Today’s buyers are more knowledgeable, prepared, and motivated than ever before. They demand solutions, and they want them quickly. Show up to your next sales pitch armed with an explainer video that answers buyers’ questions, establishes value, and sets the stage for a successful sales pitch in any environment.
Here are our essential tips and best practices for making a sales pitch explainer video that will help your sales team close the deal.
Show Don’t Tell
An explainer video is a golden opportunity to show how your product solves their biggest problem. You don’t have to talk about its effectiveness or cite case studies, stats, or testimonials. A video literally shows how it works.
Show a use case of your software streamlining the sales funnel. Show an animated dramatization of your gastrointestinal medication reducing inflammation. Whatever your product or service, show it solving the problem, and you’re already halfway through the sales pitch.
Hone Your Elevator Pitch
“If you can’t tell me what you do in 15 seconds, I’m not buying, I’m not investing, and I’m not interested,” says author and Forbes contributor, Carmine Gallo. He’s completely right. Speed is essential in your sales pitch video. You have a matter of seconds before your prospect mentally checks out, even if they stay in the room. Don’t waste a second.
Ditch The Flashy Intro
This video isn’t about you—it’s about the buyer. Repeat this to yourself whenever you think your beautiful corporate backstory would really flesh out your proposal. It won’t.
No one cares about your history, at least not at first. Establish authority later on during the physical sales pitch. The explainer video is about showing results. I know I sound like a broken record, but buyers only care about fixing a problem. Keep the video focused on the problem and the solution you provide.
Begin With A Simple Declarative Sentence
Your video’s introduction should announce why you’re there. What does your product do? What problem does it solve? Clear and concise. Keep it simple. Here are two great ways to open a sales pitch video:
- With a clear statement of value:
“The X9000 WIDGET reduces network latency by 60%.”
- With a question or statement that shows a clear understanding of big industry pain points:
“Tired of network timeouts that slow online sales, clog up customer support lines, and lose your company money?”
The introduction needs to either attack or address buyer expectations and then exceed them. This is the key to a successful sales pitch video. Provide the reason that you’re there and the value you can bring to the situation—and do it quickly.
Keep It Simple (and Short)
Don’t cram multiple messages into your video. Keep it sleek, focused, and under two minutes. Think, “What Would Hemingway Do?” If you can’t say it succinctly, it’s not worth saying.
Target Your Ideal Buyer
What does your target buyer looks like? Age, demographic, income, education, job title, etc. Before you create a video—or a sales pitch—you need a thorough understanding of who’s buying what you’re selling.
Make your video about this person or group of people. Design your characters to mirror your target buyer. Millennial buyers might like a youthful narrator. Startups like energetic, results driven scripts. Cater to your audience. Heck, pander to them.
People want to know that a product will work for them. What better way to sell a product than to literally show your widget working for someone exactly like them?
Sell One or Two (But Not More!) Features of Your Product
Your explainer video can’t solve all the world’s problems, so don’t try. Keep it focused on the key selling point of your product. One ground-breaking feature. One application. You can get away with two, but once you split your focus, you lose some of the forward momentum. Let your sales rep wow the prospect with a million features. The video is just to whet their appetite.
End With An Open Question
Every sales pitch video needs to end strong. That’s almost more important than the introduction, because your sales team has to fill the silence after the video ends. Make the ending work for the pitch by leaving the audience hanging.
This is your CTA; your jumping off point for your actual sales pitch. The fact that your video plays directly into your actual sales pitch is a little cheesy, but who cares? It’s effective. Answer this open-ended question. Better yet, let your prospect answer it for you.
Tailor your explainer video to leave buyers intrigued—and leave the room lingering with a singular thought or question that you can then answer right then, right there, in person.
There are numerous ways to do this:
- End with a question that confronts a common industry concern:
“Are you prepared for the launch of “X” (the problem that your product can solve) in the next year?”
- End with a joke to liven up the room, but one that leads into your pitch:
“I changed my password to “incorrect”. So whenever I forget what it is the computer will say “Your password is incorrect”.
- End with a statistic that leaves no doubt about the growing problem:
“Last year over 6 million millennials cut the cord and cancelled their cable subscription.”
You final line should be a mic drop.
Explainer Video: Pitch Before You Pitch
The best part about creating a sales pitch explainer video tool for your sales team, is that it will generate value before the very first pitch meeting.
The buyer’s journey has completely changed—especially the B2B journey. Today’s buyers are more than halfway through the research phase of their purchasing decision before they ever encounter a sales rep. Which means, if you don’t proactively engage buyers your sales team is missing out on a huge chunk of time to influence purchasing decisions. A video is a great way to reach these self-motivated buyers well before the sales pitch meeting.
Attach your explainer video to emails when reaching out to qualified leads. The video will set you apart from the rest of the cold calling herd, and best case scenario, you won’t even have to set up a pitch meeting—you might get a client right then and there. Worst case scenario, you’ve sent a lead some great information about your company that they might remember down the road, and all it took you was a few seconds to add a link to your email.
Buyers know what they want. They’re often just shopping around competitors and pricing options to find the right solution. Insert your video into their decision making process, and give buyers a reason to reach out to you.
Buying By Committee: How to Reach Multiple Decision Makers
Gone are the days of getting the head honcho’s phone number and arranging a meeting with her. CEB reports that today’s average purchasing decision goes through more than five people, before a decision gets made. That’s a lot of different people for your sales team to identify and contact. It takes extra hours and labor, which affect your efficiency and ROI. So the best solution to try to reach all these people is…don’t.
Send your prospect the explainer video and let that one contact within the company do the legwork for you. They’ll have the knowledge to navigate the video to the higher ups that need to sign off on a new purchase, and coming from an employee vs. a sales rep will give the video instant credibility.
People want solutions that make their jobs and their lives easier. You just have to give interested buyers the right tools to convince to higher ups to convince them that your product is worth their budget. A well-made explainer video that clearly outlines who you are, what your product does, and how it will fix their problem is something that will circulate internally—reaching those multiple decision makers—much faster than you could ever hope to do on your own.
Sales Pitch Explainer Videos Sell
Sales pitch explainer videos come all shapes and sizes, but they also only have one purpose—sell the product.
Your sales pitch video needs to:
- Target the buyer
- Create clear value
- Keep it short and simple
- End with a compelling open-ended question or hook
Obviously every company is different and every product is unique, but the raw selling power of explainer videos can be a powerful asset for any sales team. Contact us today about our animated video services, and create the right sales pitch video tool for you.
