How to Convince Your Sales Team to Adopt Video Messaging
February 25, 2023·5 min readVideo may earn 3x higher response rates, but it won't work if your team doesn't use it. Sales reps can be set in their ways. Find out how to convince them to give video a try.
Some salespeople understand the value of video messaging intuitively. They see the writing on the digital wall, see how prospects grow harder to reach by the week, and video adoption is a way to break through the attention barrier.
More than likely, some reps on your team may already be using it. Ask around.
But others may see it as an interruption because salespeople are creatures of habit. They see anything that challenges the process that’s already working as an unwelcome interruption, even when it’s good for them.
These are the salespeople who need convincing because sales teams get the best value out of video when it’s driven by a proper rollout strategy.
- Contents
- Why Your Sales Team Should Adopt Video
- Sales Video Adoption: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approach?
- The Benefits of Adopting Video in Sales
- Video for Sales Adoption in Action
- Activate the Virtuous Cycle of Video Sales
Why Your Sales Team Should Adopt Video
There are two things faster than sound: Supersonic jets and sales team gossip. Great sales teams constantly chat and share like bees building a honeycomb of deals.
Chatter makes everyone better. Soundbites improve with use, and tips solidify into tribal wisdom. A blunt email that earned a positive response becomes even more poignant as others use, iterate, and improve it.
But the opposite is true, too.
Salespeople are creatures of habit—they send messages, book meetings, and repeat. To introduce something new, you have to disrupt that. The rollout can’t just be, ‘Hey here’s a video tool that gets better response rates.’ You have to spell it out in a plan with goals and show them precisely how to work it into their process.
Dan WardleVidyardVP of Revenue
Tactics that don’t go viral within the sales culture underperform.
When nobody is having much luck with emails, the team’s email acumen deteriorates, even if it’s based on user error. If a few people get cold feet about cold calling, half the team comes down with the rejection flu and avoids the phones.
This can happen with video adoption too. Even though sales pros agree that video messaging increases response and close rates and shortens deal cycles, a few detractors can dampen everyone else’s results.
To get your entire sales organization to understand video’s utility and adopt it in a fashion that quickly impacts sales pipeline, you need to sell your team on the idea.
Sales Video Adoption: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approach?
The truth is that both can work. Regardless of which approach, it’s top of mind sales leaders—over 70% who aren’t using video plan to implement it in the near future.
Bottom-Up Approach to Adopt Video
Sometimes, sales leaders can precipitate video spreading bottom-up by making it exclusive.
Any sales manager who’s ever handed a bluebird deal to one rep and gotten an earful from the rest of the team knows that everyone resents being denied an advantage. If they’re told they can’t have it, they’ll demand it.
One Vidyard customer picked two of their lower-performing sales reps and asked them to use video for several weeks. They provided training, templates, examples, and coaching. These two reps improved so much that the company’s top-performing reps begged leadership to let them use video too.
Top-Down Approach to Adopt Video
Other times, leadership can enforce a video culture top-down.
Leaders purchase a video platform, create a series of gold-standard example videos, and require the entire team to get certified on using video before they’re allowed to go live. In this scenario, sales spiffs for using videos, competitions for top videos, or making video certification a prerequisite for promotion can drive adoption.
It’s extremely hard to get a sales team to change their behavior. There’s a tried and true method of hitting your quota every month. So in order to win the hearts and minds of the sales team, we had to come with both anecdotal and data-backed suggestions that this actually worked.
Morgan JacobsonHubSpotPrincipal Manager of Sales Strategy and Systems
If you find yourself in the position of having to convince management or senior leadership to adopt video for sales, the best move is to get meta: Send them videos about video. Do it once a week, as long as it’s in good humor, and you won’t upset them.
When they ask a question over email, send a video response to demonstrate how much time you can save them over reading a written response.
You can also let the numbers do the talking. As mentioned above, sales emails that contain videos earn 3x higher response rates.
These sales leaders from PatientPop and LinkedIn share what they’ve learned while coaching their teams to adopt video messaging throughout their sales processes. Learn how they’ve gotten reluctant reps on board, where they’ve seen the greatest impact across their teams, and how they’ve maximized ROI on video messaging and Vidyard.
The Benefits of Adopting Video in Sales
There are plenty of reasons why your team should give video a try.
- Earn greater inbox presence with 3x higher response rates.
- Build relationships at a distance: It’s the next best thing to meeting in person.
- Explain complex topics simply: Video lets you show and tell at the same time.
- Save time: Higher response rates mean you’ll have more for actual selling.
- Accelerate deal cycles with simple, compelling screen share explanations.
That’s probably why HubSpot has called video prospecting one of the 10 skills every sales development rep needs to master (though SDRs certainly aren’t the only ones who benefit from using video in sales).
Video for Sales Adoption in Action
Video works, and these companies can prove it.
- HubSpot drove 4x more booked meetings and 94% retention
- Pavilion saw 72k in net new revenue
- League earned 3x higher response rates
- A SalesLoft SDR hit 120% of her target
- Flight Center Secured 42 million in new business
- MediaValet cut the sales cycle for a large deal in half
- Pipedrive increased its close rate by 25%
- Superside’s video emails experienced an 8x improvement in CTRs
- ReviewTrackers increased reply rates by 92%
- 1HUDDLE achieved a 68% open rate and 12% reply rate
Also, educate your company on your rollout plan. Demonstrate how, rather than leave video’s success up to chance, you’re arming your sales teams with the tools to do better deals faster.
Explain the certification process, how you’ll benchmark and measure success, and the importance of everyone contributing and learning simultaneously.
Activate the Virtuous Cycle of Video Sales
For the salespeople who don’t intrinsically believe in video, time eventually changes their minds. But if you don’t have time to spare and can’t let early errors turn into program-killing gossip, launch a campaign to spread video use bottom-up or top-down to get even the most reluctant salespeople selling better.
And if your teams aren’t sure what kinds of video to create, we have an entire library of free sales templates that cover use cases across the entire sales cycle.
This post was originally published on January 23, 2019. It was updated on February 25, 2023.