As a high-growth company, you likely have newly deployed products and a few in development. While your new products might be the most groundbreaking and disruptive, your sales team still wonders how the new technology works. Your product marketing managers likely developed tight talking points and PowerPoints so that the research and insight should be like sheet music, playing the same beautiful tune regardless of the musician. But something doesn’t sound right in your sales pipeline.
Sales teams are jazz musicians; for them, the delivery of the message is all about the feel. The more disruptive or different the technology, the more explaining they will have to do based on reading the room. Because the corporate talking points were too stiff or not illustrative enough, they abandoned them for fear of losing the customer’s attention. Accordingly, many of their sales calls are filled with analogies, whiteboard markers, or using pencils and pens to illustrate a point. While this might be mildly entertaining to envision, it is also terrifying to see the impact of these conversations at scale.
During a disruptive technology launch, I witnessed this “How vs. Why” phenomenon a few years ago. Time after time, I witnessed some of the best and most talented salespeople spend most of their meetings explaining how new technology worked to customers. Within minutes, I would see them fall victim to the same traps. By the end of the meetings, the customers were either confused or newly crowned 30-minute experts on the technical aspects of the new widget. However, almost no time was spent on why or why not the solution is applicable or relevant to the customer and the impact on their business. Unsurprisingly, this delayed or lost sales opportunities.
I found that most salespeople would instead use someone’s video rather than someone’s words. And because the salespeople only had words or slides, they decided to rip up the sheet music and break out the saxophone. However, when provided with a well-thought-out animated video highlighting specific new technology scenarios, the sales team preferred to use those assets. An animated video kept the customer’s attention and was able to illustrate complex points in a simple, organized fashion.
As a result, the sales team had video assets that took up two minutes of a meeting that highlighted the main points instead of a half hour. A two-minute creative asset that answered both the how and the why took the explanation responsibility off the salesperson so they could focus on the customer’s problems. Additionally, the salespeople had a tool to help communicate the solution’s value to stakeholders who did not attend the meeting to help continue the sales momentum. A well-crafted creative asset gave the team scalability. In contrast, spontaneous analogies and misplaced slides resulted in pipeline detours or off-ramps. While ” jazz ” will always be involved in sales, investing in creative assets creates more harmonious choirs than out-of-tune solos.
Creative animated video assets can be tremendously powerful and valuable for your entire sales pipeline when crafted professionally and deployed effectively. Viewing animated creative assets as just “a marketing deal” or “only for lead gen” limits the ability to create efficiency and consistency for your message and value. Every sales stage has exit criteria, and reinforcing value is a common thread. There are pain points and emotions to connect with the close you get to close. Are you willing to ensure you can increase your chances at each stage?
I have been around the block long enough to know there is no such thing as magic business beans. No single solution will be the game changer. However, I have also seen marketing and product teams work hard to bring products to market only to see those efforts stall because they did not provide sales teams with enough effective creative assets to help their deals get across the critical points in the sales process. Creative assets can undoubtedly improve sales outcomes, but often, because the expertise to create these is either not in-house or intimidating, they are an afterthought. My team is on a mission to change that.
If these points resonate with your situation or you want to change up your go-to-market strategy, our team at Kru Creative specializes in partnering with companies to tackle these problems head-on. We have diverse backgrounds in sales, marketing, animation, and creativity, allowing us to craft campaigns with scalable assets to be used throughout sales lifecycles from lead to prospect to scope to closed won. We welcome the opportunity to understand your why.
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