How Sales Can Triple Response Rates With Video

There is nothing worse for a sales rep then trying to book a call with a prospect and hearing “Sorry I’m slammed, my calendar is too full, let’s reschedule next week, next month, next quarter, or next YEAR!” It can derail any rep and kill momentum, leaving you questioning if they were even a good fit, to begin with.

Just remember, it’s nothing personal. Buyers are bombarded with as many as 2,900 messages each day. They are busy with a lot on the go and have to be strict with what gets time on their calendar. The only way to process it all is to develop a subconscious filter for everything that sounds irrelevant. Filtering allows buyers to stay sane and only consciously engage with the messages that matter and make impact with them.

So what messages cut through the noise? Ones from friends, family, colleagues, and trusted influencers. As a sales rep, if you want to break through that superhuman filter, and get prospects to carve out time for you then be like your buyer’s friends and create a personal connection.

There’s no better way to do this than with video.

Video is transforming many organizations sales processes and their results, like Terminus who saw great numbers after implementing video into their sales cycle:

• 40% increase in email open rates
• 37% increase in click rates
• 216% higher response rates

Video is a simple way to turn your sales process around, and drive even greater results (like tripling response rates) and here is how you can get started;

Use Video For Sales Prospecting

When you’re freshly reaching out to a new lead, it’s so important that you stand out and get noticed. Prospecting emails have to stick out in crowded inboxes. For BDR and SDR teams, the best opportunities to spice up those prospecting emails with video are:

• Cold Prospecting
• Follow-Up
• Account-Based Sales Approach

The most prominent things to keep in mind here are similar to any other form of prospecting: you’re trying to capture attention with an audience that is overly busy and doesn’t know you yet. You’ll want to focus your videos on:

• Capturing attention – Use “video” in email subject lines and include the thumbnail in the email body.
• Establishing credibility – Reps should give their prospects a reason to engage with them other than to pull out their checkbook right away.
• Personalization – Top reps spend time learning about an individual and their business & then use this info to connect with leads individually.

Video isn’t just for prospecting, and it can be used efficiently throughout the entire sales cycle.

Avoid The ‘Me-Centric’ Approach, Make The Message All About Them

Remember that customers don’t care about your product until you prove that you can provide value to them. So make sure to drive the value home to encourage the prospect to want to carve out time to learn more. The great news is that video is the perfect channel to do this efficiently.

The key is to speak to how you can help that person and organization, NOT to simply tell them what you do. Video allows you to quickly share what you’ve learned about the company and/or contact that caused you to reach out and how you believe that your product or service can benefit them. It’s easier to share this in a video than to pack it all into a short email.

Use Personalized Video Throughout Your Sales Process

A personalized video is a devastating weapon for breaking through subconscious filters and achieving awareness. Correctly applied, it can:

• Increase click-throughs by 4.5x. Just as people scan social media looking for photos and mentions of themselves, you’re offering them the same dopamine hit in a B2B context.
• Keep viewers watching for 35 percent longer. Once a buyer’s attention has been captured, a video is a fantastic medium for interestingly communicating a lot of information. It has a higher informational throughput than text, audio, and images alone because it combines all three.
• Increase the chance that late-stage prospects buy. When buyers are shown personalized videos that demonstrate a solution, they experience it viscerally, increasing comprehension. The marketing team at Salesloft found that 75 percent of late-stage prospects who received personalized videos became closed won deals.

Video is your key to getting heard by buyers with the superpower of selective hearing. With video personalization, you’ll find that you’re no longer just one vendor among tens of thousands shouting in a stadium: you’re just one, sitting face to face with the customer who knows you have something they need.

If you’re a sales rep looking to learn what steps you need to take to embrace video prospecting, and throughout the entire sales process then “How Our SDRs Tripled Response Rates with Personal Video Messaging” is the video for you!

The post How Sales Can Triple Response Rates With Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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4 Ways Video Helps Maintain Control and Accelerate the Sales Cycle

We’ve been talking a lot about using video during the inbound/outbound sales process. But it’s time to dive a little deeper into how you can strategically use video to tighten up your sales cycle and maintain control of the buying process – at the same time, providing a seamless experience for your customers and prospects.

