Once seen as a nice-to-have within the sales process, video messaging is increasingly becoming a must-have touchpoint.

Personalized video messages help salespeople stand out from the competition, gain prospects’ attention and strengthen existing customer relationships.

Most sales teams spend much of their time juggling calls and emails with prospects, trying to keep up with their pipeline. Little time remains to make personal connections with their potential customers. As more business deals close in digital spaces, with fewer salespeople and prospects traveling to introductory meetings, video offers a unique avenue to humanize and enhance all stages of the sales process.

Salespeople can use video for email prospecting to increase clickthrough rates and attract more responses than a typical prospecting email. Increase the likelihood your prospect will see your video message immediately by:

• Recording short, personalized videos.
• Choosing an eye-catching thumbnail.
• Embedding the video into the body of an email.

Further down the sales funnel, teams use video messages through email, text and social media to enhance follow-ups, provide engaging meeting recaps, offer eye-catching appointment reminders, and share distinctive thank-you messages and referral requests.

Sales teams are increasingly adding personalized video messaging to prospect touchpoints to spark a human connection in their inboxes. But it’s one thing to introduce video messaging to your sales team and another to gain department-wide support and adoption.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Jonathan Lister, COO at Vidyard

Resistance to new tools

Adopting video messaging across your entire sales team can pose a challenge. Salespeople already manage many tools — so many that they might struggle to remember what’s what. The prospect of learning yet another new tool and integrating it into their existing workflow is daunting. These four strategies make it easier for sales managers to encourage the adoption of video messaging throughout the sales process.

Keep it simple.

Don’t overwhelm your team with a sudden, full-speed implementation of video messaging. Instead, choose one way to incorporate video into the sales process. Look to your key performance indicators (KPIs) for a starting point. For instance, if you’d like to increase monthly sales bookings, add personalized video messaging to the booking process.

Wherever you add video messaging, ensure you incorporate the step into your formal sales process. Update your training materials and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to reflect the change, and offer specific language to help salespeople see how video complements the outreach they’re already doing.

Finally, remember that habits take time to develop. Hold your team accountable to incorporating video consistently over a fixed introductory period — more than 30 days and fewer than 90 days — to reap the most significant initial benefits and demonstrate video’s value in their sales strategy.

Identify and leverage your influencers.

Every sales team has a trendsetter or two — someone who bravely advocates for a new process or takes a risk in their approach to problem-solving. Those people are often also your top performers and emerging go-getters, willing to do whatever it takes to convert a prospect into a customer.

Invite these influential team members to helm your pilot, build interest in video messaging and demonstrate its effectiveness. An internal influencer’s video messaging success will also inspire a little healthy fear of missing out (FOMO) among teammates. And because they’re so deeply involved in the tactical aspects of sales, a top performer’s recommendation to use video carries more weight with your team than a directive from management.

Remind teams to be themselves – that’s the best differentiator!

While plenty of teams have adjusted to video meetings since 2020, some people still bristle at the thought of recording a video of themselves and sending it out into the world (or even to just one other person). It’s easy to get so caught up in the desire to make a “perfect” video that you record repeatedly, and your message never reaches its audience.

The fight against perfection poses a particular challenge for salespeople, who spend much of their time and energy trying to impress potential customers and keep existing customers happy. But authenticity is a crucial trait all top-performing salespeople share. Rather than viewing video messaging as an avenue demanding perfection, encourage a mindset shift among your sales team. Challenge them to tap into their uniqueness using their perfectly imperfect selves to stand out and build connections through video.

Get some early wins and showcase them.

Once you’ve chosen how to incorporate video into your sales strategy, given teams time to try it out and found your internal influencers, identify early wins and celebrate them!

For results-oriented sales teams, recognizing and encouraging all video wins offers proof of concept and motivation to participate. Those wins can come as qualitative evidence like customer feedback. Or you might capture data-driven indicators like video views, increased prospect replies and decreased sales cycle length. Ensure you give each accomplishment the attention it deserves to promote video messaging.

Personalized video messages enable salespeople to build trust, nurture connections and strengthen credibility — all critical elements to closing a deal. But the potential for video messaging to transform your sales process depends on your team’s willingness to integrate video into their existing sales strategies. By easing into video messaging, finding peer advocates for the technology and celebrating successes big and small, you’ll remove resistance to another new tool and help your team embrace the power of video messaging.

Read More: ICM in recessionary times