HOW DO YOU STAND OUT?

Let’s be honest: if you’re still spraying and praying your cold emails and cold calls to prospects: you’re probably not.

With a new year comes new opportunities to prospect and engage your pipeline. One of those new windows of opportunity to start getting comfortable with:

Video prospecting.

We relied heavily on video in 2020; from family FaceTimes to sales organizations pivoting from office spaces to Zoom meetings across the world. Adding video is now a must-have, not a nice-to-have in your sales stack if you want to break through the noise and insert genuine personalization and humanity into your sales approach.

Not only does it pave a road of opportunity to bring personality and creativity to cold outreach, but it helps warm up the conversation, which can be the hardest part in the process for salespeople. Imagine being on the receiving end of countless, robotic emails a day telling you why you need a product you have been given little to no information on and have yet to be fed any value to want to carve time for. Video prospecting mitigates the biggest flaws in the sales processes and makes you, the recipient, the center of attention. If anything, we’ll start seeing shifts into creative video prospecting through other social channels like TikTok or Instagram, but that’s enough for another conversation. In 2021, perhaps the greatest gift we can give someone is our full, undivided attention.

Still not convinced? Even C-suites are recognizing the impact video is making on them. A friend of mine told me about her cold outreach strategy to Roque Versace, Chief Revenue Officer of Troops.ai, who gave a fair testimonial to the impact of video prospecting. After making a majority of the sales pitch through LinkedIn messaging with voice notes and video, she asked for feedback and was told:

“The voice message is a sub-optimal step, go straight to video. It’s good and I’ve heard it’s getting good responses.”

Bam. People are talking about the impact video is having and if it’s garnering attention: it’s time to take action.

The one downfall of video: you can’t fake it. Your tonality, inflection, passion … it’s all going to come across on your face. If your confidence and knowledge of the prospect isn’t there, it will show. It’s going to take more time to put together a video than it will be tossing together and editing a previous email template. If you’re putting together a list of high-quality, high-touch prospects, doing your research on them and truly personalizing your messaging (while coming across as sincere) is the way to be impactful.

So be bold. Be intentional. Be different. Stand out!

Embracing video will take you further in your pipeline than outdated techniques and bulk templates will. And please, for the love of all things good and holy in this world, show us your blooper reels. Humility goes a long way in the process. Optimize reality over email subject lines.

Who is the first prospect that comes to mind that you’ve been wanting to get on the hook and feel isn’t taking the bait? Go after them with video. A solid tip is to start with doing some behind-the-scenes work on their LinkedIn profile to see the kind of recent activity and posts that they have put out. This will help make an even warmer intro and segue the conversation and create some immediate common ground. Even if video doesn’t immediately make an impact with the original contact, it can create a more seamless transition into garnering a referral.

In case you need more reasons to dip your toes in, here are my “Top 5 Reasons You Need Video in 2021.”

5. Not doing video is “sooo 2020,” and 2020 sucked. Embrace digital — and Embrace your face. It’s not going anywhere.

4. Your prospects and clients are tired of boring text-related communications. According to RevenueGrid, prospects are receiving upwards of 88 emails per day on average from sales teams. It’s time to stand out and get comfortable pitching on-screen.

3. It’s not just for prospecting anymore. Video accelerates the pipeline and helps define which opportunities are real versus “hopium” opportunities.

2. You can send one to friends and family when you don’t feel like actually talking to them!

1 . It’s ALWAYS free with no credit card required. Vidyard is the online video tool built for success. Learn more.

Need creative inspiration? Learn more and read an article about how an SDR from Dynamic Signal used Vidyard to prospect his Buffalo Wild Wings account and book a meeting.

—

Looking for more? Some important events for this week that you don’t want to miss out on:

Tuesday, January 5th: Surf + Sales Bonfire Session with Corporate Bro

Register here: https://theharrisconsultinggroup.com/corporate-bro-takeover

—

Thursday, January 7th: Thursday Nights Sales is back with the first episode of 2021!

Register here: https://thursdaynightsales.com

—

Go check out how Richard Harris and I rounded out 2020 with our 200th episode of the Surf + Sales podcast! You can find them on all streaming platforms.