At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we began contacting all of our customers.
We wanted to learn how they were coping. Were their marketers still generating demand? Were sales development reps securing meetings? Were account executives landing deals?
What we heard wasn’t good. The pandemic had upended the sales industry. In-person was gone—for everyone. Even veteran field sellers had pivoted to inside sales. They’d replaced their steak dinners with phone calls, their site visits with emails.
But even though the landscape changed, sales was still a relationship game.
Buyers don’t want to be sold to via email and Powerpoint. Those are appetizers. They whet your appetite and prepare you for the main course. But they’re not enough on their own. You can’t form a connection with a pitch deck or land a deal with a cold email.
Our customers told us that they were looking for new ways to stand out in a remote world and engage with their prospects.
We believed (and still believe) that video was the solution. Because video is the medium for personal communication.
This is a rallying cry
We adapted to working remotely and socializing virtually. We traded nights in the bar and in-person conferences for evenings on Houseparty and Clubhouse sessions.
But the pandemic didn’t just change what we did.
It also changed who we are.
As people lost the freedom they’d previously taken for granted—freedom to do simple things like eating out and gathering in groups—they suddenly felt protective of their free time. Work-life balance shifted from a “nice-to-have” to an absolute must. Mental health became a priority. People craved human connection.
In sales, the pandemic compounded an ongoing transformation.
For years, B2B buyers have been growing more informed with data, context, and community at their fingertips. Instead of generic pitches, they expect personalized solutions. And buyers are getting younger, too. New generations are flooding into the workplace, bringing with them different communication preferences. In-person is out. Video is in. They want the freedom to choose how they interact, rather than having that dictated to them.
Simply put, today’s B2B buyers want communication on their terms: their channel, their schedule, and their purpose. And they’re not prepared to suffer sales reps who don’t respect that.
Don’t mistake this for a short-term trend or blip. This is a permanent paradigm shift for B2B sales.
To meet evolving customer demands, sellers must be more thoughtful about the in-person moments they architect with prospects. Even though in-person will come back, video isn’t going anywhere.
This is a rally cry to ditch pre-pandemic pitch-first sales in favor of a customer-first approach. The customer’s wants, needs, and pain points must form the foundation for Modern Selling.
Modern sellers need new tools
Data and technology are the lifeblood of any impactful revenue team—they enable reps to add value at every step.
When we set out to design our new video solution, we took a slow, thoughtful approach. We listened to our customers, studied their businesses, and acted only after we truly understood their challenges.
They wanted on-demand, asynchronous video communication, not just live calls. They wanted video integrated into their existing workflows, not siloed on its own platform. They wanted analytics and actionable data insights. A tool without insights just wouldn’t cut it.
During a six-month beta, we created, tested, and optimized our new tool: Showpad Video.
Then we released it to the world.
Showpad Video is a new embedded video communication add-on to Showpad Content that enables seamless and simple video recording within the Showpad platform. It’s transforming how B2B sellers are communicating with their prospects.
And this is just the start.
Building intelligent enterprises
Dubbed the “great acceleration” by McKinsey & Company, the pandemic stepped on the gas to speed technological evolution. Small mom-and-pop businesses ran world-class digital transformation programs. Once inflexible legacy companies pivoted on a dime. Small and medium-sized enterprises greenlit change initiatives long in the works.
The business world leaped forward years—if not decades.
We’ve never been more excited.
There is a wealth of intelligence locked in sales conversations: What messaging is resonating? What competitors are rearing up? Are prospects put off by pricing? What tactics are driving deals? What plays are alienating prospects?
We want to unleash that reservoir of data for our customers.
The current iteration of Showpad Video is just the start.
We want to analyze prospect voices to reveal their intent and emotion. We want to harness speech recognition and natural language processing to understand conversations at scale. We want to learn how individual reps are performing and what impact sales orgs are driving.
We want to transform your conversations into actionable insights.
It’s a new era for intelligent enterprise.
Are you ready for it?
