It’s clear that B2B buyers want a B2C-like experience. A 2021 Bain & Company survey found that 92% of B2B buyers prefer virtual sales interactions. B2B buyers want sellers to deliver an experience that feels custom-designed — one that compresses the learning curve as they try to understand what your product or service can do for them. They expect to have easy access to sales reps — but they hope they won’t need it.
The problem with technology innovation
Buyers want to experience B2B products and services through web-based demos and videos, just as they do with consumer products. This is a problem for sellers of innovative B2B products and services like enterprise technology solutions. Delivering the simple pleasures and emotions we like in demos of consumer products and luxury goods is far from easy to do in a video demo of a complex technology innovation.
Configuring a video library for a better customer experience
Most companies have libraries of demos and webinars about their products. But few make it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. This is especially true in collections of long demos and webinars.
In a demo designed to highlight all the key features of a product, how long will it take to get to what matters to the buyer? In many video libraries, all the buyer has to go on is the video listing — a thumbnail, a product name, and a line or two about product benefits — information the buyer probably had before they got there.
Providing a table of contents
You can improve the customer experience and boost the ROI of your videos by itemizing the contents and creating links that let the viewer know what’s being described or demoed in each segment. Major video platforms like YouTube make this “chapterization” easy.
Content-rich descriptions of videos help self-educating customers discover links to topics they care about in search results. The resulting clicks on specific subjects provide insight into customer interests.
Supporting sales and leveraging subject matter experts
The role of video in virtual selling should not be limited to getting prospects to pick up information on their own time. In an online meeting, video may be the best way to illustrate a key point. But it needs to be a video that focuses on that point and nothing else.
The ideal video library for sales reps (and sales trainers) would be a collection of short videos that sales can use to tailor their own communications with individual customers. Many different types of video could fill the bill — professionally produced animations, recordings of subject matter experts taken from internal meetings, or spur-of-the-moment customer insights captured with mobile phones, for example.
The role of video in virtual selling
Most people in sales and marketing think of videos in discrete categories like explainers, webinars, testimonials, and so forth. Like the different types of TV shows people watch.
But, virtual selling is sales communication with a variety of content delivered over digital audiovisual devices. In other words, it’s all video. There are many more creative ways to take advantage of “video” to drive sales than there used to be.
