In the last five years, video conferencing has become the preferred way to communicate in real-time with colleagues and customers around the world. When compared to traditional teleconferencing, web meeting tools like Zoom, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, and Skype For Business provide a more engaging way to interact through a combination of webcam, screen, and app sharing.

Among all groups in the organization who use video conferences to stay in touch, sales teams have long been out front, leveraging the technology to have “face-to-face” conversations with prospects and existing clients anywhere in the world.

Of course, having the conversation is only part of the job. In most cases, reps need to take copious notes and then follow-up by translating them into action items and insights for their team.

This system generally serves its purpose. However, most salespeople will attest that, at best, it’s time-consuming, and at worst, it introduces the risk of losing some important details along the way. Ideally, sales teams would be able to capture every client conversation verbatim, store it securely, and recall any detail at a moment’s notice. This ability to recall any point in any conversation is particularly critical when complex deals take many months and conversations to close, or when cold sales leads suddenly warm up after months without contact.

In the last few years, sales teams have begun using video in a new way to address this need. Specifically, they’re using on-demand video and emerging video search technologies to store and recall their web conferences with clients. By recording and storing video conferences in a way that makes their content searchable, reps can focus their attention during calls on the discussion at hand rather than scribbling notes, and they gain the confidence of knowing that all of the important information is at their disposal.

Here’s an example of how Panopto’s video content management system (video CMS) can be used to capture and search video conferences, giving sales reps an always accessible, high-fidelity archive of all of their sales calls.

Start by recording a video conference

Using the built-in recording features of many video conferencing services (we typically use Zoom here at Panopto), sales people can record the web conference feed, including audio, video, and screenshares. The rep can then export a standalone video file of the recording. Typically this is in the form of an MP4 file.

Panopto can also record those video conferences by simply capturing everything that appears on the rep’s screen, including what’s inside the web conference.

Attach videos to a Salesforce account or opportunity

While video conferencing software has enabled reps to communicate with their leads and accounts more easily in real-time, customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce have become the hub for storing and recalling information about their clients.

Unfortunately, Salesforce and other CRM apps weren’t built to store, manage, and share video content due to its large file sizes and the need to have several different transcoded versions of the video for playback on different laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

However, if video could be added to Salesforce, it would be a powerful way to keep a repository of sales call recordings organized with their associated opportunities and accounts.

This was our goal in creating the Panopto video management app for Salesforce. The app enables businesses to connect Salesforce to their Panopto video library and leverage much of Panopto’s functionality directly from within the familiar Salesforce interface. This functionality includes:

• Watching videos stored in Panopto from Salesforce
• Attaching videos stored in Panopto to Salesforce accounts and opportunities
• Sharing videos stored in Panopto on the Salesforce Chatter feed
• Searching across your Panopto video library and inside videos for any word spoken or shown

This last point is critical for sales reps who need to recall topics that were discussed in their web conferences.

Searching inside video to recall any point in any client conversation

Traditional video portals like YouTube rely on manually entered titles, descriptions, and tags to search video. The important content within the video remains unindexed, dramatically reducing the value of “video search.”

Panopto takes a different approach that unlocks all of the valuable content inside videos. Through the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR), Panopto is able to index words that are spoken during recordings and words that appear anywhere on screen.

For sales reps, this provides the ability to:

1. Search across every recorded video conference for any keyword or phrase
2. Find the precise moment in any video conference where the keyword is mentioned
3. Fast forward to that exact moment in the video

Using the Panopto video management app for Salesforce, reps can perform these “inside-video searches” without ever leaving Salesforce.

The result is a dramatically improved way to capture and recall details from any conversation with any client.

A video CMS for all of your business cases

Salesforce is far from the only enterprise collaboration tool that struggles with video, and it’s what Panopto does best. As video is increasingly used to power employee onboarding and training, sales enablement, corporate communications, and social learning, Panopto can provide an integrated, easy-to-use solution that works across all of these use cases. And because Panopto integrates into Salesforce, corporate learning management systems, enterprise networking and collaboration tools like SharePoint and Jive, and anything your IT department can dream up using Panopto’s API, it provides enables employees to use video within the software they already use on a daily basis.

To give your organization a competitive advantage with an enterprise video platform that integrates across your business processes, contact a member of our team to request a free trial today.