How to Use Video Throughout Your Sales Cycle? Video Selling Best Practices

Vlad Oleksiienko 02 Feb 2023

In this day and age, getting your prospects’ attention is no easy task, no matter how great your offer is. Sales teams can’t solely rely on traditional outreach methods, especially nowadays when buyers demand more personalized and engaging experiences.

At the same time, most social media giants have switched to video-centered content. And the reason is simple – that’s what the people prefer!

Proactive businesses understand this and jump ahead of the curve by incorporating videos in their sales strategies, from prospecting to closing the deal.

Wondering how to effectively spice up your outreach campaign with personalized videos or even where to begin? Look no further!

We’ve gathered and summarized everything you need to know to become a video sales pro, from the different types of videos, to use cases, best practices, and more.

The power of video selling

I guess the first question is, can videos actually improve your sales performance? According to the available data – YES!

The number of digital video viewers in the US has been steadily growing since 2018 and was expected to reach 248.9 million in 2022. (Statista)
95% of B2B buyers say videos play an important role in moving forward with a purchase. (Brightcove & Ascend2)
79% of buyers report buying a software or app after watching a video. (Wyzowl)
Adding a video to your proposal can increase close rates by up to 41% and close a deal 26% faster. (Proposify)
Video content receives 1.5 engagements per mention, compared to just 0.91 for plain text. (HubSpot)

So as you can see, the power of videos is hard to question for three main reasons:

Videos in sales…work. They are a great way to break through your prospects’ inboxes and grab their attention, with every study in existence showing an increase in engagement, open, and reply rates.
Videos allow sales reps to showcase their human side, creating a personal and authentic ambience that builds trust with your audience.
Videos accelerate the sales cycle by getting a complex message across in an easy-to-digest format, saving both customers and sales teams precious time.

Videos That Sell: Common Types, Use Cases, and Best Practices

Get all the deets on effective video selling from Reply & Hippo Video in a convenient, bite-sized format.

3 common videos formats salespeople use

Before we dive into the various ways to incorporate videos in our outreach, it’s important to outline and differentiate the most common types of sales videos and their main purpose.

While experimenting with new methods is always great, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Here are the top 3 types of videos to kickstart or reignite a conversation and create a memorable customer experience:

Talking-head videos

These are the classic webcam-recorded videos, offering the next best thing to meeting face-to-face with your prospects. Also known as selfie videos, they offer a much warmer and personal interaction by putting a face to your name. Talking-head videos are cheap and easy to record, and are perfect for initial prospecting and follow-ups.

Screenshare videos

These videos are fantastic at showing your prospective customers your product in action. Screenshare videos are created with a screen recording tool where the sales rep shows rather than tells the value proposition. Even the most complex products and features can be simplified and made digestible with a short and capturing screenshare video.

Screenshare + Webcam videos

Often, the two mentioned types of sales videos overlap, creating this third, hybrid-like method. It’s a great way to combine the personalization of talking-head videos and the depth of screenshare videos. These videos come in different shapes, but most commonly either include a webcam recording ‘bubble’ over a screen-recording, or transition from webcam to screenshare.

Of course, sometimes you don’t have to choose a single video format. You can mix any match talking head and screenshare in the same video message or even combine all three types! Here’s a really cool example of that from Synthesia (I’ve mentioned this product among the top trends in 2022 and will talk about it more later).

Video use cases throughout your sales cycle

The great thing about sales videos is that there’s a place for them in every step of the sales cycle. One way or another, businesses can find opportunities to tweak their sales strategies with video content to increase their conversion rates.

Check out the following prominent use cases for inspiration:

Prospecting and outreach

Videos make your cold outreach stand out from the crowd, get your prospects’ attention, and simultaneously leave a memorable first impression, setting up your entire sales strategy for success.

The most popular and effective visual prospecting technique is including a short, selfie-style video in the good-old personalized cold email to keep things warm and friendly.

Since the main priority of cold outreach is establishing a connection rather than “selling” per se, showing your face will enable your recipients to trust you and your message, which is step number one in every buyer journey.

