Despite the slow adoption of digital technologies, Sales is emerging as the leading adopter of generative AI. AI-backed tools and systems are on their way to becoming every sales professional’s digital assistants.

Today’s business landscape is customer-centric, and this makes customer engagement the cornerstone of success. Engaging potential customers with personalized experiences has become a selling practice that no salesperson can overlook. Generative AI, with its tectonic capabilities, promises to help sales professionals achieve their sales targets with remarkable productivity and success rates.

Sales is a highly variable and people-driven function that generates volumes of data from email trails, phone conversations, video interactions, etc. And this interactive and transactional nature of the function makes it well-suited for generative AI models to learn, connect, and create new opportunities in various permutations and combinations.

This blog explores the potential of generative AI to transform the future of sales engagement.

Enhancing sales content creation

Salespeople constantly strive to create content that can hook their prospects and keep them engaged with their products. Generative AI tools help them automate content creation for emails, contextual follow-ups, proposals, video scripts, sales pitches, FQAs, etc. Apart from this, it also aids in inspiring creativity and bringing fresh perspectives to their sales processes. With every passing day, we are witnessing amazing possibilities for content creation born from human creativity and AI assistance.

For instance, Hippo Video offers a number of video personalization capabilities that can transform your video creation journey. From tailored text overlays on video to generating sophisticated personalized videos, our AI capabilities help you deliver bespoke-like video content to a massive audience with minimal effort.

That said, these smart tools also help businesses cater to their global audience with localized content and expand their reach. By using specific AI models, businesses can generate localized versions of their content—at scale—and explore uncharted territories that were forbidden due to linguistic barriers.

Personalizing user interactions

Personalization has emerged as a fundamental pillar in any sales process, and generative AI acts as a catalyst in helping salespeople do it at scale with efficiency. Based on prospect preferences, past interactions, and user behavior, these AI models help salespeople create or curate user-specific experiences that can unlock maximum conversion potential and forge stronger relationships.

Systems powered by generative AI have strong lead scoring and prioritization capabilities. Therefore, based on buying behavior and engagement levels, salespeople can identify and categorize their high-intent prospects from the exhaustive list and focus their efforts on prospects that are most likely to convert. This data-driven approach helps them maximize conversion efficiency, sales outcomes, and productivity.

In the context of video selling, AI-powered video analytics tracks customer interactions with video content, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. This data enables sales teams to optimize their video content and sales strategies, delivering more engaging and impactful videos to potential customers.

Facilitating conversational selling

Conversational selling aims to build strong relationships with prospects by driving meaningful discussions, addressing their concerns, and moving them towards a buying decision. Generative AI plays a pivotal role in facilitating this method by empowering natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Through AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants, prospects can engage in real-time conversations, receive prompt responses to their inquiries, and get guidance throughout the buying process.

These AI-led interactions are not only efficient but also highly personalized. The sales systems have the capacity to analyze the prospect’s communication style and customize their responses accordingly. These automated systems are available for prospects at the click of a button 24/7, which significantly enhances customer engagement, delivers immediate support, and accelerates the overall sales process.

Improving sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is crucial for businesses to make better-informed decisions, optimize operations, and stay ahead of the competition. Unlike traditional sales processes, modern sales cycles have many structured and unstructured datasets to be analyzed to arrive at accurate sales forecasts. Plus, the agility to adapt to changing market conditions makes sales forecasting all the more tedious.

But generative AI offers sophisticated and accurate forecasting capabilities that can understand and interpret existing patterns, generate new (relative) datasets, and model complex relations with precision. Also, its ability to learn the typical behavior of sales data and detect anomalies helps businesses respond to unexpected events quickly.

Is AI a productivity tool or a potential substitute for salespeople?

“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”

And this stands true for the way in which AI has changed the world at large. Generative AI is ushering in a new era of customer engagement in B2B businesses. 

By leveraging this innovative technology, companies can streamline content creation, deliver hyper-personalized experiences, foster meaningful conversations with prospects, and gain valuable insights for sales forecasting. If you’re looking for a cutting-edge AI-powered video platform that can level up your sales engagement, then talk to our experts to see how you can leverage this aspect of generative AI into your business growth.

The post The Rise of Generative AI in Sales: Transforming Customer Engagement appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

Buying patterns have indeed evolved, and according to Gartner, modern buyers spend an average of 15% of the buying cycle time reconciling different information sources, often from the same supplier. However, emerging sales technology like Digital Sales Rooms helps you minimize this unproductive time and facilitates presenting a seamless experience to your prospects right from the first encounter and shortens the deal cycle.

It unifies all the required collaterals in one location to move the deal forward, making it convenient for all the decision-makers to collaborate and make an informed purchase decision. Plus, it also helps in creating a self-service buying experience that instills a sense of control and confidence in the buyers throughout the deal.

Digital Sales Rooms can help to:

• Simplify the buyer evaluation process through a centralized buying resource hub.
• Delight modern buyers with a branded and one-to-one buyer experience.
• Deploy the power of videos to personalize messages and provide context for assets.
• Establish a secured virtual environment for successful deal collaboration.
• Help in the consensus-building process to gain buy-in from all the stakeholders.
• Mitigate buyer concerns actively and increase the frequency of communication.
• Track buyer engagement in real time and prioritize follow-ups individually.

Get started on creating a Digital Sales Room

Creating a Digital Sales Room with Hippo Video is easy. Follow this four-step process to initiate the setup and ‘Drive Sales Results’ faster than ever.

1. Create and Customize your Sales Room

The first step towards producing a seamless buying experience is securing a digital or virtual space to create it. With Hippo Video, you can create Digital Sales Rooms in minutes—you simply have to start by naming the room. For example, you can name the room based on your collaboration, i.e., [Customer’s Company Name] X [Your Company Name].

Next, personalize it by adding their company logo, set access permissions, provide a short description explaining the purpose of the sales room, add the Table of Contents to give a brief overview of each of the resource sections, and lastly, add CTAs.

Quick Note: The Table of Contents, along with providing an organized overview of the salesroom’s structure, includes hyperlinks, allowing viewers to click on a section’s title and navigate directly to the corresponding section.

2. Include Documents and Resources

Once you’ve created the sales room and customized it to your prospect’s brand, it’s time to add documents or resources tailored to their business needs. These resources can include case studies, use cases, product presentations, onboarding plans, security and compliance documents, support contracts, and more—anything that could provide stakeholders with the context of every moving step before and after the closure. Using Hippo Video’s easy drag-and-drop mechanism, you can effortlessly upload resources from your devices or cloud storage drives to the respective sections.

Quick Tip: Before uploading the documents to the Digital Sales Room, make sure to name them appropriately so the buyers can identify them and also have context for each of the documents.

3. Add Video Assets

Modern buying experiences are incomplete without videos. Deploy dynamic storytelling using videos to drive buyer engagement, pass on dense information quickly, and create sticky brand experiences. You can add a variety of videos to support your deal, like an introductory video explaining your competitive advantage to the buyers, short product or feature demos, product roadmaps, video testimonials, proposal walkthroughs, videos from pilots, and more.

With Hippo Video, you can easily upload videos from your device or account library or directly record a new one from the Digital Sales Room at the click of a button and upload it.

Quick Tip: Transform your talking head videos into attention magnets by incorporating your prospect’s website as the video background.

4. Share your Sales Room with the Prospective Team

Once your Digital Sales Room is put together, it’s time to share it with the relevant stakeholders. Hippo Video facilitates easy sharing by generating the link and pasting it into emails or other sales-facing platforms. This way, anyone with the link can enter the room, have access to all of its content, and interact with you.

Quick Tip: Before sharing the link with prospects, check our “Require Email To View” feature to have visibility on the new additions in the decision-making team.

Bonus Step

Continuously keep updating the content of the room based on the progression of the deal to maintain its relevance to the buyer’s journey. Track the engagement levels of the buying team with different content pieces and tailor your follow-ups accordingly. Plus, don’t forget to add the learnings to your forthcoming Digital Sales Room experiences.

Digital Sales Room Use Cases

Digital Sales Rooms are primarily utilized by companies as sales channels for seamless buyer-seller collaboration. But this centralized and personalized approach can also be employed by other teams throughout the customer journey. For instance, a customer success team can utilize a Digital Sales Room to share a detailed onboarding plan for implementing a customer’s purchase, while an account management team can use a Digital Sales Room to provide updates to the stakeholder team associated with an account.

Here are a few B2B business use cases showing how to employ Digital Sales Rooms for your team’s success.

Digital Sales Room for Buyer Engagement

Digital Sales Rooms is one of the emerging sales technologies that has generated great enthusiasm within the sales community.  It helps to create a seamless buyer engagement plan to drive successful sales outcomes. Alongside unifying the entire buying process—from research to decision-making—it helps in establishing a process of unanimous consensus among the buying team.

Here is how you can use Digital Sales Rooms in your sales processes:

⚈ Organize and customize the deal room: Log into your Hippo Video account and set up the Digital Sales Room. Customize it to reflect your branding and create a professional and engaging environment for your buyers. Structure it in a logical and intuitive manner, arranging the documents, presentations, videos, and other resources in easily navigable sections. Use clear and concise titles and descriptions to help buyers quickly find the information they need.

⚈ Personalize the buyer experience: Add prospect company’s branding elements and share resources specific to their business needs. Plus, create and add personalized videos explaining your understanding of their company and the value you can provide.

⚈ Upload relevant content: Update the Digital Sales Room with new and relevant content that showcases the value of your products or services. This can include case studies, testimonials, product brochures, pricing and security information, and industry reports. Ensure that the content is easily accessible and presented in a visually appealing format.

⚈ Enable collaboration and interaction: Once the Digital Sales Room is ready, share it with your prospects. Use its collaboration tools to foster engagement and interaction with the buying team—allowing them to ask questions, provide feedback, and have meaningful conversations with you and your team.

⚈ Track buyer engagement: Leverage analytics and tracking features to monitor buyer activity, such as document views, time spent on specific content pieces, and interactions. This data can give you valuable insights into buyer preferences and help you tailor your engagement strategy accordingly.

⚈ Follow up and nurture leads: Use the Digital Sales Room as a foundation for ongoing communication with your buyers. Based on their interactions and engagement, follow up with personalized messages or meeting requests. Continuously nurture leads and guide them through the buyer’s journey.

