It’s easy to forget just how many different ways video can enhance communications. Anywhere there is a repeatable (and often complex) message, video can lend a helping hand to tell that story more efficiently and in some cases tell it better. We’re highlighting 5 of the most popular ways we’ve seen people scaling their communication with video.

Product Demos

Replacing the initial in-person demo or online meeting presentation keeps your salesforce more available to focus on ripe opportunities. Giving your prospects the opportunity to watch product demos whenever they want, allows them to become better informed more quickly.  There’s no need to schedule a time to walk through the same canned demo; prospective customers can watch just what interests them.  The result is that prospects will already understand your product during initial sales calls, resulting in more meaningful questions being answered earlier in the process.

Customer Testimonials

Giving a prospect access to a happy customer is one of the most effective ways to gain trust and ultimately close deals, and yet one of the most difficult things to scale. Your customers may love your product but they’ve still go their own job to do and life to live. Interviewing your customers for testimonials on video can help you to harness one of the most effective (and underutilized) marketing and sales techniques.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is a polarizing issue. It draws “w00ts” from those seeing success and “@%!#’s” from almost everybody else. Many companies still use cold calling effectively but it’s at the expense of the 90% of people who never wanted to hear from them in the first place.

Fortunately we’re seeing a positive shift… turning cold calling scripts into video. Taking your message and putting it into a video format allows you to improve the quality of the message, annoy less people, and focus on communicating with those people that are actually interested. The goal of most cold calling is to gauge interest and qualify potential leads.  Letting people receive your message when it is convenient for them lowers barriers and makes it easier for the person to demonstrate interest.  By tracking what a potential lead watches you can spend more time following up with meaningful conversations and less time playing phone tag.

In Person Training

Keeping your customers, employees, and prospects well educated about your company and products is crucial to keep your business moving forward. When there weren’t technological options, it was common to ask people to fly in from around the country and spend an afternoon learning about all the new whizbang products and services your company has been cooking up. Today, we’re seeing people in the same company, sometimes even the same office opting to educate each other using video instead of meeting in person. Using online video to educate means that there’s no travel to schedule, venue to book, or documents to print out. It allows people to learn on their own time when it fits into their schedule. Just as you knew how many people came to your event, you can track how many (and which) people watched the video to get a sense for the impact.

Help & Support

Providing a solid line of defense for customer support is key to keeping customers happy and prospects engaged. Some customers will tweet questions @you, others while be satisfied with a FAQ or forum, but others want more in-depth explanations. As expectations have shifted we’ve found an increasing number of people expect that they can find the solution to their problem without having to pick up a phone or send an email. This is great, but it puts the onus on you to make sure that you can help answer even the most complex solution to problems on-demand. We’re seeing more and more businesses embracing video to get this job done right. Over time every business will include videos to explain many of their complex processes.

What’s next?

While even a few years ago it would have been a pipe dream to use online video to make all of the above business processes more efficient and scalable, today it’s a reality.  As technology advances and high quality video becomes easier and cheaper to produce, what will be the next generation of things in your business to be replaced with video?