If you’re just starting out with video, head over to our Video Selling Institute to learn best practices for breaking through e-mail clutter, boosting response rates and booking more meetings. I also suggest you get yourself a whiteboard and check out Lauren Wadsworth’s blog: How I Get 5x More Meetings and Beat Quota Every Month (Hint: It’s Not Email or Phone).

It’s no surprise that video prospecting yields significantly higher results than traditional methods, but let’s explore some new ways video can be used throughout the entire path-to-purchase, to deliver on sales-sourced pipeline and convert your prospects from  lead to customer in just the click of a play button.

1. Waking the Dead (Dead Opps + Cold Leads)

Remember Paul the MQL who requested a demo and went cold as ice? You followed up with him for 20 days, 4 emails, 3 calls, 2 voicemails, a LinkedIn connection request and—nothing! New projects, minutiae and a flooded inbox had other plans for Paul.

Let’s wake the dead and turn these cold leads to warm, and then to hot.

Here’s an example of how video can help you stay top-of-mind, re-engage a cold lead, and leverage existing marketing content to further qualify and convert your prospects faster.

Dead opportunities are at least somewhat familiar with your product and typically convert faster than cold leads. Introduce a 2-minute micro-demo in a playlist to remind Paul why he was evaluating your product in the first place and try to drive urgency to re-engage.If there wasn’t a compelling enough reason before, be prepared to deliver why there is one now.

2. Land and Expand

Let’s dial-in on prospecting large to mid-market, and enterprise accounts. When you’re navigating through thousands of employees to prospect, you need to scale your efforts and prioritize your time working your most engaged leads. You still need to personalize your messaging – but in this case, the personalization is your targeted research on the company.

It’s about finding the right balance between quality and quantity; account based videos save you time and deliver on both.

Check out this example of an Account Base Video (ABV). ABVs should be based on persona, so while you’re sending the same video to multiple prospects, your messaging will always resonate:

The idea is to create one single screen share and send the video at-scale, using video analytics to hone in on the leads that are most engaged.

Once you’ve landed the first meeting, expand it. Reuse the same Account Based Video and prospect the same persona in a different territory or country. If Sandra, the Director of IT in the East is interested, there is a good chance David from the West could be, too.

Expanding into an account you’ve already determined is a good fit is like working a highly qualified lead – you should be able to get to a yes/ no/ maybe, very early on in your cadence.

At the very least, your prospect should be open to a conversation—if you’re extra cheeky—it’s because you’ve asked for the referral! Convert, convert, convert.

3. Enabling a Champion

It’s true; no one can sell your product better than you can. So, when you hear the inevitable “let me pitch this to my team /boss/VP, and get back to you,” use video to take back control of your opportunity and deliver your own value prop.

Shikha, SME Account Executive at Vidyard, shows us how to enable a champion, summarizing the discovery call, addressing the resolved pain-point, and positioning herself as a trusted advisor:

Encourage your champion to forward your video internally and use the video analytics to guide your next steps. Did multiple viewers see the video? Did they watch it more than once? Based on how invested your champion is, you’ll have some understanding as to how your deal will progress.

It’s important to note, if you’ve sent a video to your champion and you’re receiving a poor drop-off rate—or worse, no view at all—take this as a clear warning sign; your champion hasn’t bought in!

There could be competing priorities, you did not provide enough (or the right) value or your prospect simply isn’t ready. Either way, find the disconnect and get it back on track, or take this opportunity to nurture the account and focus your attention on other opportunities.

4. Proposing your Proposal

It’s not uncommon that a sales rep thinks they’ve got it in the bag and then suddenly, the entire deal falls apart. Video analytics provide a way to keep your finger on the pulse, appropriately tailor your next steps, and better yet, more accurately forecast your pipeline.

Summarize your proposal and be transparent with your champion and decision maker, let them know you will send a physical copy of the proposal once you see they’ve had a chance to watch your summary video.

Tom, Mid-Market Account Executive at Vidyard gives us a clip of what a proposal video might look like:

Again, let the digital body language from your video proposal be your guide. If there is limited or no interaction – set a plan! Have an executive sponsor create a video introduction to show you’re fully invested in, and committed to the future relationship.

This is where video can help you really move the needle.

Take these opportunities to get your face in front of your prospective customers and show off your best asset; you. After all, people have a hard time saying “no” to people they like, and there’s a reason you were hired to sell.

