This article was part of Industrial Distribution's March/April print issue. The full issue can be viewed here.
So you’ve decided to incorporate video into your selling methods. Before you press record, check out these best practice tips from sales guru Jim Pancero, president of Jim Pancero, Inc.
Short and Sweet
Today, a video is dead if it is over 5 minutes. And if it’s a selling video, where you’re early in the selling process and you don’t have the buy-in commitment of the customer – then I think it should be less than 3 minutes. The rule of thumb is: the closer the video is to your homepage, the shorter it has to be.
If we’re talking about a product you’ve come to buy on a product page, I might be able to have you watch a 10 minute video there, because you’ve gotten that deep into my site and are looking at the product that you might actually buy. But if you’re still on the homepage, and we’re still “dating,” where I don’t have any commitment from you, and you’re still checking me out – I believe that has to be 3 minutes or less.
Get the Right People on Camera
When you have an appointment with a customer, arrange a senior manager or an expert to join you on the call via Skype or FaceTime. Whether it is done on a handheld mobile device of the sales rep, or the customer has the ability to set up Skype or FaceTime in their conference room, this lets you get more of your team in front of the customer.
Another great way to do that is with your head of customer service. Have the sales rep and the customer sitting in the customer’s office, talking to the head of customer service about what kind of job they’ve been doing for them, and how it can be improved.
Light it Up
If you’re doing any kind of FaceTime, webinar or anything else, a secret of computer video cameras today is they really like light. If you went into a portrait studio you’d see that their lights have light bulbs inside of big boxes, with a film in front of it to diffuse the light – strong light that is soft.
If I shine a light on you, you will look 10 years older because of the harshness – the single line of light causes shadows on any wrinkles you have and it will highlight them. But if we put a soft box on you, the light is diffused over a wide surface area. There is no direct light source, so there are no shadows on your wrinkles. It’s what I call a “light box,” and I just shine one on the ceiling. It doubles the lighting in the room. I looks so much stronger than if I just used normal office lighting.
Add light to the room and you usually improve the video image, whether it’s a webinar or Skyping situation.
