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Video: The New Linchpin to Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is a challenge that marketers within enterprises struggle with regularly. We think video can be part of the solution.
According to Harvard Business Review, US companies spend over $900 billion on their sales force, yet only deliver 50%-60%, with more than half of their challenges being misalignment with leadership. Another disturbing statistic comes from HubSpot, who’s study estimates that the disconnect between sales and marketing is costing businesses $1 trillion each year in decreased productivity. According to Aberdeen the average sales representative spends 43 hours per month searching for information.
As media leaders, our role is not only to develop world-class content in all forms, but also to solve for the organizational issues that are tied to growth, savings and productivity, by using video as our tool of choice. The sales enablement challenge is a great opportunity for in-house creative teams to step up and partner with sales and marketing to drive positive change in your organization.
Here are five things you can do to make video the new linchpin to sales enablement for your enterprise:
1. Integrate video into the learning and development strategy in play for sales, while decreasing training costs. Video is a great way of capturing audiences as a quick and less daunting tool for your sales teams to get trained. According to Google, 65% of people use YouTube to help them solve a problem. So why not capitalize on this platform to connect with your sales force? Additionally, this enables learning anytime and anywhere, leveraging any device.
2. Use video as a sales team communications tool to improve productivity and communications, ultimately driving sales. With global sales teams, video is a great way of sharing successes and meeting regularly to drive accountability. According to software maker TechSmith, using visual content in communications, such as short videos, can not only increase productivity to the tune of $167B across six continents, but it can increase productivity in 67% of employees who are more likely to complete tasks communicated by video.
3. Talking heads to close the gap in alignment and poor sales preparation. From the executive team to marketing counterparts, misalignment can be addressed through talking heads. Video can be used to close the gap of misalignment to the tune of $14M for every $1 Billion a company makes by closing the gap in poor sales preparation. According to Wordstream, 59% of executives say they would rather watch a video than read text. So go with the preference, fire up your internal teams and get those heads talking.
4. Leverage your video platform to minimize the loss in productivity in searching for content in preparation of sales calls. 81% of businesses are using video as a marketing tool. That’s up from 63% from last year, according to HubSpot. Capitalize on this platform as a way of organizing and making available not just product and service information to external decision makers, but leveraging the video platform in-house too. Make video content searchable to enable sales teams to search video libraries for the exact slide, information or explainer video to get the deal signed. If you already have a video platform that enables search, use it for the critical function of sales enablement. The ROI of cutting 43 hours a month of searching in half for sales teams will impact the bottom line.
5. Integrate video into the sales communication life-cycle directly with clients. With 59% of executives preferring video over text, what does that say about your white papers and RFP responses? Is video leveraged? If not, why not? If so, how much, and where is there room to expand? You can easily test and track closing ratios of deals on a small group or product line to create a use case for integrating video into the sales process.
So, where do you start?
Find an executive sponsor, get upstream in having discussions of where video can solve sales enablement challenges. Gather the credible statistics you need to elevate your in-house team to be a strategic problem-solver for your organization’s productivity and communications issues. Sales enablement is a great place to start. Find a sales, marketing or learning and development executive with responsibility for growth or sales enablement. His or her sponsorship can help you to create a test scenario for a broader roll out.
You can strengthen your in-house agency and break the shared services stigma with your willingness to drive change. If you’d like to discuss this article or ideas specific to your organization, email eliana@crewscontrol.com
About the author, Eliana Hassen is a strategist and marketing tsar who has spent over 20 years working with fortune 500 brands and their creative service organizations (and video teams) on optimization, execution and performance.
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