Should Sales Teams Start Preparing for a Video Overload?
Is it Time to Ask the Question: What Next after Video?
For marketers and sales people, improving business communications and evaluating the ROI of every marketing-sales messaging is always a top priority and for B2B teams to do this well, they need access to the right customer insights and behavioral indicators in real-time.
As part of these efforts, the use of video has been gaining an immense popularity in the marketplace. The Covid-19 pandemic has in part contributed to this increase, though, marketing and sales thought leaders have been echoing the need for interactive elements like videos in marketing-sales communications since much before.
With an increased interest in video consumption, many sales teams have already capitalized on the trend by including creative video prospecting cadences and video based sales and marketing messaging.
The benefits of using video in a sales or marketing cadence boasts of several benefits, not only is it easier to consume video content on the go and quickly, it is sometimes easier to make video content and it can generate more interest in your message.
In a marketplace where prospects are already inundated with too many emails, calls and messages daily, the use of video can add a refreshing touch to a sales cadence and can be more impactful in generating a response.
But on the one hand, while sales teams across the world have started opening up to the use of videos in their prospecting, nurturing or closing stages, there will probably come a time when there is just too much video thereby in turn having a negative impact on your prospect.
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That begs the question, should sales teams start preparing for a video overload? Here’s what can help:
Leave a Voice Message
With the rise in sales automation, it is important to scale outreach by building personalized cadences and messaging that strike a chord with the prospect at each touchpoint. The simplicity and efficiency that video collaterals can offer here are several but when your prospect starts receiving too many videos about products and demos, there is a high chance a lot of your videos will start getting ignored.
The key to striking a balance involves maintaining a healthy media mix that is neither too text heavy nor too video heavy.
If you’ve just had a video call with a prospect or have just sent a short video message as part of your follow up email, including a voice recorded message to the mix might help break the monotony.
The idea of exploring various tactics through which to reach out to prospects is backed by the need to reduce monotony in communications and finding newer, more efficient ways to generate a response.
A short recorded voice note can be sent over email, sent to a prospect’s LinkedIn inbox, shared to their phone (based on how comfortable they are with you writing to them on their mobile devices).
Under 1-minute Product / Service Snippets
Some sales teams may capitalize on or prioritize keeping videos on during prospect meetings or discovery calls. This trend has somewhat become a natural part of the B2B sales meeting process today. Often times though, prospects might not be comfortable with the idea of keeping their own video on, not to mention, keeping it on can’t be a blanket rule for salespeople either.
What prospects need is crisp messaging that stands out, delivered in a format that is easy to consume and refer to again when needed.
1 minute videos about your product or service, sent as a follow up to a video meeting or a sent to break the monotony of an email cadence can help drive interest in your product or follow up.
One of the advantages of using shorter clips to breakdown a core feature of your product at a time is that these snippets will be light to load and download, easy to consume on the go while enabling you to get more attention from your prospects as opposed to a detailed email about your product.
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Summaries of Video Calls/Meetings in Text
If you’ve just had a video meeting or have used a video collateral as a supporting media for any meeting or session, summarizing everything in a plain text note that is then creatively presented (with gifs, humor if needed or as a ppt) can help contribute to readership and engagement.
A thumbnail of your video call can be used as a reference point and if the call was recorded to begin with. Creative sales minds can even go a step further and use screenshots from a recorded video conversation to re-establish certain points or features.
There is such a thing as information overload. When it comes to content, most marketers would agree that there is now far too much content out there than what prospects can consume efficiently.
It doesn’t seem like a long road off for when video based sales and marketing initiatives will also start looking like ‘’too much video’’. Seasoned marketers and sales people should stay one step ahead and prepare for this by ensuring they retain a fair element of mixed media options in their cadences and captions while ensuring none of it is either too text-heavy, video-heavy or voice-heavy.
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