⚈ Gather feedback and iterate: Request feedback from your buyers and understand what worked well and what could be improved. Use this feedback to refine and iterate your approach, optimizing the buyer engagement plan over time.

Digital Sales Room for Post-sale Engagement

Customer Success Managers can leverage a Digital Sales Room to streamline the onboarding process—provide a central repository of resources, foster collaboration, and ensure access control—for a seamless customer experience. But before proceeding, make sure you’ve got all the necessary documents like user manuals, training videos, Help Documents, FAQs, templates, or any other relevant content, readily available.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that:

⚈ Organize and customize the deal room: Set up the Digital Sales Room with a clear and organized structure. Create separate sections for different topics or stages of the onboarding process. For example, you could have sections for training and tutorial videos, user guides, frequently asked questions, and more. Tailor it with your company’s logo, color scheme, and other design elements to create a cohesive and branded experience for customers.

⚈ Upload onboarding materials: Now start uploading the collected onboarding materials into the appropriate sections in the deal room. Ensure that the documents are well-organized and easily accessible.

⚈ Implement access control: Configure the access control settings to grant appropriate access levels to different stakeholders to prevent unauthorized modifications. For example, provide read-only access to customers, while granting editing rights to internal team members.

⚈ Communicate and collaborate with customers: Share the Digital Sales Room link with your customers and explain its purpose and benefits, highlighting how it will streamline their onboarding experience. Enable the collaboration features of the Digital Sales Room to encourage customers to leave comments, ask questions, or provide feedback directly within the platform.

⚈ Track customer progress: Monitor customer activity within the sales room to understand their engagement and progress. Check if they are accessing the required materials and if they are facing any challenges. This will help you proactively assist them and address any issues that arise.

⚈ Gather feedback and iterate: Encourage customers to provide feedback on the onboarding process and the effectiveness of the Digital Sales Room. Collect their suggestions for improvement and iterate on the onboarding plan accordingly. Continuously refine and enhance the deal room based on customer insights.

Digital Sales Rooms for Other Teams

Likewise, Digital Sales Rooms can be leveraged by other business teams in their functional workflows to streamline their collaboration. Based on their functional area, they can upload videos, documents, or other resources to refine their strategies, optimize conversions, and ultimately reach their team goals with greater efficacy.

Unleash the power of Digital Sales Rooms with Hippo Video

Embracing change can be challenging, yet adopting it in its early stages has opportunities. Hippo Video makes it easier for you to adopt this emerging technology, Digital Sales Room, to empower you to ‘Drive Sales Results’ that you desire.

Using Digital Sales Room, sales teams can streamline their outreach process and collaborate with multiple stakeholders at once. They can engage and educate prospects, track engagement, qualify leads faster, and shorten sales cycles.

So, get started with Hippo Video’s Digital Sales Rooms to unlock the potential of seamless collaboration and set yourself up for sales success.

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Our speakers, Heidi Sopczak Quaschnick (RVP of NA sales, Hippo Video) and Vlad Oleksiienko (Sales Leader, Reply), will show us the finer points of building a strong sales cadence and how to use personalized videos in sales and master this piece of your sales engagement game in this webinar.

Make your sales cadence inclusive 

Heidi: When you’re prospecting, you never know who you’re going to get on the phone with or what their preferences are going to be. As a result, it’s a good idea to include a variety of multimedia in your outbound communications to ensure that the person on the other end receives your content—your pitch—in the manner in which they prefer to learn about your products and services.

Gartner has a standardized report on how you should be engaging your prospects. And, they agree, a good mix ensures that you are going to get more leads, start more conversations by having a variety of touchpoints—chat, video, email, a cold call, LinkedIn, and more. Vlad, we’d like to know what your existing sales cadences look like—do you have a variety or do you just stick to a particular flow within your outbound?

Vald: It depends on your style, whether it’s aggressive or more polite. We stick to a more polite version, I would say. Our sequence lasts for 60 days, which is almost two months, and is email-heavy, focusing on high-priority, high-cost potential prospects.

We start by visiting their profile on day one, and that’s how we show up in their notification center. Then we send them a connection request—typically, a blank one, and it works like a charm for us.

After a few days, we send the very first email that is personalized, and in this case, you can use personalized video to make it even more appealing. As shown on the slide, one channel follows the other, and we definitely have a good mix of channels in our outbound cadence.

Heidi: Amazing! Continuing with your LinkedIn example, once they’ve connected with you on LinkedIn, you can send a video, either via Gmail or Outlook. Besides these, using Hippo Video, you can also send an active GIF through InMail. Maybe because some of your prospects are more active on LinkedIn than they are checking their inboxes, which is precisely why you want to have a good mix.

One-to-one Vs. Mass video personalization 

Heidi: Vlad, what do you think of reaching out to SMB versus enterprise prospects? How much does it make a difference in terms of touchpoints? 

Vald: Of course! It definitely makes a difference. When we talk about SMBs and enterprises, we take into account the most important metric, average contract value. For example, if your average contract value is like $5K, maybe $2K less than $10K, then we can have an outbound cadence with fewer steps. So you can probably send more emails, plus maybe personalized videos, in the middle of your sequence.

Heidi: Absolutely! You can probably use one-to-many personalized videos with variables such as first name and company name for SMBs. However, when it comes to enterprise, you definitely have fewer prospects and fewer accounts, and you have to be more creative in order to reach these decision makers, and you have to go through every possible channel.

Why video-first sales engagement matters

Heidi: Today, close to 59% of decision-makers and executives prefer to receive information about your products and services via video. What do you think about videos, Vlad? I understand that it can be challenging at first. So yeah, tell us about your first video experience.

Vald: I guess my video sales journey started back in 2017 or 2018. I recorded my first video, and it was awful. But, never mind, I had sent it, and I don’t remember what happened next.

But it’s now one of our primary outbound channels at Reply, not just for sales sequences but also for other purposes such as use cases and so on.

Heidi: I totally agree with you, Vald! And once you have gotten the hang of it, it becomes like a walk in the park. Plus, technology has evolved a lot too—not just in terms of ease of usage but also with regard to how you can use it.

For example, with Hippo Video’s Video Workflows, you can personalize your prospect’s video with their own LinkedIn profile or website in the background. And, if I were your prospect, and if I saw myself on someone else’s video in the backdrop, I’d probably click on that to figure out what this person was doing with me in the back, and you’d successfully get my attention.

How to use Hippo Video + Reply

Vald: Once you’ve set your sequence on the Reply platform and have your template ready, you just have to record a video, copy the link with the thumbnail, and insert it in the placeholders, and boom, it’s ready.

The best thing to do is sort of think about who you’re going after this week and finalize the videos that you might want to create and which ones you want to repurpose from your library.. And then, quickly personalize them with the merge fields from your CRM.

Other than the outreach use case, account handoff videos, pre-meeting videos, lead nurturing, and so on, these are a few other use cases where videos can be used to add a personalized touch, reduce no-shows, and keep your prospects warm.

Heidi: Yeah! And I’d like to add some best practices. First, utilize your space. You don’t want to be too close to the camera or  use your hands if you’re calling out. Second, keep your videos between 30 seconds and one minute. Third, use our teleprompter feature to look comfortable on screen and practice with videos by sharing them with your team members.Watch the complete replay of the webinar, “Video-first sales engagement in 2023”, here.

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“How can I hook my prospects in the first few minutes of the call?”

“How is the economic downturn affecting my prospects of connecting with prospects?”

If any or all of these questions are on your mind, you’ve come to the right place (page).

Cory is a renowned expert on B2B sales and sales management. He is the founder of CoachCRM and ClozeLoop and a partner in 2.12 Angels, a seed-stage venture fund. He has written 8 best-selling books on sales techniques and has experience building successful sales teams in various industries, from manufacturing to technology. 

In this podcast (and the following blog), Cory answers questions about effective prospecting, personalizing cold outreach, and the effects of the downturn on sales.

Listen to the complete podcast below.

Question: Most sales reps are consumed with self-doubt when it comes to cold outreach. How can they stop breaking into a cold sweat while making a cold call?

Cory: I think what people are scared of is not winning, and maybe that’s not necessarily losing, but maybe it’s being stagnant. And what we often find is that the best cure for hesitation, concern, and for call reluctance is winning. So the thing that organizations can do is equip salespeople with the messaging, the lists, the technology, the tools, and everything that they need to do to sit down, do their job and win. Because if they’re not doing that, then it’s gonna be hard to keep people motivated. And that’s really the answer here. It’s not something that you can just snap your fingers and do. But if you’re not winning, if you don’t feel like you’re winning, then things are gonna seem harder than they are.

Question: What’s one phrase or line sales reps can open with that will make the prospect want to talk to them?

Cory: Cold calls are common, and people may be tired of the same pattern. To better engage prospects, it is important to interrupt the usual pattern and pique their curiosity. One way to do this is to say something unconventional that hasn’t been said before. For example, ask if a query from CoachCRM sounded familiar in a negative format. If they don’t know what it is, move on to explain why the company is calling. It is important to avoid sounding like every other salesperson and not try to sell something immediately. This creates fear in potential customers, and they will likely just brush them off. Trying something new and different can help break away from the regular cold call pattern and better engage prospects.

Question: The world is slowly entering a recession. How can salespeople weather the storm? How can they sustain existing deals and build their pipeline? 

Cory: One could argue that the world is slowly exiting a recession, as it has been over nine months since we entered one on January 1st. An old saying claims that when cab drivers start talking about investing in stocks, it’s time to get out. This idea is reinforced by what many venture capitalists are discussing on their podcasts: good news for early-stage companies. On the other hand, some folks on LinkedIn are freaking out about the idea of a recession, which could mean they are nine months behind. Historically, recessions don’t last more than three quarters, although in 2001 it lasted for six. When COVID began, people panicked, but three to four months later, the economy was booming. This is why it’s important to be careful of what random people are saying and listen to the experts.

Despite this, when I drove to the bank recently, I received the biggest check our business has ever gotten. This was an uplifting moment, as it showed we were out of danger despite people still thinking that a recession might be around the corner. My advice is to keep an eye on the experts and not just listen to random people online, as this can help give you a more accurate outlook on the situation. The takeaway here is that recessions don’t last forever, although they can be painful while they do. As long as we remain cautious and trust in the experts, it’s likely that the world will come out of this period strong.

