As buyer behavior evolves and sales strategies adapt to match, certain principles don’t change. Setting up sales teams for success still means training them well and giving them tools to engage and convert prospects all the way through the sales funnel.
And today, with buying committees getting ever larger and more diverse, there’s a growing need for tools that help sellers communicate effectively with many different audiences.
In this article, we’ll look at how animated videos can be a powerful tool across your sales function and through the sales funnel, helping you enable your sellers with the intel, skills, and messaging they need, and sell to your target markets through education and engagement with your brand.
Specifically we’ll look at how animated videos can be used internally and externally by:
- Sales trainers (whether they’re situated within Sales or L&D) arming sales teams with crucial context and information
- The sales development representatives (SDRs) or business development representatives (BDRs) on the front lines interacting with your potential buyers
- And technical sales or sales engineering professionals who help both sales teams and potential buyers understand nuances of the product and how it’ll work with their tech stack
Enabling Your Sellers with Animated Videos
Use cases for sales trainers
Depending on company size and structure, sales trainers may be part of a standalone function, report up through Sales, or sit within the broader L&D organization.
Wherever they sit, sales trainers are challenged with tailoring training content to different learning preferences, minding the time constraints for sellers with quotas, and keeping training content current, among other considerations.
Animated videos are well-suited to bringing concepts to life with scenario-based learning and storytelling that’ll make your content memorable. And because they incorporate visual, audio, and text elements, as a medium, they’re effective across learning preferences.
When done well, videos can simplify complex concepts and pack a lot of meaning into a short duration, helping reduce cognitive load for busy sellers and increasing the chances that learning sticks. Plus, this content is much simpler and cheaper to update than live-action video when policies or methodologies change.
Common use cases:
Make your onboarding content stickier
A new hire’s onboarding experience can make or break their entire experience at the company. Don’t ask them to read PDFs or PowerPoint slides about the processes and tools that’ll be key to success in their new role. Let them experience it in video, in a format that’s memorable.
Bring your customer personas to life
Animated videos can help sales reps absorb key information about their target personas’ motivations and responsibilities better than a few slides full of bullet points. Recently, one multinational tech company turned their text-based onboarding course on key personas into a series of Vyond videos. Now, instead of reading pages of documentation, all new reps “meet” their key customer personas in a series of videos, hearing about their responsibilities and challenges, the ways a tool like the tech company’s platform could help them, and their potential objections.
“You’re learning the same information as the text-based course, but you’re learning it through the roleplay of conversations and it’s so much more interesting,” says the senior director of learning experience, whose team created the training. “It’s not boring anymore. People are genuinely telling us that it’s fun, and we’re really proud of it!”
The training team reports the new course is far more engaging, and it also delivers the same information faster. The text-based course ran about 2.5 hours, whereas the new version takes learners 30 minutes maximum to complete—a time savings of 80%.
Create easily editable skills training at scale
Rapid technological changes have shortened both the shelf life of skills and skills training content. Animated training videos shine for skills training because they’re so easy to update (unlike traditional, live-action video production).
Whether you need to update processes and best practices, change scenes and screenshots—or swap tools in and out—you can get it done in a few clicks. And if your learner audience speaks different languages, you’ll love today’s instant translation features that make your content globally accessible (though it’s always a good idea to run your translations by a native speaker).
Prep your conference crews
Industry events can be powerful opportunities for your salespeople to build relationships with customers and prospects. Set them up for success with how-to videos outlining what good looks like for all the activities that go into a conference: traveling, staffing your booth, qualifying leads, and more.
Now that we’ve discussed enabling your sellers, let’s turn to how animated videos can help your sellers educate and engage your key audiences.
Sell with Animated Videos
Use cases for SDRs and BDRs
Whether your company calls them SDRs, BDRs, or something else, inside sales reps are often your prospects’ first human point of contact with your brand. To be successful, SDRs and BDRs have to personalize their outreach, show understanding of your prospects’ pain points, offer value, and effectively communicate your company’s value proposition.
Animated video can help set your SDRs and BDRs apart with personalized, memorable content that captures prospects’ attention. And it can be a less intrusive method of introduction than talking head selfie videos.
Common use cases:
Gain an email prospecting advantage
By now you’ve seen the selfie video clips of sales people holding signs with their prospects’ names. Break the mold and stay on brand with this upgrade. Introduce yourself with an animated version of you as a GIF. Or drop your talking-head-style intro video into Vyond to tailor it for your prospect with animated elements and relevant messaging.
Tell a better story about your product’s value prop
Forget the PDF attachments. Introduce yourself and showcase your product’s value proposition with an overview video your prospect will be intrigued to watch.
Re-engage prospects and stay top of mind
Prevent forgotten and skipped meeting times or stay top of mind after your conversation by sending a video message from your own custom-built (and self-voiced) character.
Create more memorable case studies
Add energy to your customer case studies and success stories by mixing animated video and live-action footage, or have customers share their perspectives in their own words for a brief video. Share in your email outreach or on social media as social proof of the value of working with you for people just like your prospects.
Add a human touch to your FAQs
Address your prospects’ frequently asked questions with animated video to provide richer context and more examples. Answer the questions yourself, or incorporate team members from other areas of the business if the questions call for it.
Use cases for technical pre-sales / sales engineering
People in technical pre-sales or sales engineering roles help ensure that your company’s solution is smoothly integrated into your prospect’s existing technology ecosystem. Technical pre-sales people might consult on prospects’ workflows, deliver in-depth product demonstrations, and answer deeply technical questions about your product’s capabilities and functionality.
Common use cases:
Provide needed context to your technical demos
A technical audience both wants to see your product for themselves, and understand how it’ll integrate with their other tools and systems. Building demos that incorporate both product screen recordings and animated storytelling elements is a powerful way to check both boxes.
Close deals faster by making non-technical buyers smarter
The most senior members of a buying committee often have the least context on the solutions they’re being asked to approve, and they may not be eager to dive into the technical weeds.
Animated videos can help these non-technical audiences quickly get up to speed on not only how your solution can help them, but how it fits within the broader landscape, and the costs of inaction. As a medium, animated video is uniquely suited for clarifying difficult concepts and processes, bringing topics to life through character-driven scenarios, and supporting your overall sales pitch.
How to create custom sales enablement videos quickly in Vyond Go
When it comes to making animated videos for enabling your sellers and selling to your target audiences, you’ve got plenty of options—none of which leave you starting from scratch.
Vyond offers dozens of pre-built templates, like the examples above, that you can customize to suit your brand and use case. And with Vyond Go, our new script and video generator, you can enter a prompt, get a rough-cut video in seconds, and take it into Vyond Studio for fine-tuning.
Here’s Vyond video producer Taylor Morgan demonstrating how to quickly make a customer persona explainer video with Vyond Go:
In a world of constant change, some sales success principles remain steadfast: the need to equip your sales reps and help them communicate effectively with your prospects and customers.
Animated video is uniquely suited for engaging and educating diverse audiences and simplifying complex topics throughout your sales organization and along your sales funnel. Learn more about how companies like yours have already discovered the power of animated videos for boosting sales and enabling their sellers.
Ready to try it for yourself? Claim your free two-week trial (which includes access to Vyond Go).