The post 4 Ways Video Helps Maintain Control and Accelerate the Sales Cycle appeared first on Vidyard.

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How to Boost Your Social Media Following With Expert and Influencer Quotes!

I would like to start this post off with, fittingly enough, one of many expert quotes about social media:

“Social media allows us to behave in ways that we are hardwired for in the first place – as humans. We can get frank recommendations from other humans instead of from faceless companies.”

~ Francois Gossieaux, The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media

An oversimplification, maybe, but a great way of looking at the social sphere online and gaining some perspective on the true scope of its worth.

Now how about a critical quote about social media?:

“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”

~ Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Here we have two well informed, educated authorities on the topic of social media giving us their two competing theories about its place in modern society. Why did I include them here, right at the beginning of my post? Because I am a firm believer in the power of expert quotes

Why Expert Quotes Are Your Ticket To Better Engagement

I remember reading a news article about how a study found that people who post inspiration quotes on their social media page were more likely to be unintelligent. Unsurprisingly, these claims were false, but I still found it funny and shared the article to all of my friends. I am an avid quotes sharer, and so are many of them, and we all had a good laugh at our own expense.

Whatever the original intentions of that flawed study, there is no denying that experts quotes are insanely popular on social media, especially on Twitter, where a single quote will be passed around thousands of times.

Being such a fantastic form of engagement, and a way to increase your visibility on social platforms, how can you start to really take advantage of it? There are a few ways.

Find The Best Expert Quotes To Share

Occasionally you will come across a great quote from one of your favorite blogs, or a video interview, and you should feel free to share those. But when you are actually going hunting for quotes, it is good to have a couple of sources on hand.

I am especially fond of Goodreads, where you can do a search by keyword, author or tag. That is where I found the two quotes posted at the beginning of this article, as a matter of fact.

Two other great quote sites are Best Quotes of the Day and Brainy Quote, both of which offer reliable original sources, and an extensive database. The latter has a Quote Of The Day feature that gives you a beautiful visual graphic with random quotes. Which brings me to…

Create Visual Quotes

Visual quotes are even more shareable than text ones, and as a rule you should try and create more of them. Luckily they aren’t that hard to make, especially if you have a little know-how on tools like Photoshop or GIMP.

If not, you can turn to generators like Recite (for simple graphics with a watermark), or Pixteller (for slightly more advanced). I tend to alternate between the two in order to get two different types of visual quote that attract two different kind of posters.

The first is great for straight quotes that are placed against basic backgrounds like a piece of paper and pen. They have little frills, and are popular in particular with older social media users. The second puts the quote against a more visually stimulating backdrop, like the type you might see on Tumblr, or even PostSecret. Obviously, those are very big with the younger crowd.

If you want to start making different kinds of graphics that use visual quotes (like infographics), check out Canva. Having absolutely zero graphic design talent or knowledge myself, I am a huge fan of this graphics generator. It is extremely easy to use, and offers a ton of templates to choose from.

Try Some Fake Quotes

Have you seen those posts floating around that show Albert Einstein quoting Lil Wayne lyrics, or George Washington telling you not to believe everything you see on the internet? Fake quotes can be a lot of fun, and they get shared on social media quite a bit.

Technically, you don’t need any resources for this one. You can make up your own (taking care to make it obvious that it is fake), and post them. Making you the original source, and increasing your visibility.

But there are some good places to get those fake quotes if you want them.

• Pinterest is full of funny fake quotes for your inspiration
• If you feel like getting spiritual, you can check out I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddah. It is a collection of fake quotes attributed to the spiritual leader, and some of them can actually be kind of funny. At the very least, it is a conversation starter. I have posted from there myself, with the caption “~Something Buddah Didn’t Say”, and it sparked a flurry of reshares and comments.
• ohn Oliver launched his own fake quotes site called Definitely Real Quotes in a bid to shame politicians. It auto generates some hilarious visual quotes for your (and your followers) enjoyment. It’s not family-friendly material though, so be warned.
  

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Post From Your Interviews

Finally, I would say my favorite method of getting expert quotes to use on social media is also the most beneficial to you: through expert interviews.

You are probably always looking for new content, and by interviewing an expert you will get plenty. You will also build yourself as an authority and source for the original quote, which you can use to promote the content you have just published. Win-win!

