Incorporating video into your sale enablement strategy can benefit your company on two major fronts: one, facilitating onboarding and ongoing training of sales reps and, two, providing valuable, relevant, engaging content for your reps to give to prospects and clients. Video can help you significantly improve both these areas, making your reps more efficient and effective and ultimately improving your bottom line.

Sales Enablement Video Strategy – Top 10 Ways Video Can Help You Train Your Reps, Prospect Better, and Serve Your Customers

1. Video for Onboarding and Ongoing Training of Sales Reps

When people think of the traditional sales training model, they often imagine a trainer coming to a place of business and conducting an in-person session with the sales reps. However, this model is rapidly becoming out of date. Instead, businesses are opting to do their onboarding and training through video content. Here are five important reasons why.

2. On-Demand Video Training Is More Convenient

Conducting training through videos allows reps to fit their training modules into their busy daily schedules. Rather than having to commit to one time and one place, which can be disruptive to their interactions with prospects and clients, video training lets them view and learn whenever and wherever is convenient. The most important thing sales reps do in a day is sell, and training shouldn’t impede their ability to do that.

3. Video Training Is Cheaper Than Traditional Training

The cost of trying to coordinate everyone’s schedule and get them in the same room at the same time to undergo sales training can be quite high. There are travel expenses and the cost of the actual trainer to consider, but that’s not even mentioning the cost of taking your reps out of the field for a day in order to undergo this training.

Video training is faster, allows your reps to get back to selling, and eliminates much of the overhead associated with trainings.

4. Video Promotes Better Retention

Retention is a big issue with in-person training. The training occurs, the trainer leaves, and the reps are then expected to remember everything that was said in that one training session. That’s simply not how people learn effectively.

Training through video means the content is always there for the rep to go back and reference, thereby enhancing retention through multiple views. This is particularly helpful for getting brand-new sales reps up to speed.

People also tend to retain information through visual mediums better than through the written or spoken word, so videos are effective from that perspective as well.

5. A Sales Enablement Training Video Catalog Is Easy to Use

By cataloging and organizing your training videos, sales reps are able to access them quickly and easily—no matter where they are. As long as reps have mobile devices or laptops and an Internet connection, they can receive the insight and training they require before taking their next sales calls. This leads directly to increased productivity in two ways:

By making training content accessible with just a few clicks, reps don’t have to waste a lot of time digging and searching for the exact training video they want.

By mapping training content to every persona at every point in the sales cycle, no matter who reps are targeting, they can find relevant, insightful training content that will inform and better their call.

Reps need to be ready to interact with prospects at the drop of a hat. That’s just the nature of sales. If they can quickly and easily find the training content they need, they’ll be ready within minutes to make a call to that persona in that stage of the buyer’s journey, and they’ll be armed with the information they need to make that call productive.

6. Increase Sales Rep Productivity by Producing Micro Video Content

These training videos can’t be overly long. Trying to wade through too much content (text or video based) will discourage your reps from interacting with that training material. Make sure the videos are quick and to the point, or, in a longer video, embed helpful markers that allow the rep to jump to the part of the video that’s relevant. Remember, the markers need to be clearly labeled and titled so reps can get to the content they need as quickly as possible.

7. Video for Better Prospecting and Client Interactions

A large part of sales enablement is figuring out how to interact with your prospects and clients more effectively because, when that happens, you see better conversion and better profits. Video can help you get that increased productivity, and the following are five ways how.

8. Offer More Engaging Content and Communication

Video content is simply more engaging for your prospects and clients than plain-text e-mail, and video increases your odds of someone actually engaging with that content. For maximum effect, make sure the video is relevant, insightful, educational, and to the point. Sale reps and prospects alike are simply less likely to interact with overly long video content.

9. Enjoy Better Prospecting with Video

With video, you can easily track and analyze who is watching and how they are engaging with that visual content. This means you have unique insight into what personas you’re dealing with, what stage they are in the buyer’s journey, and what their problems, issues, and barriers to success might be. When reps know those things, they can come to sales calls armed and prepared with relevant, insightful information for those prospects.

When a rep can answer a prospect’s specific question—rather than just providing generic information—that greatly increases the value a prospect sees in that rep, and that increases the chances of the rep closing the deal.

10. Video Can Increase a Rep’s Credibility and Trust

A video doesn’t need to be a huge production to prove effective. Even talking head videos where reps introduce themselves and explain how they can specifically address the concerns, issues, and questions of their prospects can lead to increased credibility and trust.

11. Become an Influencer and Thought Leader through Video

In a market saturated with content, companies are always looking for ways to distinguish themselves, and video is one way to set yourself apart. By positioning the rep as a knowledgeable thought leader within the industry, video enhances the value a prospect sees in that rep—all of which leads to the increased likelihood of closed deals.

12. Video Provides Value to Existing Clientele

Video isn’t just for prospects or the prospecting stage. It can be highly valuable to existing customers as well. Your customers have already chosen to work with you once, so many of those initial barriers to making a sale are eliminated. If you have new product offering or other opportunities to upsell clients, use video to convey that. Just as with prospects, it increases your perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and value, and it makes that sale more likely.

No matter where your prospects currently fall within the sales cycle—even if they are existing customers—video can play a crucial role in enhancing the productivity of your sales team. It can also work internally to make training cheaper, more efficient, and more effective. However you incorporate video into your sales enablement strategy, though, it’s going to help set you apart and increase your chances at success.