Selling is the root cause of all commercial activity. Corporations, individuals, professionals – every one of them is in business to create something that someone would want to buy and pay for it. Selling rolls the economy.
While selling for consumer products has come a long way on the consumer front from door-to-door salesmen to Facebook, B2B selling still seems to be stuck somewhere in the draconian era. Sellers still need to rely heavily on their sales force to interact with prospective clients and do business with them. Although internet has given immense access to companies and brought markets closer, this is one kind of sale that does not close at the swipe of a credit card. The sales team is indispensable for any B2B company.
Humans bring in their own personalities, styles and approaches to meetings. Corporations extensively train their teams to portray the company in the desired light, but how much of control do they have over the process when it begins to roll? Quite limited.
The need of the hour for B2B organizations is to create a uniform messaging tool that supports the efforts of their team by providing key information about the company and its products and provides homogeneity to an otherwise subjective process.
To drive my point, let me cite a case study here.
Recently, we created a corporate video for a turbine manufacturing company in India. The company was growing and had very strong leadership. It was built on very sound business principles and created a presence all across the globe. They decided to create a video to train new employees and sales representatives on the company’s way of doing business and their culture. The video was a first of its kind and covered the company’s history, philosophy, products, presence and above all customer testimonials. The film pretty much brought together all the aspects that clients are interested to know about their vendors while making a decision.
As their sales team watched it and shared it with some of their clients, they began to realize that clients were receiving the film with great enthusiasm. Pretty soon they also started playing the film at pitches and conventions and exhibitions and realized that the film was able to portray the company in its true spirit and entirety much better than what they would be able to do through a powerpoint presentation or a monologue. The rest of the process of understanding the client’s requirements and what they were looking for became much easier as clients were more forthcoming and open after having such a detailed representation of the company in an interesting and vibrant manner. The company has seen this training investment translate into a multi-platform tool where the video is the window to the company no matter who the stakeholder.
It’s also worth noting that a recent research by E-Marketer and Forrester suggests that a video pushes the customer into the next stage of the engagement cycle 52% of the time.
So all those businesses who take their selling seriously should clearly look at enhancing the process with the right corporate video.