Take it one step further by focusing your video on relevant intent data to double down on personalization. For instance, here’s a script of such a prospecting video we send to our leads that show buyer intent:

Hi {{FirstName}}.

Reason for my outreach is that I noticed that you downloaded one of our ebooks on how to implement outbound sales / attended our webinar on how to build a better sales team, etc.

If you are still building your sales outreach strategy, just let me know and we’ll be super happy to explain how Reply could help you and your team at {{Company}} with multichannel sequences that include touch points like emails, phone calls, touches on LinkedIn and even videos just like this one.

Look forward to hearing from you and have a wonderful day.

And this is just one of many examples of video prospecting. Instead of email, you can send a LinkedIn video message, and instead of an intent-based message you could send a marketing product video – whatever works best for that given scenario.

Sales engagement & follow-ups

Once you’ve got their attention, time to prove it’s worth their while. Sure, ideally you’re looking to hop on a call to discuss further details, but why not incorporate some relevant visuals before and/or after the meeting for better results?

A meeting reminder is a perfect occasion to send a short video to your warm leads to get them ready and excited for the upcoming conversation. Use this opportunity to deliver a short outline of the meeting agenda and set a friendly tone for the upcoming business talk.

Check out how one of our video meeting reminders looks like:

Hi {{First Name}}!

{{Name}} from Reply here.

Just sending you a quick reminder that we have a meeting today at {{time}}. I’m looking forward to that meeting.

[some context regarding the previous touches, e.g., In our last chat we talked about how you can get more engagement from your prospects by creating multichannel sequences with Reply.]

What we’ll be doing today is having a conversation, walking through a demo of our platform, and your specific requirements.

I look forward to speaking with you soon. If you need to reschedule or anything, please let me know, but otherwise see you at {{time}}.

Even if all prospecting was done exclusively via text or calls until the meeting, chances are you have a battle-ready product demo prepared, and that will very likely include a video.

By the same token, feel free to send a similar video after the meeting to recap the main talking points and where the conversation left off, leaving the door open for the next one.

Deal acceleration

You’re right at the finish line, and once again, you can use videos to tip the scales in your favor.

Use videos to push the prospect closer to sealing the deal and showcase why they should buy from you with some personal assistance or a final product pitch of the most relevant features solving the most relevant pain points of the specific prospect. This way you turn an ordinary “buy my product” pitch to the epitome of personal selling.

Here’s a script of the video I’ve recently sent to our prospects who have started a free trial with Reply but haven’t created any sequences yet:

Hi {{FirstName}}!

Nice to have you on board with Reply. Yet, it seems that you haven’t engaged with the platform yet.

So I wanted to reach out and offer to help you set up your first sequences and share our best practices on how we achieve over 30% reply rates with our multichannel sequences.

Drop me a line with a date and time that works for you this/next week and we’ll spend 15 to 30 minutes max to unpack a custom solution to increase your sales volumes with Reply.

Anyway, thank you for watching and have a great day!

At this point in the sales cycle, you could also choose to include a proposal/contract walk-through to clear the air, or perhaps some sort of social proof like a customer testimonial or a successful case study summary of a similar company with similar challenges.

Whatever floats your boat and you think will give that gentle nudge towards closing that deal!

Customer communications

After all that hard work, prospects became customers. But video selling does not end just yet! At this stage, videos make that transition smooth and engaging, helping customers quickly learn the product.

SaaS companies like ours have live and personalized product tours for all our new customers. This is a short video where our SDRs gracefully pass customers along to our customer success team for the final touches to make sure the customer sticks around, as seen below:

Hi {{FirstName}},

I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to give you a quick update on your account and let you know that we’ll be handing it off to our customer success team going forward.

We’ve been really happy with the work we’ve done together so far, and I’m confident that they’ll do an excellent job of continuing to help you achieve your goals.

Your new main point of contact is Stefanie, our Head of Customer Success (she is cc’d in this email). She’ll be in touch soon to schedule your launch call. {{FirstName}}, when are you available for a call this week?

