6 min read

How and Why You Need to Embrace Sales Video Prospecting

We’re living in a post-pandemic world and most customers prefer to keep things online.  This report from McKinsey states that three out of four buyers prefer virtual sales to in-person sales. The same report goes on to say that only 20% of B2B buyers hope to return to in-person sales.

Wait, what?

If that doesn’t get your attention perhaps this will; Gartner research found that millennial decision makers are more than twice as skeptical as baby boomers, withHow and Why You Need to Embrace Sales Video Prospecting 44% of millennials preferring no sales rep interaction in a B2B sales process.  As baby boomers retire, and millennials grow into key decision-making positions, a digital buying experience will continue to become the norm.

To effectively compete and engage prospects in today’s world, salespeople need to adopt the right sales tools and sales methodologies. This is where sales video prospecting comes into play.

Sales video prospecting uses video messaging as the core component for sales outreach and  capturing the customer’s attention. While the concept may be new to some, sales video prospecting has been common practice for several years. All you need is a FREE video prospecting tool, and a little bit of practice to get started.

Why Adopt Sales Video Prospecting?

Sales video prospecting saves you time and is far more memorable and engaging for the customer than your email or voicemail message. You can also create and deliver a video far quicker than you can write an email message. Consider these facts about video prospecting:

  • Improve Open Rates—sales teams that use video get a 16% bump in open rates (SalesLoft)
  • Get More Replies—sales teams that use video see a 26% increase in replies (SalesLoft)
  • Net a Higher Click-Through—emails that contain video have 4x the CTR of emails without (Inside Sales)
  • Close More Deals—closed deals involve using webcams 41% more often than lost deals (Gong)
  • Gain a Competitive Advantage—only 43.8% of sales teams use video in their prospecting strategy (Inside Sales)

What I like most about sales video prospecting is the fact that it allows the salesperson to showcase his or her personality.  You can’t do that with voicemail or email. And in a highly competitive, commoditized market, like the staffing and recruiting industry, sometimes all you have is your personality to differentiate from the competition.

I use Vidyard as my video prospecting platform. One additional feature of the tool I love is that it notifies me in real-time when a customer has watched my video. That notification prompts me to follow up with the customer on the spot because I know they are actively engaged.  This is important because salespeople who reach out to leads within one hour (of a website visit, watching your video, opening your email) are 7X more likely to have a conversation with a decision maker than those who don’t.  

When Should I Use Sales Video Prospecting?

You should use sales video prospecting whenever you feel you need better engagement with your prospects and customers. Here are just a few examples of how I (and most salespeople) apply sales video prospecting:

  • Cold Outreach: I like to send videos to my prospects as part of my cold or warm outreach (cold and warm are relative terms) via email and LinkedIn. Vidyard (and most video prospecting tools) will integrate with your email, CRM, LinkedIn and your sales enablement platform, making the process quick and simple.
  • Lead Nurturing: Video prospecting is a fantastic tool for nurturing and converting your leads. You can share a relevant piece of content to educate your customer via email. But instead of writing a long and dry message, you include a video of yourself explaining why you feel the prospect will find your content helpful.  This makes your outreach more memorable.
  • Value Proposition: Rather than write a long and boring email articulating your value proposition, you can share it via video.  By sharing your value proposition via video, your customer can see and hear the confidence in your voice tonality and body language, and you can even do a screen share highlighting key metrics or statistics that quantify your value. This approach is far more effective than email or voicemail.     
  • Share Candidate Interviews, Customer References: Capturing your customers on video endorsing you, your company, your service offerings and your candidates is far more engaging and effective than sharing it via text. Instead of submitting candidates via email, start sharing your candidates via video. At this point, this should be standard operating procedure for all staffing firms.
  • Common Objections: Think about all the common objections or concerns you hear from prospective customers. Create a short video for each common objection with a video recorded objection rebuttal. Save these to a library and have them on the ready as part of your lead nurturing campaign to prevent friction or bottlenecks from occurring in your sales process.
  • Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ’s): For existing customers and candidates, particularly those new to working with you and your organization, you probably get the same ten or fifteen common “how to” questions. For each FAQ, create a short video of yourself answering the question and/or demonstrating how to perform the task via screen-share. This makes addressing common questions quick and easy, and your customers and candidates will love it! Just as importantly, it keeps salespeople focused on sales prospecting.

