Authentic video helps salespeople connect with Marketing Qualified Leads

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.   For any company selling to business buyers, the marketing (MQL) to sales (SQL) handoff can easily cause failure despite individually having good marketing and good sales execution. Marketing and sales are teaming to leverage video during that crucial handoff period when the sales person first engages.

We are seeing organizations use a personalized Sales Follow-up video app to help foster a trusted relationship.  They provide relevant and authentic video content to help the prospect evaluate the offering.  The nature of good short “business casual” video content is that it communicates a lot of information in a short amount of time, making it much easier to consume.  Here is an example from Alejandro at Attivio:

Why is this handoff so perilous?    As Nigel Edelshain (CEO of Sales 2.0 LLC) stated so well in a guest blog post on Hubspot – this is the time when all the Inbound Marketing moves to “outbound land”.  The sales person now needs to engage with the prospect and make that outbound call.    Culturally most people ’s natural instinct is to avoid sales people, especially when they have no personal relationship.

In old school face-to-face selling, sales people engaged with the prospect much earlier, beginning the process of trust building.  In today’s Inbound Marketing world sales people enter the cycle much later and often have no relationship with the prospect.

What techniques and strategies are you using to help make the sales person successful at the time of handoff?