Listen to the complete podcast.

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According to Salesforce, Companies that personalize their CX across all channels can see 5% – 15% revenue increase.

However, in spite of personalizing their sales efforts, salespeople are stuck with longer sales cycles. The main reasons for these are lack of Intent Evaluation and Contextualization. And, in this webinar, Sales Engagement in 2023: Real, Scalable Personalisation is Here, our speakers, Sandeep TM (Heads Inside Sales at Outplay) and Karthi S Mariappan (Founder and CEO at Hippo Video), are going to unpack the What, the Why, and the How of Real Personalization, and how you can make it a consistent and scalable practice to produce extraordinary sales experiences in 2023 and beyond using technology.

Also, we’ve with us Jessica Baxter (Sales Team Lead, Genesys DX) and Sam Grimley (Global Head of Sales and Account Management, Horizom) as customer panelists, joining to discuss how they’re guiding their teams on their way to personalization.

Why should personalization at scale matter to salespeople

Heidi: We’re gonna focus on the what, why, and how to personalize. Because I know in my past, for my sales motion outreach, it’s always a challenge, right? How much time should I spend?

Sandeep: I’m going to keep it relatable to our audience here. As human beings we’ve evolved quite a bit. For example, with respect to television, almost 10-15 years back we were just watching what was relayed on cable. But today, with the advent of OTT, we’ve so many options and so much personalization going. We have our own preferences, and even when we log into any platform, we see things that are relevant to us.

We are groomed to that level of personalization and expect the same from every aspect of things in life. And, the same applies in sales. Everyone wants to hear something that’s very, very specific and very relatable to their environment.

Karthi: Yeah. I would continue with what Sandeep said. Thanks to this digital-first world, personalization has become a way of life and this makes the context of outreach the key. The contexts are many—either derived from previous interactions, based on the state they are in, etc.—displayed through what you show on the video or via text email. Indeed, personalization has grown very huge into different aspects of engagement and is going to be vital to stand out and connect with your prospects and customers in 2023 and beyond.

Heidi: How are you managing personalization within your organization? 

Jessica: Well, personalization is extremely important. As a customer myself, I aim to do business with people that actually know me. So, we’ve to step away from those ordinary sales experiences to show people that we know them. And, one of the ways that we’ve incorporated this in our sales cycle is by utilizing a lot of the sales features from Hippo Video. My favorite is video sales pages.  So when prospects are viewing our videos, they’re also getting assets personalized to their persona. 

Sam: I think it’s the main piece. If it’s not personal, don’t bother sending it. Because, what’s the end goal of your outreach? It’s to close a deal, to hit a certain revenue number. It’s not to hit a thousand emails today.  For example, If you’re in a bar, if you’re at a conference, do you walk up to someone and say, “Hello, {{first name}}, and then read a script?” No. You look at the surroundings, who they are, who they’re talking to, etc. and use that to make it a personal introduction, make it really relevant. Mail-merge or mass emails are a big red flag for me. 

Forked Road: Quality Vs. Quantity of Personalization

Heidi: What are your thoughts around guiding your own internal sales organization around sending out mass emails or one-to-one? 

Sandeep: Mass emails, in marketing it can be done from a drip campaign perspective, but in sales it’s a no. At Outplay, we tell SDRs or AEs to invest time in researching the prospect and knowing them to personalize the touchpoint—because the competition is high and it reduces the probability of email getting opened. However, a number of conversations also matter to us, which help us understand the market. 

Heidi: Do you guys, sort of guide the SDRs or AEs, on how much time should be spent on researching and doing this personalization?

Karthi: Yeah. At Hippo Video it’s intent-based, it’s not like a mass email that’s being sent. There is someone who is diligently working on your account to understand why they are reaching out. What is the purpose? Of course, including video is one part of the story, but how do you humanize that becomes all the more important about personalization? The criteria for this are two—1. What state they are in and 2. What kind of engagement they have with our marketing touchpoints. Because, how we personalize is one aspect, but making the prospect help them understand that there is a human behind this email is another.

Heidi: How do you personalize enterprise as opposed to mid-market? What’s that mix for your team, Jessica?

Jessica: Enterprise solutions, those are the harder people to actually reach. Their inboxes are way full. So, here LinkedIn plays a huge role. We try connecting with them here and send them personalized videos their way.

On the contrary, Mid-markets are comparatively easier on the phone. They fall under kind-of 1:Many segments, this where I’m anxious to see how that humanized AI feature comes into place. Because we still want it to feel personal. You know, we still want them to know that we are caring and we are giving the actual time, and we’re still gonna treat you just like every other customer. 

Also, one thing I emphasize on is videos. I believe our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than it does text. Though people are nervous about using it initially, it’s the best way.

Karthi:  One small tip here. Though people are nervous to create a video and share it, it helps your prospect understand that you’ve taken that additional effort to reach out to them. You don’t have to be professional, but be authentic in connecting with them.

How to successfully personalize at scale

Heidi: Real personalization in sales engagement, is it possible? Are there any other platforms or tools that your teams are using to get to the nitty-gritty detail? Karthi, Sandeep. Any thoughts about this? 

Sandeep: Personalization happens at different levels. We don’t only just reach out to only the VPs or the CROs, but also to people on the ground doing the job. And, those ground level conversations, helps us in understanding what’s working and what’s not. And serves as great context to personalized messages to someone at the management level, which resonates.

Apart from this, we also use platforms like sales intelligence platforms, Whatsapp groups, LinkedIn channels, etc. where discussions are happening and prospects are sharing information. And, we leverage those and reach out to them via those mediums.

Heidi: So, Karthi, how do we personalize at scale so that our message resonates, but doesn’t look like it’s mail-merged?

Karthi: There are many ways to personalize. One could be through interactive videos, where you ask the prospect regarding their burning issues by giving them options to choose. And, based on what they choose, you get a context of their problem, which is a great data point to design your outreach. Scalable, yet personalized.

The other way could be to scale your video efforts through Humanize AI. Here AI creates a perfect audio-video sync of your videos and creates different versions of the same video with tweaks and helps you scale your video efforts effortlessly.

Make personalization more personal in 2023

Heidi: So to what extent can people look forward to personalizing messages in 2023 for their sales motions?

Sandeep: I think personalization will be all over the place. But what will come out as a winner is the quality of research that you’ve done, and how you put that into personalization will make a difference as to how you would stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Sam: A hundred percent. I mean, it was when your video email first came out, you could send anything and you were completely different from the rest of the market.

Jessica: It’s definitely gonna be a quality-over-quantity year in 2023, I think. I know one of the things that we’re personally working on is kind of a story storytelling piece, but using video, and also walking customers through their own customer journey using video.

Karthi: So for me, do the right research, and bring the context. And to top it all, by humanizing your messages with videos—put a face to your name. So that’s going to be the best part of the personalization too.

Personalization is becoming pervasive. The best time to take action is now. Watch the complete webinar here.

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Here we have put together a list of top sales reads recommended by sales leaders like Mike Kunkle, Tibor Shanto, Morgan J Ingram, Sangram Vajre, Amy Franko, and the likes, that will help you prepare for the challenges the modern sales organizations are facing.

Sales Books on Strategy and Process

1. The Challenger Sale: Taking control of the customer conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Published in 2011, The Challenger Sale argues that classic-relationship building has become a losing approach. In an exhaustive study conducted by the authors, it was found that sales reps who took ‘the Challenger’ approach are the highest performers. This is the sales rep who doesn’t bend to every whim of the prospects, but challenges the customer, controls the conversation, and leads to the problem’s solution.

Recommended by: Nancy Nardin, Daniel Watkins, and Jon Fedor

Podcast: Check out our Limitless Podcast series where Nancy Nardin spoke on how to engage prospects 10x.

2. Gap Selling – Keenan

Ask any sales rep the factors that trouble them the most and they’ll say it’s either a longer sales cycle, losing leads due to price, sales objections, ghosting, etc. With Gap Selling, Keenan brings a new philosophy to the world of sales. He argues you’re not selling a product, but a ‘change’. How can your sales team convince the prospects about the ‘change’? Success at sales requires more than a set of tactics and therefore his book focuses on turning salespeople into sales influencers who can influence buyers at every stage of the buying process.

Recommended by: Nancy Nardin

3. Stop Selling and Start Leading: How To Make Extraordinary Sales Happen – James M. Kouzes, Barry Posner and Deb Calvert

Modern-day sales are all about the buyer. In this book, co-authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner have teamed with leading sales consultant Deb Calvert to examine the skills that make both leaders and sellers successful and how to meaningfully connect with buyers. It talks about the behavioral blueprint for sellers that makes buyers more likely to buy from them. 

Recommend by: Mike Kunkle

4.Buyer-Centered Selling: How Modern Sellers Engage & Collaborate with Buyers – Thomas Williams and Thomas Saine

Buyer-Centered Selling provides strategies and tactics that help the sellers address the buyers’  eleven dilemmas that are likely to slow and obstruct the buying process. The authors speak about how buying and selling are changing and without the collaborative efforts of both seller and buyer, it can hinder the buying process resulting in lethargy and fear. This book is like a training module that outlines step-by-step what you need to do for working more effectively with buyers.

Recommend by: Mike Kunkle, and Steve Hall

Interview: Refer to the Ebook where we feature an interview with Mike Kunkle and Steve Hall. 

5. The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World’s Best Companies – Robert B. Miller

A revolutionary book that changed sales and marketing forever, it was through The New Strategic Selling, Miller introduced the decade’s most influential concept of Win-Win. He believed if a deal isn’t a win-win situation for both the seller and the buyer, it’ll end up as a lose-lose. He also lists down strategies to tackle various situations like ‘how to prevent sabotage by internal blockers’, ‘identify the four-types of decision-makers’, ‘how to make a senior executive eager to see you’ and more. 

Recommended by: Steve Hall

6. The Modern Seller: Sell More and Increase Your Impact In The New Sales Economy – Amy Franko

The sales economy is constantly changing and the buyers have changed the way they want to interact with the sellers. This calls for sellers to adopt a modern mindset, skills, and tools to handle these smart buyers. Through her book, The Modern Seller, Amy explains the 5 vital skill sets that are required for a modern seller. This book contains effective sales strategies and practices that you can use to succeed in today’s challenging sales environment.