I’m still here if you need me. Please feel free to reach out if there’s anything else we can do for you!

Some fantastic after-sale video examples include customer onboarding and product training, both very key in maintaining a solid, long-term customer retention.

Wondering how to effectively utilize videos in your sales strategies or even where to begin? Watch a free masterclass on video-first sales engagement in 2023.

Watch on demand

Video selling toolset

Adding videos to your sales strategy isn’t just something that’s trending. It has a purpose – to turn leads into customers, and customers into long-term regulars. To maximize the effectiveness of your video selling efforts, it’s best to equip your sales and/or marketing team with the best tools on the market.

Just like traditional sales outreach, video selling can be automated and scaled while keeping the message warm and personalized.

Check out some of these great video prospecting tools to get the ball rolling:

Loom for no-hassle video recording and sharing
Synthesia to generate unique video from plain text using AI (as exemplified above)
Nimbus for seamless, collaborative screen capture
Krisp for studio-quality noise cancellation
Doodle Buddy to customize your videos with a touch of art or…just some doodles
Reply to incorporate videos into your multichannel outreach at scale

Personalize your video selling at scale

Some videos such as product demos can be used for many accounts – you can simply make several different clips, each focusing on a specific value proposition. And when the time comes, use the most relevant one for each prospect. In some instances, such as a meeting reminder, it’s best to record a short video from scratch.

Yet, there’s no doubt that prospecting videos work best when personalized. So what do we do if we want to contact hundreds of prospects with a custom video message? It would take all week just to record all of them!

Luckily, there are dedicated tools that make video selling simple and efficient, eliminating the need to create a new video for each prospect, for each use case. Some of the trusted tools in this niche are:

Simply put, they offer an easy way to repurpose videos for prospecting multiple accounts while keeping it personal. Using those tools you can add your prospects’ names or company logos to the already-existing introductory videos (similar to the way you would add a dynamic element to an image), saving SDRs countless hours. Like this:

Getting started with video-based sales outreach (and best practices to follow)

Using video for sales prospecting is no easy task. It will take time even for the most experienced sales teams to make that shift, but as you’ve hopefully understood by now – it’s totally worth it.

While the transition to video selling may be challenging at first, here’s a compact 10-step plan of action to add personalized videos to your sales outreach and wow your audience:

Choose a specific prospect or an audience segment (list) you want to target. Prioritize high-intent leads, Tier 1 prospects, and those who your gut tells you are a perfect fit.
Pick the tools you’re going to use. These might vary depending on the type of video you’re going to create (and your creativity).
Decide on the suitable type of video depending on the use case and your personal preferences.
Draft a script of what you want to cover in your video. Read and try to memorize the script (or upload it to the teleprompter) to make it feel natural. Practice in front of the camera to feel confident and convincing while you speak.
Do a quick light-, sound-, and background-check to keep videos aesthetically pleasing. Take a minute to see which mic works better.
Block out all distractions – pause notifications and close all unnecessary tabs/apps.
Record your video. Keep it short (30-60 seconds max) and make sure to grasp the prospects’ attention in the first few seconds. Most importantly – maintain a positive attitude, smile, and be super friendly.
Edit the video (e.g., add a personalization variable, crop it, or add some music if needed) and add a catchy thumbnail to it.
Create or open the suitable email in your Reply sequence and add the video link to your template.
Double-check the video and template to make sure everything is ok and save the email or launch the sequence. Then sit back and watch the replies trickle in.

And remember – practice makes perfect. A good idea for SDRs is to book a 1-1.5 hour time slot dedicated solely to practice, perfect, and execute their video selling tasks with no distractions.

Are you game for video-first sales engagement?

Enough talk, time to act! With a dash of creativity, you can create engaging content that connects with customers while delivering a message that speaks to their needs and interests.

Using videos in your sales process can have a huge impact on your business’ growth, helping you boost engagement, build trust, and improve conversion rates as well as retention rates.

Yet, video selling is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires strategic planning and execution to succeed. So use this guide as an inspiration to create your own video strategy and don’t hesitate to experiment along the way!