The Epic Rise of Video in Sales
Sales professionals obviously prefer face-to-face meetings with their prospects but sometimes, given their territories, that just can’t happen on a regular basis. The alternative has mostly been to set up a conference bridge, email over a slide deck or Powerpoint presentation or get on the phone to sell. Maybe they’ll toss over some whitepapers so their prospects can read up before the call and prepare some questions.
The future of these sales meetings will one day be all video-based, no longer just a voice over a phone and a LinkedIn picture to match a face. Just tossing over a PowerPoint presentation and hoping that will close a deal will be as cool as wearing a Hello Kitty backpack on your first day of high school.
Those traditional sales and marketing webinars will fall into obscurity as they will morph into a more visually interactive forum. Still shots and slides will be far and few between.
We did some work for a client whose business model was based on the ability to make enterprise video searchable, like a corporate Youtube where every spoken word is a searchable term. Through our outbound activity we found that, although these projects aren’t all happening right at this moment, companies are preparing to make a gigantic push to utilize video.
We’re talking videos being used within every department, but for sales, we see video being used on a larger scale: collateral, social selling and marketing, sales training, onboarding, coaching, development, employee-to-employee communication and employee-to-prospect communication. Also, video can be archived so it’s easily accessible for future use and with the amount of storage now available, there shouldn't be a problem worrying about taking up valuable server space.
Let’s face it: if people have a choice between watching a video and listening to a recording or reading through presentations, I’m sure watching a video will far outdo its predecessors.
I’m curious to know your ideas. How can video be utilized by sales teams and what are your experiences with it thus far?