Using video to create a common language

You see it every day. Sales people take the latest print materials from Marketing and roll their eyes: “What am I supposed to do with THIS?” For their part, Marketing people get frustrated that the Sales people just don’t get it: “If only they’d READ what we send them!” One CRM company found that 87% of the terms sales and marketing people use to describe each other are negative.¹

Marketing and Sales: Marching to different drums?

 

While not natural adversaries like cats and dogs, there is often a gulf between the Marketing and Sales departments. Though focused on the same goal, they have different perspectives, different responsibilities, and often, very different temperaments. In addition, they can be physically separated – in different offices or even geographies – which limits natural contact between the groups.

And if the product or service being sold is not a familiar, everyday thing – say, NDT inspection equipment as opposed to shoes – then it can be a particular challenge keeping everybody seeing eye-to-eye. This can lead to frustration, which if ignored can grow into actual hostility. Even worse, it can lead to ineffective marketing and sales programs, that fail to achieve ideal or even satisfactory results.

Creating a common purpose and ethos

Organizations use a number of methods to better align their Marketing and Sales groups. Improving the quality of leads works wonders. Often, there are efforts to create more opportunities for social contact, on work teams or after hours, and developing joint incentives and bonus structures is common.

Improving communications often proves to be vital. Sometimes matters are improved when the two groups share a common language about work topics, or participate in the others’ planning.

Video is proving to be a vital contributor when it comes to building understanding, creating a common language, and promoting social contact. Short debriefing videos created by sales people after sales calls can help the marketing people see firsthand what issues arose in the sales call that they may not have considered – and it can help them see that in fact the sales person did follow their game plan.

Viewing the salesperson’s discussion can familiarize them with the concepts and nomenclature central to the sales process. And if the viewer can make comments or ask questions inline – at a specific point in the video – then the communication between the sales person and Marketing is maximized. As a result, the two groups can achieve an unsurpassed level of synergy.

In the same way, Sales can benefit from videos created by Marketing.  As we all know from watching YouTube “how to” videos, seeing and hearing an explanation is far easier to grasp than written instructions. A product manager’s explanation why a certain strategy was used can help the sales person understand the larger issues that may never crop up in the context of a sales call. The ability to place inline comments can likewise add clarification or suggest issues that bear additional consideration, once again providing better alignment of thought and purpose.

The richness of video also provides a human dimension that cannot be matched by any other form of media. In this way, using video to communicate not only improves the clarity of the information being exchanged, but can also promote a closeness with others as fellow team members who are contributing their best effort to the work. This can be vitally important for geographically distributed organizations, who may not otherwise see each other face-to-face.

If keeping your Sales and Marketing people on the same page has proven difficult, consider using video to build a team ethos. For more information on this topic, read about Consistent Brand Messaging, and how it can boost performance.

 

¹ Slideshare by Workbooks.com https://www.slideshare.net/WorkbooksOnline/how-to-get-sales-and-marketing-on-the-same-page?related=2