How to Grow Your Sales Pipeline with Video

Have you and your colleagues been thinking about how to grow your sales pipeline with video? In this post, I want to share some killer thoughts and insights from Dubb’s latest webinar on using video to find new prospects and generate more sales. 

Dubb Chief Revenue Officer Darius Santos, Amir Reiter, and I sat down to discuss this important topic. Amir is the CEO of CloudTask, which is a managed workforce provider for growing companies looking to increase their sales, customer retention, and revenue. Amir is an expert in the enterprise space and a true master of scaled sales growth, so Darius and I were excited to sit down with him and hear his thoughts on how to grow your sales pipeline with video. 

The webinar is about an hour long, so if you want to hear all of the tips and insights discussed, I recommend that you watch it in its entirety. However, if you don’t have enough time or just want to get to the best parts, here are some of my favorite takeaways from this discussion. 

The Opportunity Still Exists

As a starting point, there may be some people that think that the opportunity in video is over. After all, digital video isn’t exactly a new technology. YouTube was founded more than 15 years ago. While it may be easy to think this way, it would be similar to saying that there isn’t an opportunity in social media anymore because the platforms are “saturated” or “crowded.”

The bottom line is that video is still underrated for sales. A very small part of the market is regularly using video to generate new sales. This is great news, as we are just getting started on this massive opportunity. 

Ultimately, you can think of video as a pattern interrupt in people’s lives. People love consuming video, whether they are taking a break at work or are looking to be entertained on their commute. We are naturally wired to prefer visuals and storytelling, both of which are at the core of what makes video so great. 

So even if you think that “the time is past” to start building a presence on video, think again. While some prospects in your sales pipeline may not have arrived after watching your video content, that doesn’t mean that you can’t drive traffic this way. The opportunity is there. You just need to consistently create high-value video content and display it where your audience likes to hang out. 

Yes, it is easier said than done. However, the best way to get closer to growing your sales pipeline with video is to start making videos in the first place. With so many great video creation tools available today, there is little stopping you from doing so. 

Strategies on Using Video to Start the Prospect Relationship

Video can be an outstanding way to open a prospect’s relationship with your company. While some prospects may have heard of your company through a blog post or even a cold call, video offers plenty of benefits to the start of your prospect relationship.

For one thing, video lets you quickly build trust with your prospects. If a prospect is encountering your company for the first time, it’s easy for them to take a more skeptical view of your company. While you may not run a huge, multinational corporation, it takes time to build trust with new prospects.

Video can help you quickly build that trust. The magic lies in showing off your personality and being yourself. The great news is that there is no “one right way” to make video content for new prospects. In fact, one of the key pieces of advice in starting these prospect relationships is to avoid what other people are doing. Even if there is a standard of “professionalism” in your industry, that doesn’t mean that you have to create your video content in a “professional” way.  

Granted, you will want to ensure that your video is on point. This means that you need to step into the shoes of your prospects and understand the issues or problems that they are encountering. While every prospect is different, there are likely several overarching dilemmas or issues that you can target. 

This leads to an important point. That point centers on time. We only have a finite number of hours per day, so we want to make sure that we are efficiently using it. When speaking about research, the dilemma centers on how much time we should spend researching individual prospects. If you are targeting hundreds (or even thousands) of prospects in a short period, this can be extremely difficult. However, the general principle is that more personalization in your prospect communications dramatically increases your chances of making a sale. 

So how can you solve this dilemma? One great way to get started is by creating industry personas for your targets. There’s this idea of minimum viable products in the world of digital startups. You can apply the same idea to research through a concept called “minimum viable research.” Here, you’ll want to make some generalizations about the individual you’re targeting. That said, you don’t need to know their entire life history. Once you have a general persona, create a video that focuses on them. Ask them about their job, role, and pain points at their company. Putting them first is a great rule of thumb here. 

Ultimately, if you know your buyer personas, you can do minimal research and still make a great impression on the prospect. Don’t hesitate to create and rely on buyer personas during those initial communications.

More Best Practices on Video Creation

Whether you are communicating with a brand new prospect or are trying to take a prospect across the finish line, there are several best practices to keep in mind. When producing video content, your originality and creativity are your only real limits. Having said this, these best practices can dramatically increase your chances of creating effective (and profitable) video content. 

First, make sure that you are starting with questions and honesty. It’s an obvious truth but it’s worth repeating: your prospect should be the center of your attention. Sales aren’t about stroking your own ego or showing your prospect how smart you are. Instead, it is about creating value in your prospect’s life. A great way to create that value is to ask questions about what your prospect is trying to solve. You can even do so in a 30-second to one-minute video. Starting a dialogue this way puts you in a great position to not only make a sale, but build a strong lifelong relationship with that prospect. 