I try and conduct an interview at least once a month, and I have loved the results.

Do you have any tips for using expert quotes to engage on social media with new and current followers? Let us know in the comments!

The post How to Boost Your Social Media Following With Expert and Influencer Quotes! appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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Why the Top of Your Funnel is Almost Always More Profitable than the Bottom

Yes. AdWords converts better than most other channels. Anywhere, ever.

But. That doesn’t mean it’s the only option. Or even the best option.

Two reasons why:

First, your cost per lead tends to be higher than other inbound channels. Chiefly because…

Second, AdWords doesn’t scale as well as other options. So you hit a point of diminishing returns. ‘Cause only 3.4% of search queries results in an AdWords click.

That ain’t a lot. ‘Specially on your ~5-10 niche keywords that actually convert.

The trick is to turn your attention from the bottom of the funnel back to the top.

Here’s why the top of your funnel is almost always more profitable than the bottom.

Closing and scaling BOFU deals isn’t sustainable

AdWords has intent. People search, click, and opt-in or buy.

It’s literally trained people to give you money.

It’s the ‘last touch’ so often that it becomes “easy to track ROI.” So like any self-fulfilling prophecy, the more attention it gets, the more “it works.” The more budget and labor and buy-in.

The problem is scale.

Especially when you’re paying $25 to $50+ per click. (Or more — I see you insurance and law.)

Conversions might be good on AdWords. But in many cases there’s (1) not enough to grow your business past six figures. Or (2) there’s not enough margin to reinvest in other areas.

Bottom-of-the-funnel advertising like this works well because you can throw down a few bucks and see a few more bucks come in not long afterward.

But here’s where more problems crop up.

High-end CPCs dramatically push up your Cost Per Leads. That, in turn, pushes up your minimum monthly ad budget. So it’s not uncommon to see ~$30k/month budgets in competitive niches on the low end (I’ve worked on a few myself).

You need so many leads to turn into customers. So you need to cast the net wide enough to convert a few measly percentage points.

Here’s the additional wrinkle, though.

According to a Salesforce B2B benchmark report, it takes an average of 84 days for a lead to become an opportunity:

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And that’s not even a final sale.

84 long, hard days to transition from a lead to an opportunity, and 18 more days to close the deal.

Now. What are your payment terms? Net 30 or worse?

You’re now looking at not recouping a single dollar from that $30k/month budget until the next quarter (at the earliest).

So in reality, you need like four or five times that budget to sustain you. It’s like working capital in finance. You need enough to keep the lights open until the money, eventually, flows back into your bottom line.

Fortunately, all hope isn’t lost.

There’s a powerful antidote to a sluggish, budget-sabotaging funnel. It goes by the name of: Brand Awareness.

The stuff that big, mega enterprises have invested in for years. But most SMBs and tech geeks shy away because it “doesn’t convert.”

Generating brand awareness is a cheap investment

Brand awareness is typically the goal of any top-of-the-funnel campaign.

You want to start positioning your brand favorably within the minds and hearts of consumers.

Unfortunately, it’s often overlooked. It’s the Great Brand vs. Performance Marketing debate.

On the one hand, ‘branding’ is like a clichéd buzzword that’s lost all meaning. And on the other, it’s only seen as viable for large companies with massive budgets. It’s a “nice to have,” not a “must have.”

To make matters worse, it’s nearly impossible to draw a direct line from brand building activities to sales. So it gets dismissed by all hardcore data geeks (even when data itself lies).

But here’s the thing.

When done correctly, brand building is an investment in future sales.

Take a look at Facebook ad expert Jon Loomer’s current ad campaigns:

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What do you notice?

First off, it’s all divided by a typical marketing/sales funnel.

Traffic/reach – TOFU
Lead generation – MOFU
Conversions – BOFU

Now take a look at the daily budgets for each. This is where it gets interesting.

He dedicates the majority of his budget to-top-of-the-funnel marketing activities.

Around $1,500 per month goes to top-of-the-funnel campaigns, and he only sets $300 aside for MOFU and BOFU tactics.

That’s a massive difference.

Why?

Why on earth would he invest $1,500 a month into campaigns that have zero chance of converting?

Why not dump that money into MOFU and BOFU campaigns with sale-based offers?

