OREANDA-NEWS. March 15, 2016. By delivering content through a video role play platform, marketing content will no longer sit idle in a file never to be used by sales. Instead, the content will be used, because after receiving the message, salespeople will now be required to video record themselves delivering this message. Because salespeople on average record themselves six times before they hit send, salespeople will gain the practice they need to internalize the message so that they can use it in the heat of a sales call. Although this delivery platform will ensure salespeople can deliver the message, it will not ensure that the message will increase sales.

How To Ensure Content Increases Sales

To increase sales, research clearly shows marketing’s message must help salespeople to articulate value.  According to a survey of sales leaders, for example, the number one inhibitor to sales people achieving quota is the inability of salespeople to articulate value. That’s ahead of a broken sales process, more leads, or poor sales skills. And customers agree. Only 34% of executive buyers surveyed by Gartner felt salespeople did a good job of communicating business value. And 70% of executive buyers said the number one way to articulate value is for salespeople to share customer stories.

To increase revenue, content must help salespeople to articulate value by sharing insight-based customer stories. To execute this strategy, marketing will collect and record on video the top five stories used by the sales team’s star performers to close the most common customer value gaps. Because these stories have been proven to work in the field, these best practice videos will be highly credible with sales.  

The benefits of this approach are clear; higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and higher margins.

How To Ensure Content Is Used

But how difficult will this content strategy be to implement? How hard could it be to show salespeople how to share these five stories? It should be easy. You’re not asking them to do anything differently except share at a minimum one 90-120 second story in a meeting. That’s less than 3% of a 60-minute meeting. If you can’t teach the most basic way to communicate value, then how are you going to scale the sales team?

How often has marketing created content only to have it never used by sales? After you collect the top five stories, you wonder how you are going to ensure that each member of the sales team adapts the story to their local market and internalizes it. If you send the stories out to the sales team, won’t most salespeople just look at the story once, and not be able to use it in the heat of a sales call?

You could require the salespeople to deliver the story to their sales manager, but will they do the coaching? If a sales manager is managing 10-salespeople, these coaching calls could take 5-hours with telephone tag, interruptions and chit chat. With the pressure to achieve quota, will the sales managers invest 25-hours to coach their team to deliver these five stories?

So even if marketing creates content that can increase sales, there is no guarantee that the salespeople will use it, because we don’t always do what’s best for us. We all know, for instance, diet and exercise are the keys to a healthy weight, and yet two-thirds of people are fat.

Our inability to do what we should no longer means that great marketing content will be ignored by sales. Marketing can now send their content through a Video Role Play platform, and this platform will track which salespeople practice and which managers coach to these best practices videos. With practice and coaching, marketing can ensure that the whole sales team is able to articulate value like the top 10% (Video Role Play companies include: HireVue, CommercialTribe, LearnCore, TrainingCloud, Allego.com, and RehearsalVRP).

How To Implement Marketing Content That's Used By Sales

Here’s how to implement this content strategy in less than three months:

1. Marketing and the sales leaders will meet to determine the top five customer value gaps, and who the best people are to deliver these stories on video.

2. To capture the stories, marketing will hire a company like Insight Demand because we will guarantee to double the quality of the top five stories. We also train the salespeople on how to adapt the insight-based stories to their market, and we train managers on how to coach their salespeople to best deliver their stories.

3. One of the five best practice videos will be sent to sales on a bi-monthly basis through one of the Video Role Play platforms.

4. Sales will then be asked to adapt the story to their local market. Once completed, the software will ask the salesperson to press record in their iPhone/Tablet/Computer and video capture their story so that their manager can provide coaching.

5. Once the salesperson hits send, the sales manager will receive the recorded story in their dashboard. The sales manager can then either provide written coaching comments below the video as they come in, or they can provide comments all at once. So a sales manager could watch, for instance, 10 of her salespeople’s stories in under 20-minutes, and in a further 10 to 20-minutes, she could provide coaching comments all from her iPhone while she waits for a flight at the airport.

Because salespeople on average record themselves delivering their story five times before they hit send, your salespeople will gain the practice they need to internalize the stories so that they can use it in the heat of a sales call to win more business.

If you want to learn more about how Video Role Play software can help your entire sales team effectively share the best stories like your top performers, click here to view our Slideshare.