7. Selling To Big Companies – Jill Konrath

Struggling to get your foot in the door of opportunities? Konrath breaks down how to get in touch and talk to corporate decision-makers, and ultimately close big deals. She also advises on deepening your knowledge of your product line, capabilities, and total solution capacity as no one can replicate you and your brain – not even your competitor. This book also provides new sales strategies that are needed to penetrate these big accounts. 

Recommended by: Amy Franko

Podcast: Amy was featured on our Limitless Webinar series where she talks on 5 skill sets you need for sales success with today’s customers.

8.You Can’t Teach a Kid To Ride a Bike at a Seminar: 7-Step System for Successful Selling – David Sandler

This book provides advice on driving personal and organizational success by breaking down rules of unconventional selling. You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar will teach you how to think. It is the perfect playbook for managers who don’t have a system in place as it will give you all the tools you need to train your team. 

Recommended by: Jon Fedor

9.Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers – Tim Hughes

The digital landscape has changed buyers’ habits. Sales professionals now need to build relationships with prospects through social networks to reach them early in the decision-making process. Through Social Selling, Tim provides practical, step-by-step processes for harnessing the skills and techniques necessary to develop a high-quality community, building trust, and connecting with changemakers. This book is for those who want to embrace the power of social selling in their organizations.

Recommended by: Ian Moyse

10.Not Taught: What It Takes To Be Successful in the 21st Century That Nobody’s Teaching You – Jim Keenan

Not Taught talks about how the rules of the 20th century and the industrial age no longer work, and if you want to be successful, you must learn the new rules of success. It offers unique and powerful ways to connect with a larger audience and win in the 21st century.

Recommended by: Michael Muhlfelder

11.Consultative Selling: The Hanan Formula for High-Margin Sales at High Levels – Mack Hanan

In his book Consultative Selling, you’ll learn that you are no longer a vendor out to sell; you are a consultant, out to help your client’s business grow. Mack points out that consultative selling requires strategies that are divorced from the traditional vendor selling. It means that you stop selling products and services and start selling the ‘impact’ they can make on customer business. This book will provide invaluable insights that will bring you wide-ranging success.

Recommended by: Mike Kunkle

12.The TOP Sales Leader Playbook: How to Win 5X Sales Repeatedly – Lisa Magnuson

Every sales organization needs an engine that generates massive deals – repeatedly. The TOP Sales Leader Playbook is your guidebook for creating that sales engine. In this book, Lisa has provided 16 key ‘plays’ and valuable insights and practical how-to’s from recognized thought leaders as sideline coach experts for each play. This invaluable reference guide is designed for modern sales leaders who want to win big.

Recommended by: Steve Hall, and Amy Franko

Sales Motivation

13. I Want To Be In Sales When I Grow Up! – John Barrows

No kid ever says “I want to be in sales when I grow up” and this is what John Barrow wants to change. Inspired by Barrow’s daughter, this book was aimed at two things – to empower women and to get more women into sales. He believes that this book will be the catalyst for elevating the perception of sales by introducing it to kids as a profession they can be proud of. 

Recommended by: Nancy Nardin

14.The Law Of Success – Napoleon Hill

The Law Of Success is a success manual course for achieving your goals. After interviewing more than 500 self-made millionaires and studying the accomplishments of masterminds such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alexander Graham Bell, Hill put together what he learned into fifteen core lessons. These lessons work as a ‘mind stimulant’ which shows us the road to success with timeless wisdom. 

Recommended by: Morgan Ingram

15. Extreme Ownership: How U.S Navy SEALs Lead and Win – Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Jocko and Leif are ex-U.S Navy SEALs who learned valuable lessons in their experience on the most violent battlefield in Iraq. In Extreme Ownership, one of the greatest takeaways is the principle of taking ownership of your actions, as people have an incredible tendency to pass blame when faced with challenging circumstances. This book contains twelve valuable leadership principles that sales leaders can use to build and lead their own high-performance, winning teams. 

Recommended by: Anmol Garg

16. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way To Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear

No matter your goals, James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, offers a proven framework on how to form a good habit, break the bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you’re having trouble changing your habits, this book is a must-have. 

Recommended by: Anmol Garg

17. 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential – John Maxwell

Have you ever wondered how you can reach your full potential? John Maxwell, in ‘The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth’ lays out 15 laws to help you become all you can be. In his book, he states “Growth doesn’t happen by chance. You must make it happen.” This book will help you become a lifelong learner whose potential keeps increasing.

Recommended by: Morgan Ingram and Tibor Shanto

18. Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable – Tim Grover

In Tim’s book Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable, he shares the mindsets of the most successful and accomplished athletes of our time. He outlines 13 things these successful athletes in their careers do and also describes their worth ethic and how those who follow them go from good to great to unstoppable. Relentless shows you how even the best get better – and how you can too.

Recommended by: Morgan Ingram

19. How To Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie

As a salesman at one point in his life, Carnegie’s classic remains one of the very best books on selling yourself to anyone you meet. It gives insights into life-changing principles on how to work effectively with others, making people like you and winning them over to your way of thinking. He states that it is important to remember that when dealing with people, we’re not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. These insights provide sales reps and leaders with actionable tips for understanding and connecting with buyers or any other key stakeholders. 

Recommended by: Steve Hall and Daniel Watkins

The Social Science of Sales

20. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others – Daniel H. Pink

Want an organic approach to moving prospects to buy? Contrary to the older sales formula of ‘always be closing’, Pink sheds light on the principles of attitude (ABC: Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity) and action (pitch, improvise, and serve). He states the importance of serving customers before selling to them as a way to get the prospects to do the things that we want them to do. 

Recommended by: Sangram Vajre and Daniel Watkins

Podcast: Check out Sangram Vajre’s webinar on our website to grab his insights on How to lead like a modern CMO in the new decade. There is also a podcast on the same. 

21. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek

As a salesperson, have you ever wondered “why” people buy? In Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, he talks about this simple concept that is incredibly empowering: why you do something is more important than either what you do or how you do it. The“Why” should be the reason that makes prospects buy your products. It all starts with “Why”. Grab this book as it will inspire you to think differently about what you do.

Recommended by: Daniel Watkins

Sales Fundamentals           

22. The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need – Anthony Iannarino

Once on track to becoming a rock-and-roll star, Anthony Iannarino took up sales as a day time job and soon became a sales expert. In his book, he shares his biggest lessons from 25 years of selling along with the secrets to what differentiates successful salespeople from the rest – self-discipline, accountability, and your storytelling skills. 

Recommended by: Morgan Ingram

Podcast: Check out our Limitless Webinar series on How to be Successful in Enterprise Sales Prospecting? where Morgan sheds light on the ways one should follow to prospect enterprise clients successfully.

23. The Little Red Book Of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness – Jeffrey Gitomer

Worried about how to sell? Rather, Jeffery Gitomer insists you think about ‘why people buy’. This, he says, is “all the matters”. The Little Red Book Of Selling is a playful book that includes entertaining illustrations in every chapter. This book has helpful tips and will clarify exactly what your customers want and how to give it to them. 

Recommend by: Michael Muhlfelder

24. Sales Truth: Debunk the Myths. Apply Powerful Principles. Win More New Sales. – Mike Weinberg

Sales Truth is an impactful sales book that slaughters many myths that are raging in sales right now and focus on things that work. Author, Mike Weinberg, states that there will never be a replacement for purpose-driven prospecting and proactive sales efforts, no matter how many nouveau experts come up with new miracle solutions. This book will acquaint you with proven and powerful principles that help master the fundamentals of professional selling. 

Recommended by: Jason Eatmon

Sales Skills

25. Beat The Bots: How Your Humanity Can Future-Proof Your Tech Sales Career – Anita Nielsen

Sales performance consultant Anita Nielsen is well aware of the struggle her clients face against the rise of robots and artificial intelligence. Most sales reps have this question “Am I going to lose the career I love — to a robot”? In Beat The Bots, Anita stresses the importance of committing to delivering “personalized value,” which, Nielsen writes, is something that can’t be duplicated by bots. She also explores how to ask effective, “high impact,” open-ended questions to capture the customer’s trust. 

Recommend by: Mike Kunkle

26. Secrets of Question-Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool In Business Can Double Your Sales Results – Thomas A. Freese

Asking questions is a lost art. Often, sales reps prefer to jump to conclusions, without really listening to the prospects. In Secrets Of Question-Based Selling, Freese provides a hands-on guide on when to ask the right questions and what those questions should be to ultimately close more deals. Grab this book and you’ll learn the secrets to overcoming objections by asking the right questions. 

Recommended by: Daniel Watkins

Sales Prospecting

27. Smart Calling: Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection From Cold Calling – Art Sobczak

Cold calling has always been one of the hardest parts of sales, isn’t it? If you want an intelligent method for engaging cold prospects, this book should be your best friend. In this book, Sobczak shares his advice on how to tackle the dreaded cold calling and turn it into a lucrative and rejection free sales system. 

Recommended by: Jason Bay

28. Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide To Opening Sales Conversations and Filling The Pipeline – Jeb Blount

Effective prospecting is essential for filling your sales pipeline with qualified opportunities. Blout, in his book, outlines his innovative approach for prospecting successfully. He also incorporates multiple touchpoints through which a salesperson can prospect with the leads such as how to text, call, email, and socially engage buyers. If you want to get better at prospecting, check this book.

Recommended by: Amy Franko

Sales Development and Management

29. Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales – Trish Bertuzzi

Bertuzzi, Sales development expert and founder of The Bridge Group, Inc., uses her three decades of experience to show sales development teams how to build a more qualified pipeline to skyrocket growth. Companies that embrace her techniques can avoid unfit prospects and provide value to a very specific segment in the market. She outlines 6 elements of success that include aligning your sales development model with your buyer’s journey, recruiting roadmap for hiring, retaining reps, and more. 

Recommended by: Jason Bay

Pitching and Closing

30. Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It – Chris Voss

Who wouldn’t want to learn negotiation skills from a former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss?  Never Split the Difference shows how to use psychological skills and emotional intelligence to calm down, establish rapport, gain trust, display empathy, and thus gather information and influence behaviors of counterparts while maintaining a great relationship. He shares nine effective principles that sales reps can adopt for a result-oriented approach. 