Because he’s making a future investment. You can’t convert sales when there isn’t enough built-in demand in the first place.

Let me explain with some data.

Nielsen conducted a massive study on understanding what drives sales, and they found that 59% of people buy products and services from brands that they recognize.

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Familiar faces are more likely to get the final deal.

But that’s not all.

SurveyMonkey and Search Engine Land found that 70% of consumers look for a known retailer when deciding which search result to click:

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That’s not surprising at all, really.

Think about it:

When you searched for “inbound marketing” recently, did you click on HubSpot or joeschmoe.net?

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it wasn’t the latter.

Even if joeschmoe.net were ranking #1, you’d probably still click HubSpot at #5.

Cuz: Brand awareness = trust.

Brand recognition is a powerful way to drive sales.

And once you develop a brand reputation within your own space, you end up being able to drive traffic without having to take the normal funnel stage route.

Meaning you don’t have to pay to drive traffic anymore.

You don’t have to pay for ads and lead magnets.

You just have to focus on closing. You reduce your costs dramatically.

It’s time for some good news:

Building brand awareness is cheap.

I’m talking dirt freaking cheap. Pennies to the dollar cheap.

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According to Moz, Facebook Ads have the cheapest CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) of any advertising platform ever.

Except they “don’t work,” right?

Maybe, maybe not. But try comparing that cost to the freaking newspaper, magazine, and radio CPMs then:

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And guess what?

You only have to spend $1 per day on Facebook as the minimum daily budget. That means you can reach 4,000 more people a day with ads based on brand awareness for a single measly dollar.

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Using expert-level mathematician skills, that’s 120,000 brand impressions each month for only $30.

That’s just about the cheapest brand exposure you’ll ever get. Like, ever.

That’s 120,000 more people seeing your brand than last month.

Here’s how to implement cheap branding on Facebook to keep your top of the funnel profitable and growing like never before.

Create a self-sustaining TOFU campaign on Facebook

Self-sustaining campaigns run and run and run.

It only takes three easy steps that you can complete in just minutes today.

Create a new, medium-sized saved audience based on your target market.
Create a remarketing audience based on those engaged users.
Create a new lookalike audience based on leads.

With this, you’ll only be spending a few bucks a day while simultaneously creating a campaign that maintains itself.

You just rinse and repeat each time the cycle completes to replenish your audience.

This way, you’re generating thousands of new visits and impressions to build brand awareness every single month.

More brand awareness = more recognition/trust = more sales in fewer funnel stages = less money out of your pocket.

To get started, fire up the Facebook Business Manager and head to the audiences section:

From here, select the option to create a new saved audience:

The saved audience is a great starting point to generate a big enough list for brand awareness campaigns.

Start by entering the basic demographic data associated with your target customers:

Next, it’s time to narrow it down a bit.

You can’t target 200,000,000 people with brand awareness ads. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many people who care about your company.

Start adding various interests related to your company. For example, if you sell SEO services, add that as an interest:

Are your services B2B? Narrow it down further:

Lastly, finish it off with some exclusions to avoid targeting users who typically don’t respond well to your products or services:

Next, hit save and name your audience so that you can recognize it later.

Now, head to the Ads Manager and create a new campaign based on the brand awareness objective:

Then, scroll down to the audience section and choose the saved audience you just created:

Next, set your budget to just a single dollar per day (or more if you have a larger budget):

Now it’s time for the creative.

For brand awareness ads, you don’t want to focus on converting someone to sales. Offers like that won’t resonate with users who have no clue who you are.

Give them value associated with your brand without asking for anything in return.

For example, take your latest blog post and use that as your creative.

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You’re done with the first step. Next up, it’s time to set up a remarketing audience based on visits to your brand awareness blog post.

First things first, you need to get your Facebook Pixel setup if you haven’t already. Head to the Events Manager and select the Pixels option.

Click to create your Pixel and give it a recognizable name for your site:

Next, install your Pixel code by selecting any of the listed options:

From there, simply follow the directions for each based on your choice to get your code installed.

Now, go back to the audience section and create a new custom audience based on website traffic:

Make sure that you select “People who visited specific web pages” as your criteria, and then enter the blog post you drive traffic to for your brand awareness ads:

If you want to get even more specific, narrow down the traffic by refining the frequency to two or more visits:

Still with me?