Along with this, prioritize honesty. You don’t want to force your prospect to purchase a product or service that doesn’t actually provide value. Along with this, you don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. While you should use your best judgment here, emphasizing honesty helps you build that relationship—both now and in the future. 

Next, have a bias toward brevity and embrace planning. Brevity doesn’t necessarily mean that your videos themselves should be long or short. There are some situations where shorter videos are better than longer videos (and vice versa). 

Brevity in this sense means that you should quickly get to the point in your videos. Many of us think the most efficient thing to do is to hit the record button and start speaking to the camera. While it may feel great in the moment, it makes it all too easy to ramble on. If you don’t have the experience of recording all kinds of video content, it becomes surprisingly difficult to drop a 60-second or two-minute video that your prospects will actually watch.

To make it easier, I encourage you to plan out your videos. The plan doesn’t need to be overly detailed. Instead, it can be just a couple of bullet points. Make sure that they also include things like a hook and call to action. Once you have those bullet points down, I also recommend that you speak in bursts when recording. After you have spoken about a thought or one of those bullet points, go ahead and click the pause button. You can later stitch those clips together using a tool like Dubb. 

Finally, don’t feel the need to edit every video. When you’re creating content, it can be all too tempting to spend lots of time editing the video. After all, you want your video content to look crisp and polished. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but you don’t want this to prevent you from consistently releasing video content.

Remember that video is just the vehicle that you’re using to spread your message and connect with others. The production value, no matter how great, is not going to convince your targeted prospect. Instead, it’s the message at the core of your video.

For your shorter-form content, I’d even argue that you need to make few (if any) edits. If you are recording a short selfie video, think about bypassing it entirely. If you feel strongly about making a few edits, nothing is stopping you from doing so. That said, the point stands. Place a much greater emphasis on connecting with your viewer than making the sleekest or most polished video possible. 

Keep the Long Game in Mind

This is a great principle to follow in countless areas of life. With much of the world so short-term oriented, you can gain a huge advantage by focusing on the long-term. This is especially true when growing your sales pipeline with video. 

Patience is a virtue here. Going in for the hard sell likely won’t work—even if you are feeling the pressure to meet your monthly sales quota. As I’ve been saying, you need to provide value first. Avoiding spammy messages and prioritizing real value for your viewer will pay off in the short and long-term. It may seem contradictory, but it is true: by focusing on the long game over the short game, you’ll accomplish your goals much more quickly. 

Yet while you want to keep the long game in mind, that doesn’t mean that you should pursue your short-term goals. For instance, if you made a video for a particular prospect and haven’t heard back from him or her, don’t hesitate to follow up. You can bump up the video by saying something like, “Hey, my team and I made this video for you and I know you’re going to find some value in it. Let me know what you think.” If you think about it, you made the video for them and you know that they will find it valuable. Therefore, don’t hesitate to bump up your video and give them a friendly reminder. In all likelihood, your prospect will thank you. 

In the end, however, don’t forget about the long game. Be patient and keep communicating with your prospects—even if they have passed on your initial pitch or are longtime customers. 

Don’t Hesitate to Repurpose Your Content

When you are thinking about how to grow your sales pipeline with video, you’re likely spending your time planning and creating original content for your audience. Granted, to fill your pipeline using video, you will need to create video, whether that is for an individual or larger audience.

However, some people forget that your content doesn’t need to be used just once. You can use your video content to create a digital resume on your website, YouTube, and/or somewhere else. 

The standard resume is full of black bullets that encompass your skills and experience. It can certainly help provide some context about you and your work. However, your sales videos can actually be leveraged as a recurring inbound marketing strategy. For instance, if you created a longform sales video talking about your product or service, you can post that video to YouTube. Even when you are working on other tasks, that YouTube video is doing work for you. It is showing brand new prospects that you are knowledgeable about your industry or sector and offer a product or service that can solve their problems.

That’s not the only thing. These videos can even be helpful when you are training your colleagues. If you are bringing on a new hire, you can show your sales videos to explain your pitching strategy. Whether you made a successful pitch to a warm prospect or created a stellar video to move brand new prospects down your sales funnel, you have a wealth of insights that you can share with your colleagues. Don’t hesitate to do so.

Video is even a great way to increase your email open rates. In all likelihood, your organization has at least one email list. Email can be a fantastic way to stay in touch with your prospects and customers. But even better, you can include video content to increase your open rates. At Dubb, we have found that including the word “video” in a subject line leads to 10% higher opens. 

All of these are ways that you can repurpose your video content. Undoubtedly, there are more, so don’t hesitate to brainstorm. You may find the next great way to reuse your video content. 

