If your team doesn’t have a video-powered sales strategy, you’re letting opps slip through your fingers. Discover three essential benefits that come from building video into your sales strategy.
Does your sales team have a video sales strategy? If you don’t—why not?
Video is arguably a sales rep’s single most powerful sales tool. 75% of top-performing sales pros say that video increases their response rates. While reading through a text-heavy email inbox makes prospects feel unhappy and stressed, watching a video reverses that effect, making them more receptive to your pitch.
And when your entire sales team coordinates on a larger video sales strategy, the benefits get even bigger. That’s because beyond offering personal, authentic outreach, video helps teams collectively earn more mindshare, spend more time selling, and improve quicker.
In fact, HubSpot has called video prospecting one of the key skills every sales development rep needs to master—though SDRs certainly aren’t the only ones who’ll find video valuable. Every member of your team, from SDRs to account execs to sales leadership, have something to gain from learning how to create and send great videos.
You may not have a video sales strategy in place right now, but by the end of this post, you’ll understand exactly why it’s so important to your team’s success. Read on.
- Contents
- 1. The Benefits of a Video Sales Strategy for Sales Teams
- 1.1 #1: Earn More Mindshare
- 1.2 #2: Spend More Time Selling
- 1.3 #3: Measure Sales Success
- 2. How Leaders Can Put Video to Work in Their Sales Strategy
- 2.1 For Team Leads and Managers
- 2.2 For Sales Enablement
- 3. Practice Makes Your Video Sales Strategy Perfect
The Benefits of a Video Sales Strategy for Sales Teams
It’s worth your while to learn how to incorporate video into your sales process. Here are three big reasons why video should be a big part of your sales and marketing strategy:
- #1: It earns more mindshare, grabbing prospects’ attention and helping your reps stick in their memory.
- #2: It lets your team spend more time selling by making their outreach more repeatable and scalable.
- #3: It makes it easier to measure success by tapping into video view analytics to see who’s watching, for how long, and how engaged they are.
#1: Earn More Mindshare
Despite the prevalence of tech advances, a personal, one-to-one video is still a surprising thing to receive in your inbox.
Sales video emails are more likely to be opened and more likely to earn a response.
Now, getting one video in your inbox is surprising. But getting a video from several different people at the same organization? That’s memorable. If account executives, business development reps, and sales consultants all use video, their company earns a reputation for personable, authentic outreach.
Even if prospects don’t respond to the first message, videos build familiarity. A new rep prospecting into closed-lost accounts gets a big advantage: They’re using the same unusual format—videos—that the last rep used. This lends continuity and makes them a lot more likely to earn a response.
If prospects do watch the video, it’s worth millions of words. Video conveys information in three modalities at once: Images, audio, and text. A minute spent reading an email with a screenshot pales in communicative comparison to a minute of video where a prospect shows how simple their software is.
When you talk about software extracting metadata, it’s hard to picture. But video has been a really powerful use case for us, because when I drag and drop a file and people see it, a light goes off. They can see how they’d use it.
Ryan SimonBrandfolderAccount Executive
#2: Spend More Time Selling
Teams armed with a video platform that’s built specifically for sales benefit from an economy of scale.
Rather than recording a new video each time they send an email or LinkedIn InMail, sales teams can save them and create playlists. They can reuse videos, but also mix and match. If a marketing video does a perfect job of explaining the product, why reinvent it? Salespeople can simply tack on a brief, personalized video introduction, then hit send.
Video platforms can also pass data directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems. They even integrate with your sales engagement and sales intelligence platforms. Teams can trigger alerts when prospects watch a video, or when they view a certain percentage of that video. On the other side of the house, marketing teams can score leads and accounts based on how much of a video they’ve watched, letting them better personalize their account-based marketing campaigns.
Here are a couple of ideas for your teams to try:
- Set an alert for when a lead or an account watches a video, so your reps can follow up right away.
- Incorporate your video data into your lead scoring rules for a more comprehensive view of lead engagement.
When your reps spend less time recording or checking up on who watched what, they can spend more time actually selling.
#3: Measure Sales Success
Sales teams using a video platform can use sales analytics to measure the metrics that matter.
- Email Opens: How often do prospects open emails that contain videos?
- Response Rates: Are prospects responding to the video messages that your reps are sending?
- Meeting Booking Rates: Are your reps’ video messages generating meetings?
- Win Rate: Are videos helping your team win more deals?
- View Time Percentage: How much of each video do prospects watch?
How Leaders Can Put Video to Work in Their Sales Strategy
So far, we’ve been talking mostly about how your team can use video as part of their sales strategy. But video holds plenty of benefits for sales leaders, too.
For Team Leads and Managers
Remember how we just discussed video analytics? Leaders can add those reports to their CRM dashboards to see how individual reps (and whole teams) are performing. For example, do a handful of reps generate the lion’s share of booked meetings? Does a single rep earn an abnormally high response rate? You can use this info to dig in to view those reps’ videos, see what they do differently, and coach the rest of the team based on what you find.
To test video’s effectiveness, try rolling it out to one particular team, or even just a few individuals, and see how it alters their performance compared to the rest of the organization.
Leaders can also view video performance for the entire team and answer questions like “How do videos influence my team’s deals?” or “Where are videos most effective in my team’s sales cycle?”
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 that video adds to sales pipeline and revenue.
For Sales Enablement
Organizations focused on sales enablement can see which videos work best at each stage of the sales process 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 for LifeCEO
An all-in-one video selling resource to support your strategic planning, SKO, and ongoing enablement. Get the Kit Practice Makes Your Video Sales Strategy Perfect
Team-wide video usage elevates it from a mere tactic to a fully fledged sales strategy that builds upon itself. Video helps everyone earn more mindshare, spend more time selling, and prove their success. And if a combination like that doesn’t help your team crush their quotas (like this one SDR did), what will?
This post was originally published on January 23, 2019. It was updated on August 8, 2022.