Recommended by: Steve Hall

31. The Lost Art Of Closing: Winning The Ten Commitments That Drive Sales – Anthony Iannarino

Most of the sales professionals face difficulty in closing, leading to the loss of many lucrative deals. In the book The Lost Art of Closing, Anthony Iannarino emphasizes on the 10-step process for converting skeptical prospects into paying customers. This book teaches you how to prioritize your leads and leverage social selling in your prospecting efforts. 

Recommended by: Amy Franko

32. Sales Differentiation: 19 Powerful Strategies to Win More Deals at the Prices You Want – Lee B. Salz

Sales Differentiation brings to light the aspect of selling that salespeople struggle with the most –  differentiating their product or service in ways that are more meaningful to the buyer. In his book, Salz states that sales differentiation is not so much about what you say to the buyer. Instead, it is about the questions you ask to elevate the importance of those differentiators in the buyer’s mind. This book is a must-have for sales leaders and salespeople who struggle with objections during prospecting.

Recommended by: Jason Eatmon

33. The Closer’s Survival Guide: Over 100 Ways to Ink the Deal – Grant Cardone

Learn to close and you will never be without work or money! Grant in his book, The Closer’s Survival Guide, talks about how ‘the close’ is what differentiates those who have from those who don’t have. It includes 20 major rules of closing and over 120 exact closes that you can use every day. Now you can close deals with confidence. 

Recommended by: Jon Fedor

34. The Million-Pound LinkedIn Message – Daniel Disney

Imagine one single well-crafted LinkedIn message that has the power to land a deal worth over £1,000,000. Impossible isn’t it? Daniel Disney, one of the world’s leading LinkedIn and social selling experts has spilled all his secrets to show you how to build an effective LinkedIn profile and generate results. He will also show you 25 tried, tested, and proven LinkedIn message templates to up your social selling game. 

Recommended by: Ian Moyse and Michael Hanson

Behavioral Economics and Psychology

35. Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People – Vanessa Van Edwards

Captivate is a collection of people skills that you can use during your social interactions. It outlines straightforward, but persuasive tricks you can adopt to build connections – ranging from the first few seconds of meeting someone to building lasting relationships. When you’re in sales, you need to know how people work and this book will teach you just that. 

Recommended by: Morgan Ingram

36. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions – Dan Ariely

Predictably Irrational gives insights into how humans make irrational decisions in a majority of situations. For example: how many times have you purchased a second item that you didn’t particularly want, just to take advantage of the ‘free shipping’ offered? Predictably Irrational is extremely helpful to sales reps when figuring out how to position your product, or even when talking about price. As an icing on the cake, Ariely outlines 13 ways in which consumers are predictably irrational, revealing 13 opportunities for marketers to harness a consumer’s irrationality to sell more.

Recommended by: Steve Hall

Management and Coaching

37. The Ten-Day MBA: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering the Skills Taught In America’s Top Business Schools – Steven Silbiger

The Ten-Day MBA provides all the basic information about the subjects of the MBA course in leading American business schools. This book reflects the contemporary corporate culture and economic climate. For those of you who want to familiarize yourself with the MBA basic terms and concepts, this book is your go-to. 

Recommended by: Tibor Shanto

Podcast: Tibor Shanto was featured in our #Limitless Webinar Series where he provided his insights on Why and How Telephone Prospecting is Coming Back to Life. And that’s not it, we have teamed up with Tibor for a 7-day mini-course called Voicemail+ Program which you should totally check out! 

Sales Leadership

38. Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box – The Arbinger Institute

What if all the “people problems” we have in our workplace, home, and our communities were streaming from a problem within ourselves? What if that problem was right in front of us and you were the cause? In the book, Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box, the Arbinger Institute states that the key to leadership lies not in what we do, but in who we are. This book shows how we trap ourselves in a “box” of endless self-justifications.

Recommended by: Michael Muhlfelder

Step up your sales game

Whether you’re just starting in sales or have years of experience under your belt, gaining insights from top sales professionals is always helpful. We hope this list of books recommended by industry experts will help you in improving your sales game and make you a better, more well-rounded salesperson and leader. 

What are your go-to sales reads? Have we missed out on your favorite sales book? Do let us know in the comments. 

The post The 38 Best Sales Books You Must Read in 2023 appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

This blog will explore how you can incorporate videos for sales cadences, fast and easy.

Why are traditional sales cadences no longer enough?

When it comes to effective and efficient sales strategy, traditional tactics such as phone calls, emails, voicemails and social media are still relevant and beneficial. But these methods of communication often neglect one core component – the human connection. It is essential to build a relationship with customers through every interaction which is why more businesses are now turning to video as an ideal method of creating memorable experiences. 

Video offers a three-dimensional combination of text, voice and face which can be used to engage customers on a much deeper level than other forms of communication allow. 

To further solidify this, a study conducted by Salesloft found that using at least 5 different channels increases contact rates by 161%. 

The same study also found that adding videos to your sales cadence can lift your reply rates by 25%.

Top 4 elements of a video that improves relevancy in your sales cadence

The benefits of leveraging the power of video are far rewarding and can offer a great opportunity to maximize relevancy and value in your sales cadence. Such a versatile channel, video can be leveraged in countless ways to increase engagement and reach potential customers. 

Related article: What is sales cadence and how it helps sales prospecting techniques?

We are listing a few of them here so you can see how these can be used in your sales cadence:

1. Interactivity

Interactive video is a great way to enhance your sales cadence in order to reach prospects with more efficiency and accuracy. Rather than spending valuable time and energy on multiple emails or calls aimed at uncovering customer pain points, you can create a simple video that contains possible pain points as sub-videos. This allows prospects to click on the relevant point they are experiencing and be shown a video specific to their issue. Furthermore, you can incorporate interactive elements such as polls, forms, and call-to-action buttons to help you capture key data from them. This two-way communication approach provides insights into what makes customers tick, enabling you to craft tailored messages for each of them down the line, thus helping you stay relevant in a non-intrusive way.

2. Hyper-personalized video

Putting a face to a name is an incredibly unique and powerful thing when it comes to video. Rather than having only your voice, your text-based emails, or other forms of communication, videos give prospects the opportunity to put a face to the name they are communicating with. This helps create a strong sense of connection, trust, and familiarity that is invaluable in creating client relationships.

Video can also be used as an incredibly personal form of communication; you can use someone’s LinkedIn profile, their website page, or other visuals to create a sense of immediacy and personalization that is sure to enhance the relationship between you and your prospect.

3. Personalized sales landing page

A sales landing page is an invaluable resource for creating a custom experience for prospects. From the moment they arrive on your page, each detail has been carefully crafted to draw them in and keep them engaged. From the colour schemes, font sizes, and messaging used to the additional resources you can add as carousels at the bottom of the page, it’s all designed to provide a cutting-edge experience. You can also add branding elements such as company logos, calls-to-action buttons, and links to social media channels, all of which help create an environment that speaks directly to your target audience.

4. Video analytics

When you send a highly personalized video, wouldn’t you want to know how well it was received? With the right video hosting platform, you can get real-time notifications that provide key insights into how your content is performing. Imagine being able to see when your video was opened, how much of the video they watched, and more—all in real-time. This allows you to make immediate follow-ups while you’re still on their mind. No longer do you have to resort to cold calls; now, with the right information, calling them can be a much warmer experience.

Now that you have a better understanding of the immense potential of using videos in your sales cadence and its associated advantages, let’s look into how this can be conveniently implemented into your sales process. 

Example of an Effective B2B Outbound Video for Sales Cadence

Since a sales cadence is unique to the type of business you’re reaching out to, it is important that you customize it accordingly. At Hippo Video, we have come up with a sales cadence that has video at its core, helping you utilize the power of hyper-personalization at various touchpoints.

Let’s take a look.

Day 1

Step 1 – Research

It’s going to be your first interaction with the lead and to get to know them, it’s time to research. Dig deeper into their social media accounts and understand their business to find a correlation between their most apparent pain points and your product/service. Begin by:

• Searching through their LinkedIn for past roles, accomplishments, or anything interesting in their bio. 
• Google them and see if they’ve been featured in any articles or videos.
• See if there are any major company news, acquisitions, mergers, funding etc,.
• Find valuable information that you can use to prove that you’ve done the legwork.

Step 2 – Send them an introductory email

Frame a personalized email, putting to use all the data (with special mention of their pain point and how you can help them) you’ve gathered. The email could go like this:

“I have been following [company name] for some time now and noticed an exponential growth in your team size. Congratulations on that! It’s always great to see you guys soaring high. I also know that with the team expansion, you guys would really benefit from our sales tool, to [address their pain point and how you can help here]”.

Can we schedule a quick call this Tuesday to discuss this?

Related article: Craft the perfect email at every stage of your sales cadence

Day 3

Step 3 – Call and leave a voicemail to introduce yourself

It’s time to make that first call. If there is no response to this call, leave a voicemail with your name and phone number. Let them know that you’ve sent an email and would love to get a callback at a time convenient for them.

“Hi [prospect’s name], I am [your name] from [your company name]. I am reaching out regarding an email I’ve sent for [your product/service]. Do you mind if we go ahead and schedule a time to talk about [their pain point and your solution in one line]? It will only take 5 minutes to see if it’s a good fit to work with each other. You can reach me at [phone number].”

Step 4 – Video email

This is your first video email. The goal of this email is to build an authentic connection with them that extends beyond just plain text. When you click on this video, you can see that we have built a personalized sales landing page along with related case studies and an additional video to help prospects get a full understanding of the product. The best part is that we have embedded the main video with related videos, allowing viewers to choose the viewing path that best suits their needs. Couple it with relevant CTAs, and you’re on your way to a lasting relationship.

Hey {{first_name}}, I just wanted to put this conversation back at the top of your mind with a video I recorded for you.

Watch Video

If your prospect has watched the video, you will immediately get notified on their watch rate, view rates, etc. Based on the video they’ve watched i.e, the main video and the related videos you’ve embedded inside, you can send them an email so as to maximize the engagement. 

