As a Sales Manager, Director or VP, you have a lot of responsibility (and likely some aggressive numbers to hit). You’re consistently problem solving and helping your team sell more products to right-fit customers. On top of that you’re training and developing your team members, improving their appointment-setting abilities, increasing conversion rates, and even shortening your sales cycles.
You probably already have a full stack of tools dedicated to help you achieve these goals – from Salesforce to Outreach to Conversica to Calendly … the list goes on and on (or up and up, as tech stacks often do).
There is a standout way to help your sales team set more appointments with ideal customers for a fraction of the price than of most of the tools you’re already using.
Video is one of the best sales solutions out there and most of your competitors aren’t using it yet. Check out our five tips below on the best ways that your team can use video to increase their total number of demo sets!
BONUS: Be sure to scroll to the very bottom of the post to find tips on how to increase your demo hold rates, too.
Appointment Setting Tip 1: Add Video Inside Your Cadences
As a Sales Leader, you know how important it is to arm your business development team with unique and enticing sales cadences that are worthy of an interaction.
In your current cadences, you’ve probably incorporated a mix of phone calls, voice mails, LinkedIn messages, and emails for your BDRs and/or SDRs to utilize. And most decision makers are receiving multiple variations of all of these interactions each day.
You know what they’re not seeing everyday? Personal videos from smiling faces. As opposed to a faceless block of text that goes easily ignored by prospects, a real, authentic person will always stand out in a crowded inbox.
Our Business Development representatives are often sending personalized videos inside their cadences. They’ll originally leave a voicemail with a prospect, and in that voicemail they’ll say “I’m going to send you a video now to help you put a face to the name.” And then in the video they’ll tie back to the voicemail of course, which helps them leave a more memorable impression, and increases their chances of setting that appointment.
While we recommend creating personalized videos for your initial prospecting emails, to save time, you can also use pre-recorded videos in some of your follow ups. These videos should still be persona based, and speak to your specific audience’s pain points, and even common objections. If you have enough information on your personas you can create a variety of videos that will appeal to each one. And if you haven’t created personas yet, HubSpot has a great article on the questions you should be asking your target personas in order to better understand them.
By the way, BombBomb integrates within Outreach. Click here to learn how you can leverage video within your Outreach sequence.
Appointment Setting Tip 2: Speed to Lead with Video
Speed to lead is not a new concept, but there are new approaches to help your team improve their lead response times.
According to InsideSales.com, “If you respond in under five minutes to your sales lead, you’re 100 times more likely to contact them and 21 times more likely to get them into your pipeline.” Under five minutes is EXTREMELY speedy and hard for your sales team to follow. But there is a way to help them send a quick, memorable, message and increase their chances of setting an appointment.
For example, if you have inbound demo requests that come through from your website you can create pre-recorded introduction videos that can automatically be sent to each lead letting them know who you are, and that you’re here to help. With video tracking, you can determine how these leads engage with the video to determine if you should follow up with a truly personal video.
Speed to lead works within cadences for your Outbound teams as well, which we’ve already discussed a bit in the tip above. The benefit of using video in outbounding is that is will showcase your team as reliable, and available for any questions you might have in a timely manner. When you’re evaluation software for your team isn’t it important to you to know that you have a trustworthy resource who can help you with any issues you might have? This is something that is extremely important to most decision makers. Video will help your team build rapport with clients, show their true authentic & trustworthy selves, and do so in a timely manner.
Finally, we’ve had many clients tell us major success stories about responding to a new lead immediately through a video email mobile application. With the mobile application, they can respond to any emails in their inbox with a video at any time or place. Some clients have responded to leads at the airport, others have been able to respond while they are outside spending time with their kids. The personal response and peek into the sales representative’s life humanizes them and helps them build trust with leads they’ve never even met.
Appointment Setting Tip 3: Personalize and Provide Value with Screen Recording
I recently held a webinar with our partners at Sales Hacker. During the webinar, I mentioned tons of tips for sales representatives on how to use video, and one of them was providing value through video. Providing value is not a new concept. You probably tell your team that they need to be providing value to their leads every single day. But let’s peel that back a bit. What exactly does it mean to provide value?
Hubspot defines value as “the information, insights, and actions you bring to your buyer that they cannot find on their own.” the key phrase here is: information that they cannot find on their own. And that’s where your sales team can really shine. So let’s say your team sells SEO services. Have the sales representatives send videos to potential clients with their websites in the background using a screen recorder service. Have the reps speak to their website and give potential clients actual, tangible tips that are personalized to them that they can immediately take away from the experience. Give them SEO information that they would have never realized on their own to showcase a need for them to source further information from a professional in your industry.
