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Email is an easy way to get your message out to lots of prospective customers. Unfortunately, everyone else trying to sell something does the same thing, so those customers have to wade through 100+ emails a day just to find the ones they care about. Usually, those are the ones needed to get their jobs done, or the ones that are interesting and personal, so standing out with a product pitch can be next to impossible.
As a longtime sales veteran, I’m certainly familiar with the feeling of waiting for responses that never come. It’s not enough just to get their attention. The goal is to get a response, and that becomes much more likely when the prospect feels like they’re dealing with an actual person. That’s rarer than I’d like to think in this era of automation tools and artificial intelligence. It’s become too easy to reach a lot of people with so-called personalized pitches that they’re now anything but personal.
My own sales organization has found that using video in our prospecting gets much better results than just sending text-based emails, particularly with key target accounts. Since we started using video to humanize the sales process and change the way we connect with leads, we’ve seen our open rates quintuple and our response rates jump to an incredible 25 percent for some of our top reps.
If you’re looking for new ways to help your sales team stand out and be more personal and relevant, here are three easy ways to use video to get the attention you deserve:
Short webcam videos bring the human element back to sales and allow you to speak directly to your prospect. Think of it like a video voicemail in which you can put a face on your typical impersonal email and articulate why you’re reaching out. The key with these is to be authentic and genuine. Don’t overly script these videos to the point that they appear robotic. Your viewers can tell if you’re reading from a script, which immediately ruins the personal nature of video. Jot down a few key points, practice a couple times and then go for it.
Pro tips:
Keep it short – no longer than 90 seconds. 45 seconds is even better. Just 37 percent of viewers will sit through a video longer than 90 seconds.
Use headphones to improve the audio quality of your video.
Grab a small whiteboard, write a personal greeting on it such as “Hi Thomas!” and hold it up at the start of your video. After recording, use this as the thumbnail to really get their attention.
New tools can enable you to quickly record and share screen capture videos directly within your browser and email. The best of them also let you track views and be notified when a recipient watched a video. Consider creating a video walkthrough of your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, highlighting their accomplishments that led you to contact them. Or give them a tour of their website to show you’ve done your research and tell them how you could add value to them or their company. Provide a demo of your product or service created specifically for the prospect in the same amount of time it would take to write an email. For any of these, make sure you start with a compelling thumbnail/splash screen to get their attention.
Pro tips:
Set up your different screen tabs ahead of time so you don’t waste precious time loading pages.
Be mindful of what’s in your inbox if you’re showing your email (sensitive company info, other customer names, etc.). Same goes for notifications that might pop up if you’re going to share your full screen.
Some tools, like ViewedIt (created by our own team here at Vidyard) enable you to record your webcam at the same time as a screen capture to bring that human element into these videos as well for free.
Once you’ve made that first connection with a possible customer, send a video call summary instead of the typical long email recap. A personal thank-you video will build more rapport than yet another boring email. If you have a lot to cover, put together a quick slide and capture your screen on video with your message.
This is also a good time to re-use those high-quality sales and marketing videos. Depending on what you’ve discussed already, customer testimonials, a product overview or how-to content could move the conversation forward. Pull up the right video and personalize it by adding a custom introduction video. You’ll be taking advantage of your best-existing assets with a fresh touch that only takes seconds.
Pro tip:
Content without context doesn’t help. Explain why you’ve shared the videos you sent and how they apply to the prospective customer. You don’t want them wondering why you sent them more material out of the blue.
I’m constantly obsessing over how to best reach out to customers in a more human and personal way. It’s hard to fight through that numbness they’ve developed for email sales pitches. Even when they look at our messages, we only have 8 seconds to get their attention. Video gives us a powerful tool to surprise them and show that a real person is interested in helping them solve a real problem.
Darren Suomi is senior vice president of global sales at Vidyard.
