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Making Your Differentiators Stick with Video

Think about the High-quality Deal

If your company sells enterprise technology solutions, if pays to think of video in the context of the buying process. For surprising insights into buying processes — teams, activities, decision-making, and what it takes to win — I’ve found Gartner analyst Hank Barnes to be a reliable source over the past decade.

Consider, for example, the high-quality deal, where “both the customer and the vendor should be (at least relatively) happy.” The Gartner team has been researching these deals for quite a while; here’s a graphic from a recent blog post by Hank Barnes that summarizes key findings:

Demonstrate Winning Differentiators

What’s notable here is that there are only two bullet points, both of which begin with the word demonstrated. Demonstration is one thing every tech company uses video screens for. Shouldn’t every technology solution demo emphasize situational awareness and industry knowledge?

How would you do that?

  • Choose use cases familiar to your ideal customer
  • Draw clear comparisons to alternative approaches
  • Clarify the customer benefit of every feature you demonstrate
Reuse and Repurpose

Sharing excerpts and use cases from targeted demos is an opportunity for sales to communicate the kind of situational awareness and industry knowledge customers are looking for.

Because it’s video, this sales communication is more likely to be shared internally within the customer organization than ordinary email. It’s an efficient and unobtrusive way to get buying team members on the same page as they build their business case.

It’s also a pretty simple task for a video producer. Step-by-step demos of a software solution tend to look pretty much the same from one industry and use case to the next. It may even be possible to use the same screencast sequences with different customers and industries. Personalizing the demo can be done with narration and introductory graphics. If it’s directly relevant to the viewer, it’s not going to require a lot of pizzazz.

Add Character

As I’ve written here previously, you can turn a demo into a quasi-testimonial with an animated character recounting the use case as a stand-in for subject matter experts. Simple facial expression animation is relatively inexpensive and easily adaptable to different stories.

Achieve Differentiation with Digital Selling

Differentiation is always hard. In today’s environment where sales interactions on video screens is growing, opportunities to use video to demonstrate industry knowledge and understanding of your customer’s situation are growing too. You’ll probably be able to identify lots of them in the online demos you’re already doing.

Bruce McKenzie

A writer with a background in public broadcasting and corporate marketing communications, Bruce McKenzie pioneered the “2-Minute Explainer®” brand video for technology businesses in 2004. Customers have included numerous enterprise technology companies (Cisco, IBM, BMC, Brocade/Broadcom, Software AG, CA Technologies, CompuCom) as well as B2B startups. Rebranded “Technology Business Video” in 2017, the company today produces a variety of “tactical” videos to reach buying team members throughout the sales cycle. We take everything marketers want to say and transform it into short videos that communicate stuff buyers want to know. It’s basically what good writers do, made visual. Visit www.techbizvideo.com to learn more or set up a chat about tactical videos with the Technology Business Video professionals.

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