Next, hit save, and you’ve generated your second audience.

With this audience, you can bring back users and narrow your list down even further to the most brand-aware visitors.

Lastly, you’ll want to take that new custom audience and turn it into a lookalike audience.

That will allow Facebook to wrangle up more users for you to target who have similar interests and tendencies as your best performers in these campaigns.

Genius, right?

Head to the audiences section and create a new lookalike audience. Select the second remarketing audience you just saved as the “Source:”

Next, be sure to choose the 1% audience size to keep it targeted and dirt cheap (See: this study).

Hit save, and you’ve just created a self-sustaining top-of-the-funnel campaign to generate tons of brand awareness.

Phew. You made it.

Now it’s time to sit back and reap the rewards of a well-sown crop.

Conclusion

Yes. You should invest in AdWords.

But invest all you’ve got?

No. Probably not.

Not when you’re looking at ~four * $30k/month to start getting your first few customers. Not unless you’ve got a rich uncle hiding somewhere. Or a private equity firm cutting the checks.

Instead of following the typical playbook, flip the script. Invest in the stuff that’s going to make future sales easier and less expensive.

Invest in branding activities, that you have no way of tracking today, in pursuit of an easier tomorrow.

Brand awareness has the power to drive faster, funnel-skipping sales, at scale. And when done correctly, it can even be a cheap investment that will pay off dividends for years to come.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

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How to become your team’s outbound king or queen

Top outbound reps don’t reach the #1 spot by waiting in line.

They skip everything that doesn’t move real deals forward. That includes the pointless check-ins, the moonshot deals, and the customers who are happy to talk but will never buy. Their success has nothing to do with callousness, luck, or speed, and everything to do with prioritization.

If you want to ascend to outbound royalty too, here is how to be crowned.

1. Have a system

Sales can be an emotional rollercoaster. Cold-calling your entire list may sound totally reasonable (fun, even) after hitting quota, but after losing a deal it can feel like pulling teeth. To keep yourself consistent, develop a system that allows you to:

Silo your activities

Silos speed up your outbound because there is no such thing as multitasking—there is only doing multiple things poorly at once. And while many people claim to be the exception, neuroscience researchers at MIT insist that multitasking makes us 40 percent less efficient.

That means if you try to John Nash-it by jumping between building lists, adding contacts, and reaching out, you’ll only get about half as much done.

Segment your tasks and perform them on different days, or at least at different times.

Make the most of every conversation

Qualify every conversation heavily before taking it. No matter how excited you or your SDR are about the logo, push back politely and insist that they’re qualified to the right standard. Do they have budget, authority, need, and a timeline?

If so, prep heavily. Focus your conversations by anticipating their questions and concerns so you’re ready with solid answers and probing questions of your own. Encourage your prospect to prepare too. If they have a true need, they’ll be happy to engage in your pre-call diligence. If they don’t, this might upset them, and that’s a red flag that’s equally valuable.

Record your outreach (it’ll help you)

Whether chatting via phone or video conferencing, the ability to review interactions offers big learning opportunities: What questions do prospects ask most often? Which objections are common? How have you succeeded or failed at overcoming them?

Once you’re treating these conversations as what they are—tests—it’ll become easier to spot your shortcomings and improve your results.

2. Spend your time like it’s your money (because it is)

The more administrative tasks you can hand off to automation, the better. Calendar everything—including those siloed blocks for prospecting—and set reminders to do pre-call prep, follow-up, and deal diligence. And tighten up all meetings by changing your default calendar meeting length from 60 minutes to 25 minutes. Defaults are powerful and you’ll be forced to work more efficiently. When it all works properly, you should feel like these notifications are guiding you through your busy day like a personal assistant.

You should also take advantage of every automated insight. This is great news if your sales strategy includes video: Most next-generation video platforms allow you to set alerts for when a prospect watches a certain percentage so you can strike at the best time—while they’re thinking of you and have seen enough to be qualified—without wasting time on leads who’ve gone cold.

Salespeople who follow up with leads in under one hour are 7x more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker.

3. Make your outreach count

B2B buyers are more immune to outreach than ever, unfortunately. They’re bombarded with endless requests to chat and are fed up with salespeople who disrespect their time by “just wanting to touch base.”

