Personalized video is a buzzy topic in B2B. Maybe overly so. Like something the whole company gets excited about for five minutes today and forgets about tomorrow when the Next Big Thing comes along.
Is video the quick fix that’s gonna solve all your sales challenges and make buyers come begging for demos? Go ahead, take a moment to roll your eyes here. We get it. Personalized video is sexy in a way that feels suspect. But while it isn’t the cure for everything difficult about B2B, buyers do respond to it. In fact, Aragon Research found 85% of buyers will consume video but ignore every other content format.
Personalized video can impact the sales cycles for organizations that operate in a highly competitive industry, deal with multiple stakeholders in a buying decision, own complex portfolios—and where relationship-building is critical in winning the deal.
Top-down and bottom-up approaches to piloting video
You need to accomplish a few things in your rollout:
- Drive adoption: Get your sales team excited—and keep them there for the long haul.
- Evaluate impact: Is video worth the time and effort? Where does it impact the sales cycle most? Keep reading to find out how you can measure success and ROI.
- Keep your sellers out of trouble: You don’t want Ed from Sales (you know Ed, great guy) flexing his Spielberg muscles. (Trust us on this. We’ve seen some very, erm, creative examples). But you do want to empower Ed to craft a personal message that creates a connection with a buyer.
Once you’re sure you’re going to roll out video to your organization, we suggest taking a top-down approach for managing this change. Not in a dictatory kinda way, but in a lead-by-example way, if you catch our drift. Because when leadership uses video to communicate with their teams, it signals the organization is all-in.
You can also use a bottom-up approach with a select group of sellers: either tech-savvy high performers or a group under a manager who’s excited about video. And by following up with your pilot team regularly, you get qualitative and quantitative feedback. Once you’ve got a few golden nuggets in hand—great numbers or testimonials from your pilot team (the good stuff)—you then roll out video to your broader salesforce. Seeing others achieve success with video brings out the copycat instinct.
How do you get those success stories? We’d suggest asking your pilot team these simple questions:
- How are buyers responding to videos?
- Have you noticed an increase in email open rates?
- Do deals progress more smoothly when you share clear and actionable info via video?
Evaluate impact
Video can be used anywhere in the sales cycle—from a quick message when your seller is getting to know a client to a mini demo to a rundown of a complicated product feature. Anywhere!
And if you’re using a modern approach to enablement, you’re not just ensuring video delivers ROI—you’re also measuring the impact in various stages of the sales cycle to see where your salesforce should focus their efforts.
Early-stage sales cycle metrics:
- Open rates
- Response rates
- Number of first meetings booked
Mid- to late-stage metrics:
- Deal velocity
- Sales cycle length
Before rollout: Check that you have the right video tool
If you’re thinking about which video tool to try (because there’s lots)—or struggling with adoption with an existing tool—you should ask yourself two questions:
- Is the tool easily accessible in my sellers’ daily environment?
- How many tech tools do my sellers use daily?
If the answer to Question 1 is ‘no,’ that will make your life difficult. Or if the answer to Question 2 is ‘more than five,’ that will start to confuse things. But if you’ve got these answers for both, you might be in real trouble. Removing friction is the key to successful tech adoption. Your tools need to be native and available in at least one of the platforms sellers use most, such as your enablement platform.
What’s next: Supercharge measurement
Thinking about how video fits in your sales cycle? Or how you can effectively measure its impact? Discover Why Off-platform content is a dead end.
Ready to take the next step now? Shameless product plug: Showpad Video is built into our enablement platform, making it easy, intuitive and extra-impactful as you see how it works with your other tactics and selling patterns. Take a look.
