As stay-at-home restrictions begin to lift in some areas, many brands are turning their attention towards how to drive sales in the coming months. Analysis from Hubspot shows that deals created and closed in mid-May took a positive turn compared to previous weeks, with 6% increases two weeks in a row. If your brand is looking to capitalize on these gains, an obvious option is to lean on sales teams. But why not give them extra tools to boost success?
Video is one of those tools. It amplifies the efforts and effectiveness of your salespeople by giving them an additional asset that might sway the prospective customer. It has a number of benefits for salespeople, including helping to cut down on the time they spend pursuing each individual sale and strengthening the pitches they make to customers.
So, whether your sales team is at record-high performance or could use a little help, video is effective at taking your existing efforts and making them even more successful—and efficient. If you’re ready to capitalize on those benefits, here’s how to get started with video content that’s specifically tailored to your sales goals.
Ask Your Salespeople What Content They Need
First, go directly to the source. Ask your sales team what content they need. If they need prompting to get ideas flowing, ask them questions like:
- What questions do people commonly ask about our product/service?
- Is there a particular stage of the sales process when people often decide not to purchase?
- Do consumers have any misconceptions about our brand when they start talking to you?
- Are there key features of our product or service that really resonate with our customers?
- Which selling points seem to sway customers most consistently during conversations?
- Is there any information you give that is time-consuming to explain over and over again?
These questions open a dialogue between your sales team and the team(s) managing video content—often marketing and either an in-house production department or a third-party production company. This dialogue itself is actually a wonderful benefit of going through the production process as it’s common for sales teams and marketing teams to lack alignment in many organizations. By tuning into the needs of your salespeople, your marketing team can adapt to make content—video and otherwise—that serves their needs more effectively.
Starting by going directly to your sales team is important for a few other reasons, too. One is that your salespeople obviously have the most experience with your sales process and with your prospective customers. They truly know best when it comes to driving sales for your brand, so they’re in the best position to identify potential gaps that video could help to fill.
A second reason is by involving your sales team in the process upfront, you’ll increase the likelihood that they’ll actually use the video content later. By giving them a say in the content that’s created, you’re giving them a personal tie to the project, which may incentivize them to put it into practice when the video is ready for use.
Decide What Type(s) of Video to Make
Next, you’ll want to decide what type of video you’re going to create. Base this decision primarily off of the information you got from your salespeople. Whatever video you create should address challenges they’re facing, save them time in relaying the same information over and over again, or emphasize the points they say help sway customers.
Note that as you create these videos, the content can be longer than you might be accustomed to seeing with other brand content like social media videos. Because of the nature of the sales process, someone who is seeing this video is already investing time and resources into understanding your product or service. While a 5-minute video might scare off a viewer on social media, a 5-minute video sent from a salesperson to a prospective customer can be more appropriate because the viewer is primed for that level of detail.
With that in mind, here are several common types of videos that specifically support sales.
FAQ Videos
FAQ videos are great for addressing questions that your salespeople receive time and time again. By sharing the FAQ video on your website or having salespeople send it to prospective customers during one of their first touchpoints, they can get ahead of some of these questions and save valuable time.
There’s also a consistency benefit here. By making a video to go over common questions, you’re able to ensure that every viewer is receiving the same answer. If your company’s salespeople sometimes give conflicting information or answer questions slightly differently, having a video standardizes the experience for customers.
As you make these videos, make sure that the “answer” portion of each FAQ covers information for both the decision maker and the end user. In some cases, this will be the same information or the same person. Other times, the decision maker may need more information about concepts like the sales process or your support teams, while the end user is typically focused on whether your brand will solve their problem.
Bio Videos
If you don’t have a company “about” video, now is a great time to make one. Your salespeople can use bio content to give prospective customers insight into what your brand is and what it stands for. This often helps build trust with the viewer, easing them into the purchasing decision.
You could also consider making a few versions of your bio video. This could be especially useful if your customers tend to fall into a few key industries or use cases (potentially represented by your brand personas, if you have them). You could make one video for each segment, customizing your “about” language and any examples you give to make sure they’re specifically relevant to your viewer in each case.
Cost/Pricing Videos
Our next suggestion for sales-focused content is a video that goes over the costs or pricing structure involved in a customer’s purchase decision. In 2013, a study found that business customers report price as the #1 piece of information they want to find on an organization’s website, but many sites don’t actually provide this information—especially B2B sites. While the study is slightly outdated, the logic likely holds true today. People who are investing time into understanding your brand want to know—right away—whether your prices are even realistic for their needs.
So, how does this apply to salespeople? The concept is the same for prospective customers coming through a more personal channel by way of your sales team. They want to know early on whether continuing the sales conversation is even feasible based on your pricing. Making a video to explain your cost structure is a great way to mitigate this problem and earn trust with your prospective customers by being transparent from the start.
Video is specifically useful for this task (as compared to other mediums) because pricing can be complicated to explain depending on how your prices are set up, and video is especially effective at relaying complex information.
So, consider making a video that gives detailed information about price. If your pricing is highly dependent on the exact needs of each customer, make a video anyway that gives some examples or highlights your most common scenarios. Viewers will understand that their case may be slightly different, but now they have a ballpark figure in mind and are less likely to feel that you’re hiding something by obscuring prices until late in the sales process.
Personal Sales Videos
Finally, rather than making one of the videos above (or in addition to the videos above), you can give your salespeople the resources to make personal video content that they send to individual contacts. This helps prospective customers by putting a face behind your brand, and it allows your salesperson to get really specific about the information they give.
Some ideas? Have your salesperson tell a personal story about why they joined the brand or what they love most about it. Some people even recommend that sales employees put this type of video in their email signatures. Again, this helps with building trust and makes the relationship feel less automated right from the start.
Or, if your team has already been in contact with this customer, make a video that touches on specific points you know might be contributing to hesitation. You can provide information about the use case you know the customer might be considering, or even talk about why your product is better than a close competitor.
Regardless of the specifics, personal sales videos allow you to tailor your messaging to each customer in a unique way, helping you to stand out from the crowd and get straight to the points your customer needs to hear. Note that if this isn’t feasible for every customer, you could also encourage your salespeople to take this approach for high-stakes deals that may require additional investment.
Tap Into Natural Competition to Ensure Distribution
Lastly, once you have your video content created, it’s important that your sales team uses the content when working with prospective customers. You don’t want to put resources into developing this great new asset only to have it go unused with actual sales prospects.
One way to encourage the use of your content is to tap into the natural competition that often exists between salespeople in the same organization. Because success for salespeople is typically linked to the number of deals they close, if one employee sees that incorporating video content into sales pitches helps close deals, they’ll be more inclined to continue using it in the future.
If other salespeople are skeptical or want to lean 100% on their own methods, seeing the way video helps their peers may inspire others to adopt video into their own strategies for fear of being left behind.