How Dubb Can Help You Accomplish Your Goals

Throughout this discussion, we have spoken about how to grow your sales pipeline with video. As you can see, there are plenty of tactics and strategies that can consistently fill your pipeline and accelerate your sales growth.

That being said, we haven’t spent too much time talking about how you can actually do this. While I may be biased, I strongly believe that Dubb is a fantastic tool that can help you fill your sales pipeline—both now and in the future.

As my colleague Darius discussed in the live stream, Dubb is a video messaging platform that is specifically designed for sales, but is also optimal for marketing. Dubb offers so many benefits in terms of creating videos, customizing those videos, and then distributing those videos to your chosen audience. These three pillars are part of a comprehensive package that lets you engage with your audience and accomplish your financial goals.

Let’s start with creation. Dubb offers many different tools that you can use to create the most outstanding business videos. For instance, the Dubb Chrome Extension lets you easily create video content on your desktop. Pressing the Dubb icon in your Chrome browser, you can capture screen recordings, webcam recordings, or a little bit of both. 

When you are actually recording your video, you can also do plenty of different things. If, for instance, you have a slide deck or other visual that you want to show in real-time, Dubb lets you easily do so. Dubb’s annotation tool also lets you easily emphasize certain parts of our screen. With that visual aide, you can circle or underline key sentences or items so that your viewer knows exactly what you’re talking about. 

Along with pressing the Dubb icon, you also have different recording options inside your favorite tools. On LinkedIn, Gmail, or Outlook, for instance, you can click on the little Dubb icon to start recording right away. Dubb has plenty of integrations where this is possible, so you’ll want to click here to see if your favorite tools are listed. In all likelihood, they are. 

Finally, in terms of creation, there is the Dubb mobile app. You can find it for both iOS and Android devices. The Dubb mobile app lets you record on-the-go and make advanced edits when you’re away from the office. This includes everything from splicing together multiple clips to adding music and emojis to your video content. It really is a one-stop-shop if you’re looking to record and edit video when you’re outside the office. 

Now, let’s talk about customization. This is a part of Dubb that many people miss. There is a wide array of customization tools that you can use to make your videos shine. Not only that, but your videos can be optimized to create those conversions for your business.

When you create and upload a video to Dubb, you get several things that are automatically created for you. Most notable is the Dubb action page, which lets you include many different calls to action below your video. Dubb lets you customize all aspects of this video landing page. Whether you want to include your logo, certain fonts, specific calls to action, or something else, Dubb lets you get the job done. In terms of calls to action, our software lets you do virtually anything, whether it is having a viewer schedule a call on your calendar or letting a viewer reply to your video with a video of their own. 

The playlist feature is also another gem. Here, you can combine hyper-personalized videos for your prospect and stack them on top of another video (or videos). Those other videos can be more general, yet sleeker videos that can further explain your product or service. 

Ultimately, the idea here is that you can have as many different templates as you may want or need. Switching templates, you can change everything from the background image to the colors throughout your page. These templates can be helpful for things like cold prospecting, follow-up with a certain segment of customers, and more. 

Lastly, there is distribution. Essentially, this is all about how you’re going to send your videos out through the channels and methods of distribution that you’re already using. 

The first piece of Dubb’s distribution features is the direct integration. Whether you are in Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, or something else, there will be a little Dubb icon inside the interface of that tool. That button lets you instantly insert your recorded and edited video into that tool. Easy enough, right? 

Beyond this option is Dubb’s universal copy and paste function. When we say universal, we mean universal. It works with any CRM, social media tool, or email platform. All you need to do is copy and paste your video into that interface and you’ll be good to go. It will send the entire video and you don’t need to worry about things like attachments or video sizes. 

Using Dubb, you can also access some other critical built-in features. For instance, Dubb users like you can get a wealth of analytics about their videos. You can see specifically who has watched a certain video, how much of that video the individual watched, and other insightful analytics like that. You get these analytics whether you are sending a one-to-one video or a bulk video to a huge audience. 

Dubb also lets you take advantage of automation. In other words, you can build simple or complex workflows that are triggered based on certain events. Using this tool, you can create a series of emails, text messages, or any combination of them so that you can more easily accomplish your sales or marketing goals. 

These are just some of the tools and features that you can leverage as a Dubb user. To learn more about how it can help you grow your sales pipeline with video, click here. You can also click here to sign up for a seven-day free trial of our premium plans. 

Accomplishing Your Sales Goals

In this post, we have seen how to grow your sales pipeline with video. It’s an exciting topic, as you can leverage video to accomplish your loftiest of sales goals. By implementing the insights above, staying consistent, and being laser-focused on your audience, you can absolutely fill your sales pipeline—both today and tomorrow.

If you’d like to learn more about how Dubb can help you fill your sales pipeline, go ahead and click here. And if you’d like to get in touch with us, click here.