Should sales or marketing be responsible for a sales enablement video?
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, […]
Content marketers are forgetting sales enablement. Here’s why.
A recent LinkedIn post asks “Are B2B sales reps getting spoiled by inbound marketing?” Now, I don’t know about all B2B sales, but in my experience with technology solution sales, I’ve certainly never run into a sales professional who seemed overly satisfied with the leads produced by inbound (or any other kind of) marketing. A recent Hubspot […]
Using explainer video for buyer engagement
When we started making 2-Minute Explainer® videos in 2004, what seemed to need the most explaining was what businesses do. We prospected for new business by reading news releases about new products. If we couldn’t understand the product or service on first reading, we called up the executives quoted in the release and pitched them […]
Producing more targeted explainer videos
How messaging and branding hurt your business Let’s assume that you work for a technology company with a viable brand and a professional marketing operation. Which of the following does more to make your brand central to the business lives of your customers: Advertising, corporate identity, and PR? Or Everything else employees do? Sure, branding […]
New Buyer’s Journey Videos
I’ve been writing recently about videos for the buyer’s journey. We tried to capture the essentials of these ideas in the video linked to the right. It’s under a minute long, so I won’t give away the plot except to say that targeting different interests on the buying team seems to us to be a […]
My eight best explainer video content tips
I’ve been working with clients to make videos that help their buyers make decisions about enterprise technology solutions for some time. Here’s a summary of the best tips for video content I’ve shared recently. 1. Make several videos from one. Why? It’s very cost effective and simple to slice and dice even the shortest video […]
Most B2B marketing videos don’t support the buyer’s journey
Most B2B marketing videos don’t support the buyer’s journey because they are product-centric. They accompany product introductions, reside on product pages and are featured in product promotions. Most B2B videos are designed for the “awareness” phase of the buyer’s journey — that is, “Introducing (ta-da!) Cloud Security v.3.0!” These overview “explainer” videos are useful. Customers, […]
Making explainer videos for the buyer’s journey
A trend we’re seeing in the production of information marketing videos is that our clients are increasingly interested in making explainer videos for the buyer’s journey “consideration phase.” This is the point where prospects think they have the problem pretty well defined — now they are trying to get a handle on their options for solving […]
Videos for the buyer’s journey
A couple years ago, Forrester analyst Lori Wizdo depicted the marketing sales funnel in this clever sideways view, with the funnel “bottom” becoming a confused network of criss-crossing channels in which buyers and influencers share the information they collect for themselves. “Marketers who continue to ‘go to customer’ with product-centric campaigns and offers,” she wrote in this blog […]
Explainer videos for sales enablement
Customers in an array of industries, from IT to insurance to business process outsourcing, are often way ahead of the salespeople who are ‘helping’ them. Harvard Business Review In many of today’s buying processes, actual living, breathing salespeople are likely to enter the game when it’s more than half over. If the buying process goes awareness –> […]