Here are two ways you can command attention:

Personalized videos

Did you know that 70 percent of B2B buyers watch a video sometime during their buying process? Use this to your advantage and create your own personalized videos. They’re attention-grabbing and deliver your message in a way that’s far more exciting than just another text or email with a value-proposition followed by three bullet points.

If you’re spending your time wisely and only reaching out to high-fit accounts, you should have plenty of time to personalize these videos for maximum impact.

Want more video sales tips? Read 7 Ways to Use Video to Close More Business.

Build immunity to rejection
As a salesperson, routine rejection is an occupational hazard. But the better you get at eliminating bad options, that is, those prospects who were going to say no anyway, the more time you’ll have to spend on your best accounts.

Do as Marketo recommends and immunize yourself to the ‘rejection flu.’ Test your messaging constantly, practice getting rejected in low-risk environments, and take improv classes. And above all, use your system to outbound consistently. Whenever you take a long break, you’ll regress and rejections will start to sting again.

Keep it up

The most important part of having a system is sticking to it. Whether you’re on a post-deal high or breakup call low, knowing precisely where and how to spend your time keeps you consistent and helps you avoid the feast or famine of outbound sales.

And when you consistently deliver the results, month after month and quarter after quarter, you’ll earn yourself the title of king or queen of outbound—a sweet prize—and almost as satisfying as having crushed your quota on the way there.

The post How to become your team’s outbound king or queen appeared first on Vidyard.

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4 ways to renew an account that’s gone dark

Do you hear that? It’s the deafening silence of another churned customer.

Don’t they know you care? Couldn’t you have saved them? Perhaps. But account management is like a game of cat-and-mouse: Customers only surface when they need something. And when it’s time to renew, they’re often nowhere to be found.

To bust through their inbox and create a reciprocal relationship, try video.

1. Use video to engage while you educate

When your customers need help, they need it fast. Offering them FAQs, long emails, or phone calls in a crisis is like offering them a textbook just minutes before an exam. Be a better teacher and create a help video library. It places customers at the front of the class where they learn faster and recall information more readily. The remarkable explanatory power of video allows reps who send them to resolve questions quickly—often on the first response—which opens the door to an ongoing conversation about other things. (Ahem, renewal.)

Now we know what you’re thinking: Sounds great, but I don’t have time to prepare an entire video library!

Oh, but you do—the #1 most important factor in customer loyalty is reduction of customer effort, which means you’ll need to increase your own. Spread the work across your team to create videos for onboarding, troubleshooting, and frequently asked questions that’ll save you countless hours going forward. Then arm your reps with the way to send personalized How-To clips.

Millennials who prefer personalized communications have a 28% higher brand loyalty than those who do not—so add a dash of personalized video.

2. Come up with a compelling reason to reach out

And by compelling, we mean beneficial to the customer. If you rarely engage them, renewal time can feel like getting a flood of “Let’s hang” texts from a person you met once at a party last year.

Since most customers churn without a peep, reaching out regularly to understand what’s working (and what isn’t) about your product is one of your best safeguards against churn.

Here are some reasons for your customers to reconnect with you:

• Follow up on feature requests

Feature request follow-ups cut straight to what customers care about—their own experience. If you’re diligent enough to keep notes on who’s asked for what, there’s no better opportunity to reach out. And if you haven’t kept track, start.

More than half of U.S. consumers are loyal to brands that keep them on the cutting edge by consistently offering the latest products and services. As your product team reveals their roadmap, pass it along. They’ll appreciate that you recognize their needs.

• Follow up after technical issues/outages

Have any bugs recently beset your customers? Get personal and apologize. It may seem counterintuitive to remind them of the bad stuff right before their renewal, but it’s better than silence. The most compelling apologies have six elements, including an acknowledgement of responsibility and an explanation of what went wrong. If you nail these two, you get a shot at earning their respect and perhaps start a conversation.

And, reach out even if the bug wasn’t yours. Data privacy is a hot topic right now and more than half of consumers cited breaking up with a brand after a data breach. Capitalize on their need to feel safe by letting them know you’ve beefed up security.

• Help them solve a problem

Every customer is struggling with something. As their account manager, you probably have access to a wealth of information about what they want. Look back at the sales handoff notes or onboarding transcripts and send them relevant research and reports, even if it’s not related to what you do. These are great as ‘flowers for no reason’ touches and might get your foot in the door. To maximize your chance of a response, ask if they’ve read something but ‘forget’ to include the attachment or link.