Hey, I see that you are most interested in [mention the video they clicked]. I will be happy to share more information on this. How about a quick call on {mention a convenient day}? 

Day 6

Step 5 – LinkedIn connection request

Send a personalized connection request on LinkedIn with a quick intro message in Inmail.

Day 8

Step 6 – Call with voicemail referring to the email

This follow up call should be kept to a minimum as you wouldn’t want the prospect to get annoyed. Make sure you deliver value at every stage.

“Hi [prospect name], I can see that you’ve missed my emails and calls. It happens because we’re all in the fast lane. I have an amazing opportunity to address [their pain point], and we can see how it can be tackled. Everything is detailed in my previous emails. How about a quick call at a time of your convenience? Here’s my phone number.

Step 7 – 1st follow-up video email

This is your first follow-up video email. Keep it short and focus on getting them to reply to you. As you will see in the video, you can include a meme so your prospects can understand you are a human being and you are waiting for their response. To take things a step ahead, you can also embed interactive CTA buttons that will take them directly to your calendar, your LinkedIn profile, and so on and so forth.

Hey {First Name}, Another day?

Watch Video

Day 11

Step 8 – LinkedIn InMail with video

You’ve tried two mediums of communication – phone call and emails. Now it’s time to connect in a medium most professionals are on – LinkedIn. Make sure to not appear persistent. The goal here is to build a relationship and not scare them off. To do this, you can have their LinkedIn profile as your background to evoke that personalized outreach and deliver a short message on how you can help overcome their pain points.

“Hey, I was on your LinkedIn profile and I have sent a short InMail message. Would you take a couple of minutes to connect?”

Watch Video

Day 13

Step 9 – 2nd follow-up video email

Your second follow-up video email can include their website as your video background. Here you can address the benefits of your solution to their pain point while scrolling through their website.

Watch Video

Day 16

Step 10 – Call with voice note

Similar to the second follow-up, only focus on getting a response from the prospect. To change things up, call them in the morning and also leave a voice note.

Hey [prospect’s name], I’ve been trying hard to reach you. Are you still interested in a quick call to discuss ways to scale your business minus the [their pain point]? If so, please call me at [your phone number]. I will make it quick, I promise.

Day 18

Step 11 – LinkedIn message with video

It’s time to wrap things up. Send an InMail video if they’ve been opening your previous messages, asking them if they are interested in your product/service.

Hi [prospect’s name],
It’s hard to keep up when there’s silence on the other side. So, are you bored of [their pain point]? From my experience, I know it’s time consuming and monotonous, won’t you agree? How about a quick call on [pick a day] to help you double your [their goal] in a fraction of the time? You can simply type “yes” or “no.”

Day 21

Step 12 – Breakup email

This would be the last email in this communication chain. To add impact, make use of a video here. By sending a breakup email, you don’t have to cut all ties with them. Instead , as you can see in the video, leave an opportunity for them to get back to you anytime in the future.

Subject: Bad timing?
I haven’t heard from you, so I’ll assume a new {{strategy}} isn’t a priority right now. Maybe it’s me, but I’m getting the feeling that I’m not really a fit & a call right now doesn’t make sense. Let’s connect in the future. PS. As a “parting gift,” I would leave this video hub with you as a reminder.

Watch Video

7 Sales Cadence Best Practices

1. In a recent Hubspot survey, send your emails on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to get maximum engagement.
2. Emails sent between 9 a.m and 12 p.m on Tuesday get the most engagement, followed by Monday and Wednesday during the same time slots.
3. Heavy personalize your first email in the cadence to have a 2x response rate.
4. With prospects skimming through most text-based emails, it is ideal to keep your first cold outreach email within 100 words. 
5. Use a video in your 2nd and 3rd email so you can put a face to a name.
6. If the prospect replies a “no”, that doesn’t mean they have taken the decision after much thought. Instead, try to understand the reason for their objection. It might not be your product offering, but other issues such as the budget restrictions. 
7. While following a well-defined sales cadence is ideal, make sure you run a cadence content audit and that they are up-to-date. This is because selling trends change and you need to sound relevant to the audience.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ) on video for sales cadence

1. Is it necessary to include video in my sales cadence?

We strongly recommend you to incorporate videos into your communication and marketing channels, in addition to emails, phone calls, and social media. This is because today’s prospects have a wide range of preferences when it comes to consuming content. For some, they prefer conversing on the phone and taking their time; for others they prefer reading emails or skimming through blog posts; while there are also those who will opt to watch a quick video that conveys the necessary information they need to know in an efficient manner. 

2. Should I create new videos for every single prospect?

Hippo Video makes creating videos for different scenarios fast and straightforward. Our pre-built templates are designed to help you get the job done faster. Also, our platform allows you to stitch personalized intros with pre-recorded videos so you no longer have to record individual videos for each prospect repeatedly. 

Conclusion

With personalized outreach tactics like video for sales cadence, your sales reps can create meaningful connections with prospective clients. As the saying goes, “the more personal the communication, the better,”. By utilizing video in your sales cadence strategy, you can give your sales reps the opportunity to be creative in their approach and experiment, rather than sticking to the rigid framework of the widely used sales cadence. Try it out with our free trial to see the amazing results of incorporating video into your cadence. Give it a shot today with our free trial and start seeing results quickly! 

The post Unlock More Conversions With Video for Sales Cadence: Why and How? appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

How can you take full advantage of such a powerful weapon for your promotional needs? By following the latest trends and digging deeper into the clients’ needs.

Text emails have been around for decades. However, their power is dwindling. Let’s look closer at why it’s time to replace text emails with something more efficient: video messages.

Blast from the Past: Why Text Emails Are Losing Their Touch 

Text emails have been around since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson developed a system to send messages from one computer to another. In 2.5 decades, thanks to Microsoft, the system evolved into what we are used to today.

Source:Guinessworldrecords.com

It was Tomlinson who decided to use the now-ubiquitous “@” symbol to separate the recipient’s name from their location – to indicate that the user was “at” some other host rather than being local. As much as the format of emailing has changed over the past 44 years, “user@host” remains the standard for email addresses that we all continue to use today. (source:guinessworldrecords.com)

Back then, text emails were the only option available to users for two reasons. The internet connection was extremely slow (compared to what we have today), and hardly any software existed to create high-quality images and videos.

Age-Old Struggle of Email Marketing 

Email marketing appeared in 1978 when Gary Thuerk sent a cold email to 400 users via Arpanet. The move resulted in $13 million worth of sales. It’s a crazy ROI, isn’t it? More than half a century passed since then. Hardly anyone managed to repeat the trick because the novelty was gone.

The world’s oldest spam was sent at 12:33 EDT on 3 May 1978 by Gary Thuerk (USA), then working for Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC, USA). It was sent to 397 email accounts on the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) of the US Defense Dept., inviting them to a product demonstration of the DEC SYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060 and 2060T computers. ARPAnet is regarded as the predecessor to the internet. The original email still exists” source: Guinessworldrecords)

Cold emails are the most exploited form of sales emails today. Their desired effect heavily depends on their ability to impress.  

Impressing the recipient is becoming harder and harder by the hour. The old and good text emails are quickly losing their ability to shock, excite, and convert. This is especially true for cold emails, which must have the strongest effect on the potential client.

While content is still king, its wrapper is old and boring. Why are text emails losing their efficiency?

• Lack of empathy – while the text may be packed with style, excitement, and value, on the surface, it’s still lifeless. Unless readers put some extra work into it, the words don’t sound emotional in their heads
• No personalization – even though marketers work hard to add personalization to text emails, they still tend to sound somewhat generic.
• Time issues – even if an email grabs their full attention from the start, many people still aren’t ready to waste their precious time reading the text.
• Attention span – with an overwhelming number of emails cluttering their inboxes, recipients tend to skim over the message without seeing its value. Meanwhile, long emails end up in the trash folder faster than light.
• Spam filters – with spam filters becoming more and more powerful, salesy emails are taking a hit. Many high-quality text messages fall victim to automatic filtration.

Five features to sanitize your email :

The New Era is Here: Video Emails are Highly Efficient 

According to Brainshark’s research, simply putting the word “video” in the subject line works wonders. It increased the open rate by 19%, boosts the click-through rate by 65%, and decreases unsubscribe rates by 26%.

Impressive, isn’t it? Now imagine what the video itself can do for your conversion rates, especially considering that viewers retain 95% of the message when watching a video compared to 10% when reading it in the text according to Wordstream.

Videos are gaining popularity quickly. In 2019, according to Marketing charts, an average person watched 84 minutes of online videos. The number keeps rising. Meanwhile, according to HubSpot, 92% of marketers say that video is an integral part of their marketing strategy.  

Vidoes can also be a great weapon to use in place of signatures to quickly spell out relevant details and include a personalized thank you :

source: technsmith.com

Video emails do so well because they do no bank on scripts. They establish personal connection because they are authentic, raw and is as close to having a person in front of you talking to you. That is why brainstorming ideas work so well before you send out a video email to a prospect.  

According to BluLeadz “Companies noticed a 36.9% higher close rate when using personalized videos with email!”

Why You Should Choose Video Content for Your Cold Email Template

Statistics aside, let’s talk about several important reasons why video content can be a powerful weapon for your cold email strategy.

1. An impression of Physical Presence

When you record a personalized video message instead of typing it, you create an impression of physical presence. It closes the distance between you and the recipient and turns the email into an interaction, making the prospects feel special.

Psychologically, it’s harder for the person to say “no” to another person than to click the “delete” button. 

2. Efficient Personalization

People are always responsive to genuine communication. By incorporating personalized data tailored for the intended recipient into the video email, you can get your point across quicker and easier. 

When you are speaking (rather than writing) directly to clients, you are making them feel special and taking a better hold of their attention.

3. Quicker Engagement 

Since our brains process video information much faster than text, you can catch the clients’ attention quicker. Meanwhile, you can pack much more information in a short video that you can in a text email.

When recipients see a long email, they are likely to send it to the trash, or worse, spam folder immediately. If they see a video, the same people are highly likely to check it out before making the decision.

4. Simpler Descriptions

You must have heard a gazillion times that a picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to email marketing, the old proverb takes on a new meaning.

If you start describing numerous benefits of your products, your text email will get boring once you get to the second sentence. Showing the same benefits in a video takes less time but makes a much better impression.

