Who should be responsible for producing a sales enablement video for technology solution vendors? Well, marketing usually controls the budget, and has responsibility for inbound content marketing and lead generation. So, marketing is responsible.
But how responsibly do they fulfill the sales enablement function? As noted in a previous post, formal agreements between sales and marketing (budget commitments, for example) are pretty unusual in B2B companies. Marketing works hard to generate leads, which sales hopes to transform into “opportunities.” But marketers tend to think of video in this context as advertising or collateral, not as a tactic for capitalizing on sales opportunities.
What is an “opportunity”?
From the technology sales point of view, an “opportunity” is frequently a team of individuals evaluating solutions, each from his own point of view. Or an “opportunity” may be the chance to increase penetration in existing accounts. Or to cross-sell or upsell solutions marketed by lines of business the salesperson doesn’t work for directly.
What sales needs in these instances is not a video brochure or sales sheet to hand out, but the ability to get through to different members of the team with different messages. Sales may have contacts on the customer side who are keen to help — but, now they need help framing the value proposition for colleagues. These colleagues at third remove from your sales team may be willing to engage, but they don’t need (or want) to be enticed with highly promotional collateral.
As to different buying team points of view, it’s inconceivable that general marketing collateral can encompass them all satisfactorily. Some buyers care only about the soundness of the technology itself, others may only be interested in the security and compliance aspects. Some want to compare features, others need to find out how the potential returns from this solution stack up against opportunities in other areas competing for limited funds.
It is sales, not marketing, who must contend with all this complexity. But it’s a big and underexploited opportunity for savvy content marketing — and for using video in particular.
How video makes better sales opportunities
Why video? Because video is very good at making complex ideas look approachable and making summarized content easy to grasp. And what different people want at any stage of the buyer’s journey is summarized content that provides guidance to their own thinking.
Your sales team has the resources needed to answer in-depth questions. Where they need help is getting people to ask questions in the first place. They need to communicate to different members of the customer buying team enough about the ways in which their individual concerns have been addressed that they’ll want to know more.
Marketing can meet this need with short, business-like, attention-getting videos that answer questions and encourage follow-up questions. It needn’t cost more to produce, say, three or four (or more) <1-minute videos than it would to produce one 2-3 minute video.
If all these videos address real concerns of real customers, they will almost certainly have wide application across many different groups of customers. Hence, by taking responsibility for sales enablement videos, marketing gets more marketing videos. Seems like a responsible use of the marketing budget to me. What do you think?
For more about designing videos for sales engagement, download our free report Creating Videos that Support the Technology Buyer’s Journey.
