately share that across your team.
Jamie ShanksSales at LifeCEO
Practice makes perfect
Video usage across the entire team elevates it beyond a tactic and into a full fledged sales strategy that grows upon itself. Video can help everyone gain more mindshare, increase sales, and make their lives easier. If that combination doesn’t work to crush your quota, then what?
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This article was first published January 23, 2019. This post was last updated on December 22, 2020.
Why sales teams need a video strategy