5. Trust Issue

A half a century worth of worldwide email marketing efforts did an excellent job making your target audience highly suspicious of any sales messages. No matter how many marketing tricks you employ, the trust issue remains on the agenda.

With a video, you can break the suspicion barriers by establishing a “face-to-face” contact with your audience and create a precious emotional connection.  Check here for video email best practices and tips

What are the benefits of video email?

Videos inside emails can improve prospect engagement and drive them to take action helping you build more connections and increased results. 

Businesses want  to highlight the key differentiators from their competitors in order to capture the prospects attention. With videos, they can show that they truly differentiating the way they project information – that exudes a human-to-human experience and the one that establishes trust. 

They can be a great aid when you want teach different audiences about your business. 

It is by far the best medium that commands attention and provides information in a format that will stick. 

How Salespeople can use video to qualify leads?

Measuring prospect engagement when using videos emails and also taking steps to make improvements to your sales videos is another biggest advantage. You can understand how long your vidoes are being viewed, how many times they are replayed using heat maps in your report. 

Using interactive elements such as forms, relevant CTAs can be a great way to disqualify junk leads from your sales funnel. 

With a very concentrated and intent driven audience it is easy to test a variety of content by further segmenting them based on their interest level. 

What should a sales video include?

• The sales video you create should tell a story in a way that your prospects can relate to their pain points. 
• Your sales video should aim to shine on the benefits that your prospect would gain if they choose to pick you. 
• Your sales video needn’t be expensive but expressive. 
• Showing authenticity and accommodating minor mistakes ( in terms of articulation or a dog barking behind) without editing it out. 
• Should always have a clear ask – be it a question or a cta or more information about your prospect. 

Integrating Videos into Your Cold Email Strategy 

Since the new age of email marketing is here, it’s time to consider taking full advantage of videos. These new and improved emails can create a novelty effect, build fruitful relationships, keep clients engaged, and boost your conversion rates tremendously.

By taking advantage of our Hippo Video platform, you can make your cold emails memorable and creative, turning them into efficient weapons for conquering your target audience.

The post Text vs Video: Why Video Emails are Driving More Sales appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

As a sales rep, you could present your rebuttal stating that no response equals not interested. Well, sorry to burst your bubble! According to the ‘Rule of Seven,’ formulated by marketing expert Dr.Jeffrey Lant, to penetrate the buyer’s consciousness, you have to contact the prospect a minimum of seven times. Maybe they didn’t respond to your email or your call – but that does not mean they’re not interested. In fact, you never know until you follow-up.

And sales cadence is the plan that will keep you afloat. When reading up on sales cadence, you may have come across its various forms, namely, inbound, outbound, transactional, relational, etc. 

In this post, we are examining the “outbound” facet of sales cadence and everything it entails.

What Is A Sales Cadence in business?

Sales cadence is a sequence of activities followed by a salesperson to close a deal and score a customer. These actions are spread across a defined number of days and encompass all the attempts at contacting the prospect across various channels. 

When it comes to outbound sales cadence, your sales rep is cold prospecting after researching. Based on this, they conclude that a certain individual or organization is perfect for your company’s product and services.

Naturally, when you are the one reaching out to the prospect, the sales cadence process will involve tools for generating brand awareness, educating leads, and engaging them in the long run.

Typically, every sales cadence includes six elements:

1. Attempts: The total number of touchpoints to establish contact.
2. Media: The nature of communication channel.
3. Duration: The period between the first and last attempt.
4. Spacing: The strategic delay between two subsequent attempts.
5. Response Time: The time elapsed while responding to leads.
6. Content: The messaging employed to engage, educate, and captivate audiences.

Why Should Your Company Have a Well-Defined Sales Cadence?

As a business, having a well-planned sales cadence in place is not a liberty but a necessity. It lays out a clear direction both in terms of conversion rates and predicting accurate numbers. Here are some solid reasons why you should be giving it the attention that it truly deserves:

• It imparts structure and organization to the lead generation, qualification, and prospecting process and translates them into a free-flowing and well-defined strategy.
• Tracking your prospects and their position in the sales funnel becomes easier when you can map it against a sales cadence.
• Businesses that follow a sales cadence maintain consistency in their outreach endeavors, which improves their chances at conversion.
• When your sales team follows a defined script to follow, they have a more hands-on approach while handling peak demands.
• It aligns every member of your sales team with the greater objective, and their focused effort speeds up the conversion at a faster rate.

How Can Sales Reps Benefit From a Structured Sales Cadence?

The above section talks about the benefits of sales cadence from a business’s point of view. But in reality, sales cadence delivers the results by augmenting the capabilities of your sales team, which is made possible in the following ways:

• It acts as the ultimate Sales Bible by charting the entire roadmap from the first contact to pulling the trigger on asking for sales. Anyone, from a seasoned salesperson to an absolute novice, can follow it to drive results.
• An effective sales cadence can be a tool to prospect leads using outbound marketing practices and measuring their response.
• With a structured sales cadence in place, sales representatives no longer have to struggle to keep track of all their prospects and the further course of action as all of the information will be available on the sales enablement software. There will be fewer missed opportunities as much of the work is already laid out for them.
• It capitalizes on opportunities using a mix of content types and formats that a sales rep may have otherwise missed or not even considered.
• Sales teams can deploy cadence to track the deal stages by charting the customer journey across the sales funnel and identifying the sales-ready prospects.

8 Sales Cadence Best Practices to Follow

Now that you understand the role and importance of sales cadence, it is time to put it to practical use. And while you are at it, keep the following best practices in mind while drafting your sales cadence to maximize its impact:

1. Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Broadcasting to a wide audience base might sound like a good idea. After all, it will help you get the word out about your business or its product and services. But what is the point in creating this awareness when it will not culminate into something useful?

The bottom line is that you need to pitch to customers who convert. Else, you would effectively be wasting your time, effort, and resources on just creating noise!

Building an ideal customer profile can help in this regard. 

As the name suggests, an ideal client profile lends clarity to your long-term paying customers under ideal circumstances. These parameters will then dictate the terms of your sales cadence and your overall approach to it.

You could quantify your customers according to their age, industry, geographic location, size, and several other variables. Cherry-pick the characteristics that are relevant, appropriate, and applicable to profile your customers. 

Once you have shortlisted your target audiences, identify the point of contact that will offer you an in on the organization. Categorize these contacts into account-based priority depending on their say and weightage in the decision-making process. Continue performing this segmentation at a cross-company level.

2. Shortlist the Channels of Communication

Typically, the most common outreach channels include emailing, text messaging, phone calls, social media posts, and voicemail. And an effective sales cadence must encompass all these elements.

However, the degree to which you depend on these channels and alternate between them may vary depending on your audience, their corresponding industry, and the buyer’s persona. Hence, you will once again have to refer to your ideal customer profile while making this decision.

For instance, you are operating in a high-risk industry such as finance, where you need to earn trust and credibility. Here, you may have to schedule in-person meetings or regular communication over phone calls. In contrast, if you are operating a SaaS-based startup, you can start scouting websites and pitch through social media, and you would still get favorable responses.

Plus, each mode of communication has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. For example, your contact may not be available at all times to attend your call, but when they do, you can be more convincing over a call and build a personal repertoire.

Conversely, an email gives them the convenience to get back to you when they are free and available. However, emails can drown in an overflowing inbox, and you may never hear back! Formulate a strategy that harnesses the advantages of each channel and offsets any disadvantages. Hubspot features an excellent sales cadence that utilized email, InMail, calls, and voicemails to land meetings. You could follow something similar or formulate something that speaks to your target audience.

3. Identify the Necessary Number of Touches

Here’s where everything gets extremely interesting – determining the number of contact attempts so that you do not come off as clingy or distant. You may be in constant turmoil having to choose between two diametrically opposite philosophies: “a salesperson never accepts a no for an answer” and “break up with a prospect when you notice the first signs of them not converting.”

What is this magic number where you must fold your cards?

Fun fact, there isn’t one!

In one of our podcasts, Jeb Blount did an excellent job of breaking down a 77-point cadence where the sales rep did not come across a push at all!

In other words, identifying the necessary and ideal number of touches is more of a trial and error experimentation subject to several factors. It changes from industry to industry, audience to audience, and even salesperson to salesperson.

Naturally, someone like Don Draper or David Ogilvy (if you are rooted in reality) would have greater success even with fewer attempts than someone who is learning the ABCs (Always Be Closing) of sales!

But, as a rule of thumb, a sales cadence should have about 8 to 12 touchpoints, with the former working as a reliable average. Start with a smaller and conservative number. After all, the law of diminishing return states that the activity will lose its impact and ability to drive results the more you try to push it.

Beyond this point, you will have to monitor the responses received to add or subtract the number of touchpoints.

And while you’re at it, you will have to work out the timing as well. After all, when it comes to making a sale, it is all about striking the iron when it is hot. So nail down the timing to extract the most out of every communication.

4. Refine the Value Proposition

“Let me take some valuable time out of my busy schedule to see what this company has to say to me.” – said nobody ever. 

Whenever your target audience entertains communication from you or interacts with you, they have only one question on their mind – What’s in it for me?

And if you waste time beating around the bush, you will lose their interest and a potential sale. Sure, someone may lend you a polite ear when you talk about how your company came to be. But it is all in vain if that’s all you can talk about! And to avoid losing any semblance of interest, you need to offer value at each touchpoint to maintain high engagement levels.

To articulate your value proposition, identify the fundamental problem that your product or service can solve and use it to drive home a point.

One way to do this is by listing out your target audience’s pain points. Then, you need to posit the brand as the ultimate solution for a maximum number of issues. Of course, while doing so, one needs to be practical and result-oriented. Your customers want to see value in quantifiable and tangible terms rather than vague and sweeping statements – for instance, rather than claiming how your digital marketing service put a brand in the spotlight, talk about how the brand enjoys presence across X continents, how the conversion rates have increased by Y%, and how the Y-o-Y growth of the company is now pegged at Z%. Tap into the experiences of your existing customers and use them as case studies on how you can enrich your prospect’s organization.

Chisel out all the excess details until you are left with the bare bones – why your customers should buy from you. Then package it nicely in a message that your prospect understands and appreciates to nudge them down your sales funnel.

