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Why is No One Talking about Video for Sales?

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Business2Community recently cited media content marketing as one of the B2B marketing trends to look out for in 2017. They write, “It’s easy to see why video and photos are becoming more and more common with time as inexpensive tools for creating a variety of rich media become increasingly available and affordable.” And as cited in a presentation from Act-On at Demand Gen’s B2B Marketing Exchange, 75% of executives watch video on a weekly basis. 

As you might’ve noticed though, all of the above information is directed at marketing. There’s no doubt that video is becoming a more and more powerful tool in the marketing world – and in fact, in the world in general (think Netflix, Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) But no one is talking about video for sales – specifically, B2B sales.

Video: Not Just for Marketing

When I google the phrase “video for B2B sales”, it’s not until the third post down that you see the word “sales”. And even then, it’s a link from Funnelholic sharing session recaps from their B2B Sales Summit event. Not the right type of video we’re looking for. Every other post jumps right to “video marketing”. It’s no wonder that sales teams dread working with video – not only do they think it’s time consuming, difficult to measure and costly, but now they have to work with the marketing team?! No thank you.

But the reality is that our sales team is using (and recording/editing) videos every week to engage our prospects. But before I get into that, let’s get a little deeper on why sales needs to leverage video:

  • HubSpot reports, “4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.” Also, “In a 2016 HubSpot survey, 43% of consumers wanted to see more video content in 2016.”
  • With account based sales development on the rise, sales teams need to be equipped with the right content on the fly, that is personalized to the accounts they’re managing. They can’t always rely on marketing for this, because marketing creates content that speaks to typically a wider audience and doesn’t have time to create custom content.
  • Circling back to the video stats mentioned earlier, video is one of the easiest ways to catch your target audience’s attention. Video is the closest form of content to mimick human behavior, which makes it more memorable through evoking emotion and relatability. Sales teams need a way to cut through the noise of all the other content being thrown in front of their prospects.
  • Video is extremely adaptable to different levels of the sales funnel. Think a funny sales video that creates brand awareness at the top of the funnel, or a quick video recapping the terms of agreement that a sales rep has just created for their future client at the bottom of the sales funnel. Then think of the last time you saw a “funny” ebook, or an infographic used at the bottom of the funnel – these types of content are much less adaptable.

How to Start Using Video in B2B Sales

I recently attended a conference where a presenter shared a story from one of their sales reps. The sales rep had gained a lot of momentum with a specific prospect; they’d had one or two calls and things were looking good. Then, the biggest nightmare of any sales rep happened; the prospect stopped responding and disappeared.  The sales rep got creative and filmed a simple video on his phone, of him walking into different rooms saying, “Bonnie, where are you?”. It was a fifteen second video with practically no editing required. He attached it to his next email to Bonnie and it worked – she thought the video was hilarious and the deal was back on track. It took him maybe half an hour to create the most highly personalized and effective piece of content. Imagine if we could do that at scale.

At Consensus, we are doing that at scale. Our video demo automation platform provides a full recording/editing studio (Consensus Studio™) with a dashboard of analytics for any sales rep to see how prospects are interacting with their videos. So imagine this: that sales rep sends the same “Bonnie, where are you?” video to his prospect. But this time, he’d be notified by email the moment she started watching it – this way, he could call her while she’s actively engaging already. He could also see how long she watched the video, if she re-wound certain parts, or if she shared it with anyone else in the company. That’s a lot of insight, and it’s extra powerful when applied to product demos.

I bet there are a lot of features and benefits about your solution that you wants prospects to know about. But YOU already know, that they won’t care about all of them. But it’s also hard to know which ones you should lead with, or cover, because you’re not sure about your prospect’s needs and priorities. With automated product demo videos, you put the demo in the hands of the prospect. It’s like a “choose your own journey” demo video, where they get to choose what features they want to learn about your solution. On the back end, you can see exactly how and when they’re interacting with it, who they’re sharing it with, and how other people are interacting with it that have been shared with.

Video doesn’t have to be time consuming, costly and difficult to measure. With the right recording platform and back-end analytics, it becomes just as powerful as any other marketing strategy.

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