80% of decision makers are “extremely unlikely” to answer a cold call from a number they don’t recognize [source].
While cold calling can surely be an effective strategy at times, many sales leaders believe that solely relying on cold calling to fill their pipeline is like relying on a fold-up map to navigate a cross-country roadtrip. Sure, it can be done, and was the best way to do it at one point. However, the process is tedious, and technology exists that streamlines and simplifies this cumbersome activity.
For navigation, that technology is GPS. For sales, it’s video email.
Video email unlocks your best sales asset – YOURSELF – by enabling you to get face to face when time and distance prevent an in-person interaction. As humans, we communicate better in person. We’re more persuasive, more trustworthy, and more influential. Knowing that decision makers want to work with sales reps they know, like, and [most importantly] trust, sending yourself via video is the easiest and most effective way to build that relationship and generate more frequent sales conversations.
If you’re a sales leader looking to add fuel to your sales fire, read on for five different reasons and ways sales teams are able to sell more with video email.
1. Video Humanizes You
Sales reps typically choose this profession because they are great with people. Yet for some reason, sales development is typically orchestrated in the least human-like fashion. We inherit old email scripts that have been recycled without change for years, blast them blindly to our prospects without personalization, and then think to ourselves, “Why won’t they answer my calls?”
Instead of being a cookie-cutter salesperson who’s easily ignored, grab their attention and show your personality through a video introduction. By sending a video of yourself, you build propinquity: a psychological nearness even in the absence of physical proximity. This nearness is built through frequent and memorable exposure to you.
When your target contacts feel psychologically close to you, they perceive, greet, and treat you more favorably. This sense of familiarity results in much warmer “cold calls” and easier sales conversations.
2. Saves Time and Anxiety
We’re sales professionals…not Pulitzer Prize winning authors. Yet we collectively spend way more time crafting emails than we should. Why? Not because we’re sending so many emails, but because we get stuck trying to make sure our typed words aren’t misinterpreted.
Adding personality to business emails is always a risk because, without throwing in an unprofessional emoji or a “haha,” you never know if your recipient will properly understand the tone of your message. This is a major disadvantage for most salespeople because their personality is one of their best selling tools.
Instead of hiding your personality behind text on a screen, take 60 seconds to record and send a custom video email. Your message will be received as intentional 100% of the time, and crafting and sending the email will take a grand total of one minute. Not only will you send more effective emails by leveraging video, but you’ll gain hours back in your day from all the time you stop wasting on crafting plain-text emails.
3. Major “Wow Factor” in the Inbox
If you’re targeting a certain prospect, chances are there are about 30 other sales reps targeting them at any given time as well. That means a LOT of emails will inevitably get lost or ignored in the clutter of their inbox.
Sales prospecting is as much of a battle for attention as it is a practice of delivering the right message at the right time. Knowing the level of competition in a decision maker’s inbox, would you expect a two paragraph pitch email is going to jump off the screen to them? Doubt it. You know what would, though? Your smiling face.
Pro Tip: BombBomb automatically animates the first 3 seconds of your video and displays that as your video thumbnail in the inbox. If you really want to stand out, hold up a whiteboard with your recipient’s name hand-written on it and wave at the beginning of your video. This is what appears as soon as they open your email, and shows a level of warmness and familiarity your audience is not familiar with. When they open your email, see you waving and smiling, and recognize their name handwritten on your whiteboard, they’re going to struggle to not click play on your video.
4. Gets people to show up to meetings
Meeting no-shows can cripple a pipeline and happen for a number of reasons, both physical and psychological. Often times, your contacts have time conflicts, family emergencies, or other obligations that take priority over a discovery call. There is nothing you can do about this except work to reschedule for a better time.
However, many times, decision makers neglect scheduled calls simply because they have no psychological connection to the process or people involved. In their mind, they just clicked a button on a website and filled out a standard form. To them, nobody was involved, so nobody is negatively affected by bailing on the meeting.
Without human interaction, this completely automated and faceless experience is easy to forget and ignore. The result: meeting no-shows.
The easiest way to prevent this is by injecting your people into the process. By sending videos to respond to inquiries, deliver resources, and confirm meetings, your process is humanized and your people become real. This results in more meetings being held because real people are harder to ignore than faceless sales-bots.
5. More Engaging and Convenient for Recipient
The beautiful thing about video email is that it lets you be there “in person” to pitch your product or service whenever your recipient presses play. Not only is your video email guaranteed to be the most compelling message they receive that day, but it’s also far less intrusive than a cold call because they can consume your message at their convenience. By sending a video, you deliver an incredible experience and respect their time. That’s some smart selling right there.
At the end of the day, a salesperson’s greatest sales assets are their intangible characteristics: their personality, knowledge, experience, and expertise. In other words, they are their greatest sales asset. When they’re unable to demonstrate these characteristics face to face, video is the best way to replicate that in-person interaction.
By leveraging their greatest asset in their daily communications, salespeople become more persuasive, relatable, and trustworthy. Incorporating video into your sales process will result in more replies, higher conversion, and faster pipeline velocity.
BombBomb recently partnered with an Enterprise Sales team at an international recruiting technology company to test the impact of BombBomb’s video email software on sales prospecting efforts. Download the study summary to learn how BombBomb improved their email reply rate by 56%.