In enterprise technology, buying-team members usually know the high-level story before they watch a webinar or request a demo. They understand the product category and the broad value claims. What they don’t have is the clear, practical detail that shows how a solution fits their organization’s goals, constraints, and tech stack. A short video preview for enterprise technology buyers can help close that gap. With so much information available, buyers face a simple early question: What’s worth my time right

Sales leaders are always looking for new ways to help reps and go-to-market teams spark better conversations. One rarely seen approach is the video for sales outreach—a concise, no-frills story designed specifically for business development and partner engagement. These videos stand out because they feel more like ultra-short demos than polished marketing spots. Buyers see something real and relevant. They feel like they’re learning, not being sold to. What Should a Video for Sales Outreach Look Like? A dramatized use

When tech buyers arrive at your website, most of them already have a pretty good idea of what you do. They want answers to specific questions. Some of these answers are supplied by AI-powered chatbots. In many cases, If the chatbot has an appropriate chatbot-ready video at hand, the answer will be faster and more on-the-money. Why chatbot-ready video? Highly responsive chatbots increase customer engagement, reduce sales cycle friction, and lower customer acquisition costs. Good or bad, the chatbot customer

Laggard is a nice old-fashioned word that hardly anyone uses. It was surprising to learn that “laggard” is not infrequently used in discussions of technology adoption, and also how relevant it is to the issue of planning video for buying teams. Gartner uses the psychographic profiles “conflicted laggards” and “disinterested laggards” to characterize the least successful IT buying teams — the ones who can’t reach a decision on technology adoption and fall behind as a result. The new chasm This

Use case videos for product demonstrations and tutorials  Tech tips and how-to’s. Case studies. These categories — let’s call them “use cases” — invariably show up near the top in surveys of content preferences of IT decision-makers. A use-case video can help buyers develop budgets and justify spending, especially for larger investments. Relevant use cases that map to an organization’s priorities can help make a stronger business case for the spend. Use cases also aid in gathering requirements. By examining

The High-Value Offer is a customer interaction with so much business value that the buyer feels compelled to engage. It’s an account-based marketing concept recommended by Gartner for customer acquisition, too. A high-value offer’s business value depends on timely topics meaningful discussion a unique opportunity not readily available elsewhere — like the opportunity to explore solutions with your experts One obvious difficulty here is that the high-value offer includes direct interaction with sales — something most buyers are working to avoid.

I was surprised to learn from a Foundry (IDG) white paper on customer engagement [download link] that the average technology decision-maker spent 14.3 minutes watching each How-to video they viewed in 2022, up from 12.2 minutes in 2016. If you really want a technology buyer to spend time with your video, some of what you offer should be how-to video content. Taking a Page from YouTube Creators We watch how-to video content when we’re in a hurry to learn something we need to know

Every technology buyer’s journey involves watching videos. If you’re involved in budgeting and producing those videos, you’re probably looking for ways AI can help. I think you can get the most out current AI solutions by looking at cost savings and ROI, not creative output. Who are the most effective users of AI for video? Creative professionals in the entertainment business, not people selling to IT using video. In How Runway took The Late Show edits from five hours to five

I asked Anthropic’s Claude.ai to help identify notable video trends in marketing to IT buyers using video in 2024. I was shocked when the list of trends came back with no of mention AI. When I suggested that an AI writing about the future of anything tech-related without mentioning AI seemed pretty weird, Claude answered apologetically with some sensible (and some pretty dubious) suggestions, the most salient of which was “tapping into AI tools to help scale and customize video