This is a guest post by Joel Duffield. Joel is a Solutions Consultant at Vidyard.

As a solutions consultant (SC) working at Vidyard supporting five account executives (AEs), my typical day is jam-packed—delivering demos to customers, attending strategy meetings with my AEs and the larger sales team, and formulating answers to the tricky questions sales prospects throw our way. It’s no wonder my work week can at times be double the workplace average. 

So finding efficiencies in the way I work and deal with customers and teammates is critically important. It can help me spend more face-time with prospects, shorten up sales cycles and close more deals. 

Given the company I work for, I have gravitated toward using video in my everyday workflows. Video helps me engage sales prospects more easily, communicate with my colleagues effortlessly, overcome objections faster and basically look like an all-round SC rock star. 

Let me share just a few of the ways video makes me more efficient. 

Prepping for the live demo

There’s a ton of focus in the SC world today around the demo. There are many blogs, podcasts and organizations like the PreSales Collective devoted to creating and delivering the perfect demo. But there’s a whole lot of activity that wraps around that time in front of a prospect that we don’t talk so much about. And I’m sure my SC colleagues will agree, this effort can be a major time-sink as demos are often repetitive and make inefficient use of an SC’s time. 

Incorporating video into that effort can help an SC realize huge efficiencies.

At the forefront of the sale—before we even get a prospect to the demo stage—solution consultants play a big part in creating the content prospects want to see. With all due respect to my marketing colleagues, marketing videos tend to be quite high level, and sometimes a prospect just wants to see what the product does. 

As SC’s our job is to pave the way for a sale that establishes a very clear understanding of the product, its features and benefits. If we hold that information back for too long, prospects can get annoyed. So one of the ways we can get prospects primed for a live demo is to create small pre-recorded micro demos that an AE can embed in a sales sequence—like a breadcrumb trail leading the prospect to the live demo. That same content can be incorporated on a website in a resource area, or on a product page or in a knowledge base, where it can be self-discovered by a prospect. 

Having this kind of video content available to a prospect in advance of a demo means that buyer comes more prepared for a live interaction. We also use the analytics from those videos to know exactly what the prospect has viewed. That’s a great indicator of what they need to see and allows us to zero directly in on the product features that are most compelling (or least understood). It also is valuable feedback on what content is working, and what is not, which also helps our efficiency because we may be spending time creating content around a feature that only five people care about.

Internal knowledge transfer

My AE and I also use video internally to prep for our live demos. Rather than write me a long email or schedule a meeting, my AE creates a quick video that gives me a rundown of the client, their problems, who will be on the call, what we should focus on and so forth. It is far easier than having her write it all down in an email and it is way easier for me to ingest. 

Cutting the risk of no-shows

Prior to the scheduled demo, my AE will often send out a personal video to the prospect reminding them of the event and introducing me and any of the other participants on the call. 

It’s not uncommon these days for sales development organizations to suffer a 35% meeting no-show rate. It’s a tremendous waste of the team’s time and eats away at productivity. But we have found we can cut that no-show rate in half by sending video reminders where we remind the prospect of why they were initially interested, what they stand to gain and that there are real people on the other end eager to help. 

Following up post-demo

After the live demo (which usually takes place in Zoom) we can automatically pull the recorded video into our Vidyard platform, cut off the chit chat on either end and send it off to the prospect. This allows the demo to be circulated more widely within the prospect’s organization. On our end, we again have access to video analytics to see who viewed that content and for how long. These days, purchase decisions are made by buying committees. By using asynchronous video we can shorten up sales cycles by using people’s time efficiently. And we can still reach everyone involved so we get the widest buy in possible. 

Handling objections and technical questions

I’ll also use video to address any technical questions that either couldn’t or shouldn’t be answered during a live demo. Video can recreate nearly the same experience as having the question answered on the live call. And it’s quick to create. I’ll often spin up a follow-up video right after the call and before my next meeting, pointing the prospect to a knowledge base article or showing them a relevant example. 

I’ve even found if I shoot the video in a fairly generic way, I’m able to reuse that content in other sales situations. I probably have 20 such videos in my library now. When I get a new question I haven’t heard before, I just shoot a video and add it to the playlist. I’m working toward building a complete hub of video content with technical deep dives into all the nuances of our product. This is super helpful content for overcoming objections from technical gatekeepers.

Clinching the deal

Speaking of objections, the very last stage of a sale can be one of the trickiest to navigate. Your technical and economic buyers have bought in, but the deal then gets passed out of their hands to the security team, and the IT team, and the legal team. These folks likely were not part of the initial sale, and may not even know what the product does. So, they have questions too. We are basically trusting our champions in the organization to do the knowledge transfer and that’s risky. We’ve started using video here as well to provide these gatekeepers with a short elevator pitch on our company, what our product does and the problem we will solve for their business. We also use video to efficiently address specific concerns from this audience—for instance, a question around data privacy—that could be miscommunicated and delay the closing of a deal. 

Let’s face it, if we are not efficient with our time, SC’s can be a huge bottleneck. If we’re relying 100 per cent on face to face interactions, if we’re spending hours trying to get meetings scheduled in the calendar, if we’re writing out super long, technical emails that no one reads, and if we’re custom-creating one-off content to respond to prospects’ questions, we are likely lengthening rather than shortening the sales cycle. 

Video makes doing my job easier, simpler and faster and by extension, makes our deals and customer communications easier, simpler and faster. That’s a win-win all around.