This can be done for a variety of different industries. The point is for the sales rep to not only bring valuable information, but to also stand out with the video recording and showcase your company as industry experts. With BombBomb Video email, all of your videos will be linked in the body of your email as an animated preview. The animated preview is the first three seconds of your video shown as a loop. This preview is a great way to your sales representatives the attention they need to land more appointments. It’s far better to send your video as this extremely visible animated preview as opposed to a stale link or a bulky, suspect looking attachment.
If the lead receives an animated preview in their email inbox with their own website on it – don’t you think they’ll be more likely to click on that video than they would if you sent them a boring link to your website that they’ll most likely never click? Absolutely.
Bonus: For more tips on the benefits of personalization, check out this episode of the Customer Experience Podcast featuring SaleLoft’s SVP of Sales Strategy, Jeremy Donovan, who talks about personalization in sales prospecting.
Appoint Setting Tip 4: Overcome Objections With Video
Again, overcoming the most common objections you hear around your product or service is something that you’ve probably already trained your team to do. And as a Sales Leader, you know that many of those objections come up early in the prospecting process. Why not tackle them early on with video?
The major benefit of overcoming objections with video is that your sales representatives will have the ability to deliver these harder conversions while showing their empathy and feelings as though they were face-to-face with each prospect. People want to be heard and understood. Through video your sales team can more easily show each potential client that they’re listening, and that they understand and empathize with their concerns. It’s possible to convey empathy over text – but it’s much harder and doesn’t have as solid of an impact as a heartfelt video.
Appointment Setting Tip 5: Evoke Emotion With the Help of Animated Previews
Now that your team is actually sending videos, how can you help ensure that their videos get opened and increase their chances of setting those appointments? Teaching them to create interesting video thumbnails and animated previews is a great way to help them achieve their goals. Think about animated previews and thumbnails as your new subject line. It’s how your sales representatives will be able to get more attention, and attention is the currency of sales. The more attention you can get – the more sales you will land.
Here are five ways to have your team make their animated previews look more enticing! Note: we recommend utilizing animated previews as opposed to thumbnails because they are proven to be more successful. We ran a test in 2016 and the results showed that animated GIFs deliver a 48.9% Lift in Video Play Rate. These GIFs are automatically created in BombBomb as the first 3 seconds of your video and they run as a loop.
- Name Plus Emotion: To get this accomplished, we recommend using a whiteboard and writing out the prospect’s name on that whiteboard to get their attention. Something as simple as “Hi Scott,” or even as intriguing as “Yikes Scott!” can really make an impact. Why? Because people love seeing their own name written out! But make sure to include emotion – encourage your team to smile, wave, be themselves and let their positivity show.
- Detail: Encourage your team to add personal details into their previews. Great examples are using a whiteboard to draw out a company’s logo and wave the whiteboard while smiling in the first few seconds of your video. Another quality example is encouraging your team to pull up their prospect’s LinkedIn profile and use the screen recorder feature to show that profile within those first three seconds. Wouldn’t you click a video that showed your actual LinkedIn profile in the animated preview? I certainly would.
- Emotion: This is another simple tactic. We’ve seen success with animated previews where people begin the video smiling and clapping. Why? Because it indicates good news and people always love hearing good news! Another example could be an animated preview of someone looking discouraged. Having bad days, making mistakes, these are all moments that make us human! And your prospects will relate to those emotions and those human feelings.
- Pattern Disrupt – The Unexpected: This is when your team can really have fun creating animated GIFS. This is a great opportunity to include a more human element. People aren’t expecting to see thumbnails like this and because of that, they are compelled to click on them and watch the video behind it.
- TEAM – Reciprocity: The more people you can bring into the video, the more likely those video will be played. People love seeing that you took the time round up other team members just to send them a simple, personal video!
Bonus Tip – Now That You Team is Setting More Appointments – Let’s Make Sure Your Prospects Show Up!
RE/MAX, LLC is the most recognized brand in real estate and a top 10 global franchise. Their franchise sales team members use BombBomb in many ways but one of the most effective is to confirm appointments. When they started using video for this tactic their team went from a 58% appointment held rate to a 71% appointment held rate.
For their appointment confirmation videos they follow a simple structure…
- Connect: Have your team start out their video by mentioning something that this person mentioned during their original call to show that they were listening.
- Remind (text): We don’t suggest adding the time and date to the video because attention is a gift and time is valuable. Try to encourage your team to keep their videos as brief as possible while still containing the most important information. The time and date should certainly be included as email text.
- Reaffirm Value (show effort): This is something you definitely want your team to include in their videos. I recommend having your sales or business development representatives say something like this to reaffirm value. “We are SO excited for this call. Our team is already hard at work creating a customized marketing plan specifically for your company.” If you tell them the amount of time and effort your team has put into the call beforehand, it will reduce the amount of cancellations you receive.
Send these videos a couple days before the appointment itself and you will see a major improvement in your demo hold rates. Why? Because It’s easy to say no to text on screen. It’s a lot harder to say no to a smiling face.
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