Video isn’t just a tool for marketing anymore. These days, innovative companies are using video to enhance just about every part of their businesses, from training and onboarding to corporate communications and capturing meetings.

Within the enterprise, sales organizations have also begun to use video to impact their top line. The use of video for sales enablement has grown sharply as more enterprises look to implement tools that can improve their sales team’s ability to stand out among competitors.

If you’re looking to improve the agility and efficiency of your sales department, video can provide following benefits:

1. Increase the productivity of your sales team

Research by IDC estimates that salespeople spend 7 hours or more per week — nearly one whole day — searching for information to prepare for sales calls. Despite this time spent, IDC also found that one in three sales are estimated to be lost as a result of poor sales preparation.

Companies can address this challenge by making it easier for sales reps to always have instant access to the information they need. Online video platforms like Panopto allows reps to search inside a secure video library of sales readiness videos for any word spoken or displayed within any video so that your reps can find just the right piece of information on your product, company, and industry to present to a prospect.

2. Decrease sales training costs

Onboarding new sales representatives can be costly, especially when sales training is performed in instructor-led classroom settings. The productivity loss from pulling sales managers away from sales activities to perform training must be considered in addition to the tangible costs of travel, lodging, and logistics.

Video helps organizations decrease these costs by giving employees access to an anytime, anywhere training resource. Training can be performed remotely, enabling companies to decrease the number of resources devoted to in-person training. By substituting video-based learning for in-class training and smaller events, Microsoft was able to reduce the costs for classroom training from approximately $320 per hour per participant to just $17 per person.

How much could you save by
supporting sales training with video?

 

3. More efficient sales prospecting

The sales enablement processes doesn’t only apply to your employees — they can help develop your sales prospects as well. Video can help you communicate with prospects in a more compelling way through personalized presentations and communications. According to Internet Retailer magazine, 85% of people are more likely to buy a product after watching an explainer video. Another study by Experian indicates that embedding a video in an email increased the email’s conversion rate by an average of 21 percent over using a static image alone.

At the same time, video analytics can provide valuable insight into prospect activity, including:

• Which videos prospects viewed
• Dates and times that a prospect viewed a video
• How long a prospect spent watching the video
• Interactive video features that the prospect used
• The point at which a prospect stopped watching a video

Having this information at your fingertips can help you gauge the interest level of your prospects and which use cases or information interest them the most. The insights enable your sales team to determine the most efficient use of their effort and tailor subsequent prospect communication to the most relevant areas of interest.

Learn more ways video can help your enterprise sales enablement practice in our latest white paper, “18 Ways You Can Boost Your Sales Enablement with Video.”