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Dynamically Personalized Demo Videos = Shorter Sales Cycles

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What once was a clear line between where marketing ended and sales began, has become less and less defined in today’s B2B world. As customer’s buying behaviors have drastically changed, so have their expectations. The traditional sales model of marketing handing off an opportunity to sales simply no longer works.  Your customers don’t care whether your role is marketing or sales, all they care about is whether or not your solution will solve their problem. In order to stay relevant, sales and marketing must join together to engage customers in all stages of the sale to provide a seamless, end-to-end experience.

One of the most significant ways customer’s buying behaviors have changed is in how they research potential solutions, that is primarily online. In fact, by 2020, customers will manage as much as 85% of their b2b purchase without ever interacting with an actual person. This makes the content that marketing produces more valuable than ever before, yet sales teams across the board rarely have insight into how and when customers are interacting with that content, or better yet leveraging it further on in the sales cycle.

Sales and Marketing: Let’s Play Nice

With so little control over the buyer’s journey at the earliest and most vital stages, it is critical that sales and marketing work together and leverage technology, such as personalized video, to help prospects move faster and farther along the sales cycle before a they ever even engage with a sales person.

Traditionally, sales and marketing are infamous for not getting along, a lack of communication and competing goals have no doubt been a contributing factor. It’s not only dysfunctional, but expensive when sales and marketing can’t collaborate, costing companies at least $1 trillion a year in lost sales and wasted marketing budgets. That’s why smart organizations are actively converging their sales and marketing teams, starting with aligning them behind a common goal… customer experience, which ultimately drives revenue.

One of the current shortfalls for many organizations is that they aren’t taking full advantage of the content that costs marketing so much time and money to produce. Video in particular is left in marketing’s hands and is largely ignored by sales. As a result, 60-70% of B2B content that is created, isn’t ever reaching your buyers. What a waste!

Bonding Through the Customer Experience & Dynamic Video

By focusing on the customer experience and making both teams more customer-centric, salespeople have the ability to leverage the content that marketing spends precious time and money to create in their sales interactions. Marketers also create more powerful content because they have better insight into sales conversations and customer’s priorities. Most importantly, the customer is receiving the message they want, when they need it.

Using video as part of the marketing strategy is no secret, in fact 79% of B2B marketers today use video. Many of these videos hold themselves to a very high standard of quality… professionally produced, with a clear relevant message and they can be shared on various social platforms. Although all these attributes are important to consider, sales and marketing should be focused on a different sort of quality. Your customer isn’t going to care about the bells and whistles, all they’re going to care about is if the message speaks to them and their unique problems.

Video is only impactful when content is genuinely personalized, delivering to your customer the seamless experience they expect. In addition to being personalized, video should also be shareable. We want to support our buyers and we know that today there can be up to 6.8 decision makers involved in making a purchase decision. Personalized video drives consensus and allows everyone in the buying group to make quicker and better informed decisions.

You may have all these boxes checked, but we need to keep in mind that the real power of personalized video technology is when sales and marketing come together and leverage the dynamic content to support prospects throughout the entire buying process. Only then will we see the impact in revenue of significantly shorter sales cycles and increase in close rates. That is not only a success for both sales and marketing, but a win for everyone.

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