Six Sales Video Prospecting Best Practices

There is no quick fix, silver bullet solutions with sales prospecting. Despite all the attention video prospecting has received over the past few years, you will still need to put in the hard work by continuously testing and iterating. If you’re looking to improve your team’s prospecting results, feel free to reach out. I certainly don’t have all the answers but I can probably save you some time and frustration, and I'm happy to help.

1. Make Your Video Fully Personalized

A fully personalized video is just what the name suggests, a video created for one specific prospect. When it comes to successful sales prospecting outreach, nothing produces better results than fully personalized videos. You can pick and choose how you want to personalize the video, such as referencing what you know about the prospect, including their role and their industry or, you can focus on a personal aspect of your prospect.  

2. Research Your Prospect and Create a Plan

It goes without saying that in order to personalize your videos, you need to create a plan, similar to a sales call plan. The type of research you conduct depends on where you’re at in the sales cycle. Assuming it is a cold outreach, you need to prepare for the basics including:

  • What is their job title, role and responsibility?
  • What does their company do?
  • What recent news or trigger events can you reference?
  • What are their goals or key initiatives?

Once you understand these things you can craft a personalized message.

3. Write Your Sales Prospecting Video Script

You need to write out a script or at least have a framework with bullet points as your talking points. If you already have a script, think about what visual elements you might want to share on your screen to make your video interesting and engaging.

Here is one framework to consider that includes highlighting your value proposition:

  1. Introduction: Introduce yourself and the purpose of your reach out
  2. Demonstrate Credibility (personalization): State what you know about your prospect
  3. Value Proposition: Reference how you've helped other like-minded customers solve the same problem or achieve the same goal as your prospect
  4. Use Metrics or Statistics: Include quantifiable results, such as metrics or statistics that quantify the value of your solution
  5. Call to Action: Ask your prospect to take the next step such as booking a meeting with you

You need to have a script because you want to keep your video as short as possible, ideally under 1 minute.  This is difficult to do without following a script or framework.

Having said that, don’t worry if your video is not perfect. A little stumble or stutter is no big deal, it just shows that you are human. Keep it natural and conversational but stay on message.

4. Use a Personalized ThumbnailHow and Why You Need to Embrace Sales Video Prospecting

When you share your sales videos be sure to include a thumbnail image. Videos with thumbnails get 65% more clicks than any other media! I use a thumbnail of myself, typically a snippet of myself (smiling) from the video I’m sending. The more personalized you make your thumbnail image, the more likely your prospects are to click on it. 

5. Create Fun, “Loosey-Goosey” Videos

Not all videos have to follow the framework I suggested above or be 100% business oriented.  In fact, corporate buyers are tired of robotic sales pitches. Instead, you can mix things up a bit and let your true personality come out. By that I mean, let them see the same personality and sense of humor your friends see.  It is O.K. to be informal. And it’s even better if you can make your prospect laugh.

Here is an interesting statistic: This report from Gong shows that salespeople who curse close up to 8% more deals than those who don’t curse.  I’m not suggesting you start dropping F-bombs, but it is O.K. to open things up a bit, talk freely and be “less corporate.”

6. Practice Recording Yourself

Recording a video of yourself will feel uncomfortable, far more uncomfortable and different than attending a face-to-face sales meeting or a video conference call. For this reason, you need to practice recording yourself to ensure you look, feel and sound comfortable and confident in your video. 

Summary

In-person selling is quickly fading into the sunset and it is unlikely to return, at least to pre-pandemic levels. Selling and the sales process is now happening online and corporate buyers want and expect a digital buying experience. 

To adapt to these changes in buyer behavior, salespeople need to start adopting video sales prospecting. Video sales prospecting can be more personal, more engaging and far more effective than traditional sales prospecting techniques. But it requires careful planning and practice. Lots of practice. 

top sales prospecting techniques that book more sales meetings

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