Video Materials for Early-Stage Sales

8 minutes, 10 links
From

editione1.0.1

Updated August 22, 2022
Founding Sales

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

I’m a big fan of video to help accelerate appointment setting in early-stage sales. Internet video is a fantastic tool; it’s highly accessible and provides for a richness of communication that far outstrips email templates or even visual exhibits. And thanks to mobile phones with fast data plans, video collateral can be watched anywhere, at the moment it shows up in a prospect’s email inbox or Twitter feed. As such, having a one-, two-, all the way up to five-minute overview of your offering to share with would-be prospects is extremely helpful.

MVP Overview Video

importantThe goal here is not to sell the product. Rather, as with your email templates and phone scripts, the goal of these videos is to sell the prospect on the next step—getting on the phone for discovery, presentation, and a demo. And as with your slides and email templates, your video overview does not have to be perfect. It just has to exist. One of the easiest ways to create a viable overview video is to put together a highly shortened sales presentation and demo and record it on your laptop, while you narrate.

exampleWhen TalentBin was extending its go-to-market from exclusively technical and design recruiting to include the healthcare vertical as well, we created a newly refreshed pitch deck focused on the realities of the healthcare recruiting market, and how TalentBin fit in there. Then I recorded a brief overview pitch that included the basics. Just use Camtasia, Snagit, QuickTime, or Loom to record your screen while you speak over your slides, and give a lightweight demo (as appropriate). It’s helpful to know the keystrokes to pause the recording in case you need to cough, or you stumble and need to pause and regain your footing.

I prefer YouTube as a means of deploying videos for a variety of reasons. First, YouTube is mobile-friendly. So much email is read initially on smart phones nowadays, so if you include a link to a video, you want it to actually play when the prospect clicks through. Second, YouTube is a trusted URL. If the link in your email is clearly from YouTube, the prospect knows what’s on the other end! A video! On YouTube! That place where delightful videos live!

There are other benefits as well, but they’re mainly secondary. YouTube itself has lots of traffic and does a good job of cross-marketing video content based on title, description, tags, and such. So someone watching a related video can discover yours. For that reason, make sure you title your video well, and include a rich description and good tags. And in that description, add a link back to your website so that people can get from the video page to your website and into your lead capture form! YouTube also has a great Google search engine optimization rank. Often when someone searches for your brand, Google will pepper in videos from YouTube—so make sure they’re your videos. Lastly, because YouTube is the biggest video-sharing site around, your prospects are used to dealing with it. They know how to grab the hyperlink and email or text message it to their colleagues. Or post it to Facebook and Twitter. Or embed it with an embed code somewhere. Previously it was popular to use Vimeo because of better replay quality, but YouTube has largely caught up on this front. For all the other reasons above, I highly recommend posting all your marketing videos on YouTube.

Figure: YouTube Demo Details

Source: YouTube

The production value on that healthcare video is not the greatest. There are times when I stumble on my words, or say “um” and “uh” more than I would like. However, this is a perfectly viable recording to send to thousands of potential customers who have the business pain that TalentBin for Healthcare addresses. If your prospects have the pain point you’re addressing, and the pain point is actually one that people care about, they’ll get over a couple “ums” and “uhs” and instead focus on the fact that your solution fixes their problem! (If they don’t have that pain point, you’re prospecting wrong. More on that in the next chapter. And if they have the pain point, but it’s not a substantial one, that’s a product management problem, not a sales one!)

Further Viewing on MVP Overview Videos

Explainer Videos

This more advanced cousin of the video overview is typically a more abstract presentation of the sales narrative, oftentimes animated and voiced-over and made with a higher level of production value. I find that these videos are very helpful both as a first explanation for prospects who show up on your website and as an excellent piece of collateral to deploy via prospecting email. (Note that there were links to videos in some of the appointment-setting email templates above.) You can use your explainer video for outreach beyond email too, deploying it, for example, on monitors at events and conferences.

Unlock expert knowledge.
Learn in depth. Get instant, lifetime access to the entire book. Plus online resources and future updates.

Typically these explainers work really hard to be shorter than two minutes in length—in large part because their primary use is on a website, and you don’t necessarily have a lot of time to grab the attention of the visitor. But even though you see these things all over the place, and they are valuable, they don’t have to be your first piece of video collateral. In fact, because they tend to be a bit of a project, especially if you want to do them with a professional third party, they can end up getting delayed over time. Don’t fall into that trap. Get something going ahead of your explainer—remember, something is better than nothing—even as you work on your delightful, pixel-perfect masterpiece!

At TalentBin, my co-founder and I worked our butts off on our first explainer video.

Figure: Screen Shot From Initial TalentBin Explainer Video

Source: TalentBin

exampleWe finalized the last edits with the vendor, Epipheo, while we were driving a Ford Excursion from San Francisco to Las Vegas for the HR Tech Convention. It turned out great, and we used a variation of it for the ensuing four years. But! Even before we had that spiffy explainer, we had a variety of hacked-together pieces of video collateral that we used to land face-to-face meetings with our first few dozen customers. Videos like this one, which started out with very low production value, to this enhanced version that includes some custom artwork. The funny thing about both of these is that they talk about an initial feature set that was soon eclipsed by a much larger product narrative. But we would have had a much harder time getting those first couple dozen customers with our early product narrative if I hadn’t had videos to send to local recruiting leaders in San Francisco. And if we hadn’t been able to get those first few customers, we would never have had the opportunity to expand our product narrative to web-wide talent search. So don’t gate a good enough video on perfection.

Additional Examples of Explainer Videos

Other Types of Early-Stage Sales Collateral

As you might imagine, there is a whole universe of other types of marketing collateral that you can invest in. PDFs! Webinars! Infographics! Blog listicles! Content marketing! Oh my! What we’ve covered are the basics that you want to get going before you start in on anything else. This isn’t to say that you can’t start selling if you don’t have a video overview. But it will make it easier for you to set appointments if you can embed one in your email templates. And you don’t need to have a formal demo script in place before you start taking customer meetings. But it can help make them more effective. You should be thinking about collateral as features in your go-to-market plans—each one involves time, energy, and cost, and that should be weighed against how frequently it will be used and the value its use provides.

One-Off Requests

Often you will get a request from a prospect for some sort of collateral that you don’t have. “Do you have a one-pager overview on this?” “Do you have customer success stories?” Most of the time you should think about the question under the question (more on this in Handling Objections. Consider whether an existing piece of collateral already handles their request before running off and manufacturing something new. Often that will be the case, so you can simply reply, “You’re looking for what others who have used the product have said about it? Great! We have a number of testimonials on slides near the end of this deck I’m attaching!” or “The first ten slides of this attached deck give a great overview for anyone you’d like to share it with. Oh, and this video overview is quite helpful too.”

You’re reading a preview of an online book. Buy it now for lifetime access to expert knowledge, including future updates.
If you found this post worthwhile, please share!