5. Finalize the Media and Content Types

Since we are on the topic of “packaging” the value proposition, the importance of content bears special mention here.

How you open a cold call or start an email plays a clinching role in how the interaction pans out.  And it goes without saying that outbound sales require a lot more trust-building activities than their inbound counterpart. Given that you have to take charge, right from introducing your company, yourself, and your offering to finalizing the details of the sale, content is your friend in getting your message across.

To maintain a certain threshold of engagement during your first contact, your content needs to be valuable, succinct, unambiguous, and intriguing. Ideally, your communication must answer four main questions:

1. Who are you, and why are you reaching out to the contact?
2. What is your value proposition? How can you deliver the same to the receiver?
3. How can the organization benefit by starting a long-term business relationship?
4. Companies that have benefited from your solution, and how did they achieve it?

From this point onwards, you need to focus on delivering a mixed bag of content in its various forms and formats to delight the prospects. After all, given our dwindling attention spans, nobody will go through walls of text at all times.

In fact, a survey reported that if given a choice, a whopping 72% of consumers preferred product or service videos over their textual equivalent. (And in case you’ve missed the memo, the video is the new blog!)

So, shake things up by throwing in a few videos, whitepapers, infographics, and dare we say, even memes! The point is to engage your prospects in multiple ways so that you have their attention and their trust.

6. Space Out the Attempts

Once again, the frequency of your communication could serve as the fine line that distinguishes persistence worth rewarding and desperation that is best avoided. Sometimes, it is all the white noise over the constant blabbering, which can help the prospect analyze the value you offer.

You want to give them just enough time and space to decide whether they wish to engage with you. Essentially, you need to strategize the delay between every touchpoint.

So, how long should you wait before you make another attempt at connecting with your prospect? Ideally, give them two days tops. And while doing so, maintain consistency in these gaps so that you can continue the sales cadence at a uniform pace.

7. Testing and Optimizing Your Cadence

When it comes to sales, you have to learn, unlearn, and relearn during every single iteration. And so, testing and optimization form an integral part of your sales cadence. 

As we have gone on and on, there is no shortcut or magic formula for nailing your sales cadence. So it all boils down to how you make the best of what you have and calibrate it to streamline it even further.

Once you have developed a sales cadence that works for you, you need to monitor its efficacy in delivering the desired results. Consider a situation where your audiences are not opening your emails. You could work on improving your subject line or adding video introductions to bump up the open rates. The inclusion of video boosts email open rates by 13% and conversion rates by 21% – making it an excellent place to start. Similarly, making your CTA buttons more accessible can improve metrics like the click-through rate (CTR).

You may notice that your prospects are more open to hearing from you on Wednesdays and Fridays after lunch hours. So schedule your cold calls then rather than setting them aside for Monday mornings.

All the while, maintain a record of the response that you receive to your sales cadence through the medium of a CRM application. Compare notes and analyze the saved data to identify what works and what fails to take off. As you begin refining your sales cadence, maintain a high degree of consistency as your clients and prospects will appreciate this predictability.

In a nutshell, find what works for you and stick with it until you find ways to improve it even further!

8. Know When to Break Up

The last and final tip is knowing when to call it quits.

Ideally, consider investing anywhere between two to four weeks to see where your talks go. However, it depends on your industry, pitch, decision-making process, point of contact, and several other factors. Hence, this stage is mostly intuitive.

In cases where your calls go unanswered, and your emails remain unopened, you can terminate contact at the two-week mark. For prospects that display a tepid amount of interest, you can engage them for about four weeks. But if you find yourself going around in circles, it would be smarter to abort the mission and concentrate your efforts and resources elsewhere.

In contrast, you can extend this duration upon receiving a positive response, except for a few sales objections that you can overcome effortlessly. 

You need to get a feel of the prospect and what they think of you before pressing the eject button.

Example of an Effective B2B Outbound Sales Cadence

A successful B2B outbound sales cadence requires a combination of emails and phone calls. Since it is a completely cold outreach, keep the touchpoints to a modest six or seven. The primary objective is to establish contact with the prospect and keep the deal moving forward. 

Here is an example of the sales cadence that you can follow:

• Day 1: Send a personalized email.
• Day 3: Send an email pitching your product/service.
• Day 6: Send the first follow-up video email.
• Day 8: Make a phone call in the evening. Leave a voicemail or email if the call is unanswered.
• Day 11: Send the second follow-up email.
• Day 13: Send the third follow-up email.
• Day 16: Breakup email.

For repeat action, such as sending follow-up emails on subsequent actions, vary the time so that you can time your message to elicit a response. Even though you may conclude the sales cadence with a breakup email, follow up in the next quarter in case you now meet their expectation, budget, or any other objection that may have come in the way.

Conclusion

A well-defined outbound sales cadence can be your yellow brick road. Of course, as the interactions play out, there are bound to be some variations that will crop up and change the course of the script. However, it will maintain a uniform front for all leads and all salespersons.

Most importantly, it will eliminate all the guesswork and estimation involved in your sales strategy and grant your sales rep peace of mind while following a clear-cut roadmap to success.

And finally, adding videos to your sales cadence is just what you need to break through the barriers prospects erect to avoid interactions with salesy outreaches. It adds an element of human touch, as they can see you are a living, breathing person trying their best to begin a meaningful conversation. So what are you waiting for? Try Hippo Video, a video platform with which you can scale your outreach 3x faster in less time than the normal salespeople out there.

The post What is Sales Cadence And How It Helps Sales Prospecting Techniques? appeared first on Hippovideo.io.

What is a template builder?

A template builder is a set of pre-designed video templates that allow sales reps to create consistent videos with minimum effort. This handy feature has templates that are split into the intro, middle, and outro sections, so sales reps can customize them by quickly stitching multiple videos together and adding branding elements.

What problems does a template builder solve?

With businesses scaling their video creation like never before, their team’s ability to produce videos will naturally escalate. It is only fair to lessen the burden and create a process that is simple and repeatable. Here are some of the issues a template builder will tackle:

1. Save time: It allows you to stitch multiple videos together, so you no longer have to start from scratch whenever you want to create a new video.
2. Consistent branding: Easily customize your video with your branding elements to consistently produce videos that are as per your company’s guidelines. 
3. Well-defined use case: To help first-time video creators, each video placeholder within these templates comes with a prompt on the talking points.

Video templates for every stage of the sales cycle

No matter what industry you’re in, an ideal sales cycle consists of reaching out to prospects, sending a follow-up message, walking them through a demo, and introducing the customer to your customer success manager (CSM). 

With the Hippo Video template builder, you can now put together high-impact videos for all these sales stages within minutes. 

Tip: These templates are highly customizable, so you can upload or record a video right from within the placeholders. 

Let’s look at them in detail:

1. Create prospecting video

Prospecting is hard – we know it. You have to be constantly recording new videos, and each one has to be tailored to the specific recipient. It’s time-consuming and repetitive. With these video templates, you can stitch together great-looking videos that are personalized for your recipient in a fraction of the time it would take to record a new video each time.

How to use this template

In the first placeholder, record a video to introduce yourself to the prospect and why you’re reaching out to them. Next, you could upload a pre-recorded video of the specific pain points your product/service solves. Finally, end the video with a pre-recorded “thank you” video. 

2. Send follow-up video

Creating a follow-up video can be a struggle considering the sheer volume of it. With so many of them needed in various stages, it is impossible not to feel overwhelmed.  A prospect goes silent after hearing from you once? Did they attend a demo or a webinar and went dark? Have you sent them your proposal and are awaiting their response? Worry no more. With a video template builder, you can create multiple customized videos to suit each requirement and simply stitch the appropriate clips together.

How to use this template

In the first placeholder, you can briefly introduce yourself and remind them of your last contact with them- over a call, an email, a demo, a webinar, etc. Next, upload a pre-recorded screen recording of your product/service and reiterate the value they would benefit from it. Lastly, upload a pre-recorded video to thank them for their time and let them know you’re awaiting their response.

3. Create product demo

Creating individual demo videos can be tedious. Won’t it be convenient to customize a demo video under a minute? Well, this is possible now. 

How to use this template

First, introduce yourself to the prospect and give them a brief background on your company. Address the pain points discussed in your previous interactions with them. In the second placeholder, upload your pre-recorded demo video showcasing your product or service. Finally, end with a pre-recorded “thank you” video and a CTA to nudge them to interact with you further via a meeting calendar or to reply with a video.

4. Introduce Customer Success Manager (CSM)

An account hand-off is an ongoing activity, and it can stress the sales rep and the customer success manager to create personalized videos every time. Creating and sending these videos on a loop is a breeze with this video template.

How to use this template

Begin with a warm greeting and talk about the account hand-off. Introduce yourself to the customer success manager and the role they will play going forward. Next, the CSM can record his intro video by calling the prospect’s name and letting them know he’s excited to work with them and answer all their questions. Finally, end with a pre-recorded video thanking the customer for taking the time to watch the video and promising to connect with them soon. Leave appropriate CTAs for this.

Now that we’ve looked at the types of video templates, let me take you through an additional benefit of our template builder.

Manage your team’s accessibility to the template builder

As an account admin, you can quickly and easily create custom-built video templates within our template builder.

Here is an overview:

1. Upload predefined video or images in your desired placeholder so these videos will automatically appear while the team creates a video using this template.  
2. Enable and disable the features they can use for an engaging video – webcam video, screen share with webcam, screen share, import video and import image. 
3. Insert a preset script so that when your team creates the video, they know what to speak on.
4. Set a predefined virtual background you wish to use in your video, such as your prospects’ LinkedIn profile.
5. Add multiple video placeholders for each template if you wish to in order to create a fixed workflow.
6. Adjust template privacy settings to decide who should view it.
7. Select a sales page you would want the videos to appear on. 

A Template builder eases your video creation process

Hippo video’s video templates are a lifesaver. Our video templates are interactive, meaning you can easily change up the look and feel of your videos on the fly. This way, you can produce a large number of videos without sacrificing quality.

So if you’re looking to scale your video efforts today, Hippo Video’s video templates are the way to go. Contact us today and let us show you how easy it is to get started.

The post Template Builder to Scale Your Video Efforts Today appeared first on Hippovideo.io.