Every outreach needs an inspired CTA to reel busy customers in.

3. Get personal with video

When customers go quiet, it can be tempting to pack a hodgepodge of “Let’s connect soon” sentiments into an email that’s so radioactive with worry recipients never touch it.

Make yourself harder to ignore and send whatever you have to say in video. A well-lit video of your welcoming face that expresses genuine interest and excitement about something important to them lightens the mood.

Not convinced? Research indicates one-third of U.S. consumers are loyal to brands that engage them in “multi-sensory” experiences. While most videos your team creates will be a far cry from virtual reality, the dynamic nature of any video is capable of making customers feel like they’re somewhere else—in this case, face to face.

Pro tip: Optimize for mobile and keep videos 60 seconds or less where possible.

4. Expand within the account — send videos to stakeholders, influencers, even accounting

Everyone knows it costs less to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones, but here’s something you may not have considered: Video is a scalable way to showcase your most relevant offerings to everyone inside the business.

Use regularly scheduled meetings with existing customers to suss out new cross-team initiatives. Based on what you learn, create and send relevant mini-demo videos for your customer to pass along to other teams to see how they might use your service too. And if all else fails, send a personal introduction video to their accounting department introducing yourself as their point of contact. If you can get a conversation going, find out whether they expect to renew.

The bottom line

To renew modern customers, you don’t just have to anticipate their needs and beat them to the punch: You have to break through their overcrowded inbox too. With video, you have one more powerful tool to engage those who have gone dark or are at great risk.

If you commit to more personal support, perhaps they’ll commit to you too.

The post 4 ways to renew an account that’s gone dark appeared first on Vidyard.

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How A Holiday Video Increased Our CTR 157%

This year Vidyard wanted to think outside the “inbox” and deliver our audience a truly memorable holiday message. We knew that inboxes were going to be bombarded with holiday messages and well wishes from vendors, so how were we going to cut through all that noise?

With personalized video of course!

 

We created a personalized video campaign to wow our audience and show them just how much they mean to us. Our goal was to spread some holiday cheer with a truly unique holiday message. We were sure our personalized video would cut through the noise, and do well, but from the moment we hit send on the email, it exceeded our own expectations.

It’s All About the Message

Our video campaign wasn’t just about metrics (even if they were really impressive) it was about sharing a holiday message with our audience and giving them a gift they could pass along. We wanted to be creative and think outside the “inbox” to reach them with our message. Clearly, our personalized video hit the right chord with our audience because we were flooded with feedback and well wishes in response to this campaign.

   

Subject: Jingle Bells, Email Smells, Video Saves The Day

Oh boy, that email! We embedded our personalized holiday video within the email and came up with a catchy email subject line. This helped us crush our open rate, which ended up being 35% higher than the industry average. Not only did our open rate kill it, but the CTR (Click Through Rate) ended up being 157% higher than the industry average. We knew that we were on to something with this campaign.

If A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words, One Good Video Is Worth…

In a matter of days, we had amassed over 7,000 views on our holiday video, quickly climbing the list to become one of our most viewed videos. It continued exceeding our expectations as the days went on. With an average attention span of over 1 minute (meaning most viewers watched until the very end) we really captured our audience’s attention.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

One of the main components of this holiday campaign was to give our audience the gift of personalized video. We encouraged them to “regift” the video by sending a personalized version to their colleagues/clients and spread their own holiday cheer. We couldn’t believe how many people wanted to share this video. In a few short days over 2,000 people created and shared their own personalized holiday video with a friend, colleague, or client proving that there is no shame in regifting, if it’s a kick ass gift. We even had a few people email us to say ‘thank you’ as this video helped them stand out and get in touch with prospects that had recently gone dark.

Our personalized holiday video exceeded all of our expectations, and truly blew our minds. The engagement, interaction, sharing, and feedback we collected reaffirmed the power of personalized video!

If you haven’t seen our holiday video yet check it out now and hopefully it inspires your own creativity for your next marketing campaign. And don’t forget to share a copy with your colleagues or clients, it just may warm their hearts!

Happy Holidays,

The Vidyard Team!

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