When you hear the words ‘video marketing’, you likely think about your efforts on YouTube or the latest video you’ve seen from a popular brand, but I want to get you thinking about using video for sales enablement and generating pipeline.

In fact, I’ve got a terrific example to share about how video made a huge impact for our business just before Dreamforce:  

Video’s impact on pipeline

Just before we left for San Francisco we released a timely video email campaign to let our customers and prospects know we’d be at Dreamforce:

Sending the video out to our pre-conference leads along with a map to our booth, we had 12% of contacts watch the entire video all the way through. As part of the campaign, we set up a workflow rule in Salesforce that notified our sales reps when more than 75% of the video was viewed by a lead. By following up with leads through emails and responding to incoming requests for demos, we were able to track and account for well over $3,200,000 in the pipeline – all from one highly targeted video marketing campaign connected to our CRM!

What this means for video marketers

Video has definitely evolved from a form of entertainment to a powerful conversion tool and now you can track how prospects are engaging with video content you use in the sales process – you’ve just gotta get smart about it and tie your video strategy to your CRM.

Start using video to answer real questions

To start, every good salesperson knows that a great pitch begins with context. You need to be persuasive, but in order to have highly targeted sales calls, it’s all about finding the answers to the following questions:

• Who are my most qualified prospects?
• What are they most interested in?
• What can I say to get them even more interested?

Now, what if I told you that your video content can actually help you answer these questions?

The video marketing landscape is changing quickly and leading video marketing platforms now integrate with both marketing automation and CRM systems. By syncing up with the tools you use everyday, video platforms can now help you consolidate your information and can reveal to your salespeople exactly who’s watching your videos and what content your leads are most engaged with. 

How video engagement data can fuel your sales team

As it stands, you currently share content with contacts to remove roadblocks in the buying process and you know that leads respond especially well to video. It’s engaging, concise, and it’s the next best thing to being there in person.

Unfortunately, even though you’re sending awesome videos to prospects, you don’t have a way of knowing if they’re actually watching your content and you aren't able to gauge their advancement through the funnel because there’s no feedback in the current video-sharing process. 

Fortunately, this is where new tools and CRM integrations come into play. 

When you gain access to the data and analytics behind your video marketing through either a video marketing platform, or through video marketing applications for Salesforce, you can literally see how your prospects interact with your video content.

 You can determine if they watched all of the videos you sent, if they rewatched any product-specific parts, if they watched a few videos in a row about a line of products, and you can start to identify your hottest prospects based on what content you know they’re watching.

All of this engagement data – which can be stored right in your CRM contact records – points to what content your leads are interested in and can display just how qualified they actually are.

It’s all about interpreting prospects’ digital body language with the data, just as you’d try to interpret their real body language if you were selling in person. 

For example, if your video marketing data within your CRM indicates that a hot lead has watched three, eight minute product demos all the way to the end, you can be sure that they are hunting for a solution (they’ve invested time with longer form video content), and you can make a highly targeted sales call with a clear understanding of the context of the potential purchase. 

You can also use calls to action at the end of your videos that direct your leads through to the next piece of detailed content and prompt the next stage in the sales process. In fact, if you’re using Salesforce, you can even start sending videos to prospects in your Chatter groups that will help nurture them through the sales process directly from the Chatter interface. 

With the tools now available to start answering real questions about your viewers based on their viewing history, video marketing as a sales enablement tool has become more contextual than ever before. Combined with your CRM, your videos can help you gain customer insight and improve sales effectiveness. 

About the author

Michael Litt is the CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a video marketing platform helping marketers measure the impact of their video content. Thought leader, surfer, and serial entrepreneur, Michael is passionate about content marketing and changing the way we engage and purchase with video. Chat with Michael on Twitter @MichaelLitt or LinkedIn to learn more