Why Presentation Videos Are the Ultimate Tools for Sales Pitches

You know the drill. After multiple email exchanges and calls with a prospect, you’ve perfected your sales pitch. You’ve even created a sales deck that’s chock-full of helpful details about your product and pricing. You schedule the call, take a deep breath, and cross your fingers that the deal will go through thanks to your efforts.

The sales world has long been reliant on slides and documents to win over new business. But there’s a better way to close the deal during the decision stage: presentation videos.

Sure, text-based assets can be highly beneficial to your sales process when you’re trying to tell (and sell) your story. But think about it: When your best foot forward at the most important stage of the sales process — converting prospects and leads into customers — is a (usually) long-winded PDF, PowerPoint, or white paper that they rarely have time to digest fully, you’re already batting below average.

Your prospects are hungry for material, either to satiate their own curiosity or to help convince their bosses that your product is worth the investment. And the material you send them is going to help seal the deal — or send them looking to whatever alternative your competitor has to offer.

So why would you send them a PowerPoint, PDF, or sales deck when a simple presentation video could do the trick far better? By making presentation videos, you’re helping to create a more compelling, human, and engaging sales process.

“By making presentation videos, you’re helping to create a more compelling, human, and engaging sales process.”

P.S. We’ve built a webcam and screen recorder that makes creating a top-tier sales presentation video a snap. Take it for a spin and see what you think!

Going from text-based pitch materials to video might seem like an extreme change, but never fear: We enlisted the help of Shannon, a member of the Wistia Sales team, to give you some inspiration for what your next sales presentation could look like.

In under three minutes, Shannon clearly lays out what any prospect would need to know about Wistia to get started: the mission of the company, the highlights of the product, the pricing. These are all elements any company overview PDF would give you in a far less succinct (and enjoyable) way.

Sales presentation videos are the perfect way to distill complex information and get the buyer’s journey moving toward the end of the funnel. Broad overviews, in-depth examinations of a single product feature, or side-by-side comparisons of how you break down compared to your competitors — all are better conveyed over video.

Making the case for sales presentation videos

Even if your sales deck boasts flawless design, fun illustrations, and impossible-to-ignore data, there’s only so much a PowerPoint or PDF can do to stand out. Aside from allowing you to actually present a presentation, sales presentation videos offer a plethora of benefits. These are some of our favorites:

Customize it to the customer

While you certainly could produce a one-size-fits-all, generic presentation video that can be sent to every prospect, your sales videos should be fairly easy to churn out once they get integrated into your sales cadence. Especially with a potential conversion on the line, you want to show your prospect that you’ve done your homework and can offer the solution that’s tailored to their specific business needs.

“Especially with a potential conversion on the line, you want to show that you can offer the solution that’s tailored to their specific needs.”

If your video is on the longer side, chaptering it enables viewers to jump right to the appropriate point they’ve shown the most interest in throughout your conversations. Not only that, but presentation videos also give you more control over the time your viewers spend on each piece of information within your pitch. If they’re watching a video, it won’t be as easy to gloss over certain points you really want to hammer home as it might be flipping through a sales deck.

Free up more time for yourself and your team

The typical back-and-forth of scheduling a call, then following up with an email after your pitch? There’s no need for that kind of time suck with presentation videos, as you can do it all in one go. And if you’re recording your video with Wistia, you can even track your video metrics on your own! See where your viewers have watched and rewatched, all at a glance.

Another time-saving upside? Presentation videos don’t require you to enlist the help of designers and developers to cobble together a tome-like sales enablement document. You have the ultimate tools and creative control to put together a video by yourself that can be concepted, recorded, and sent to your contact in mere minutes. You’re basically a one-stop video machine.

Eliminate the impersonality of sales interactions

By this point, you’ve worked hard to build an amiable relationship with your prospect. Now’s the time when you want to step up your game and pull out all the stops to give them the deluxe sales experience they never knew they needed. Seemingly ordinary tactics like saying their name, bringing up past talking points, and showing that you know exactly what they’re looking for in a solution go a long way in closing the deal and making for an altogether more delightful sales experience (an occurrence that’s rare enough to begin with).

Pulling off the perfect sales presentation video

Even with a tool as easy to use as Wistia’s video recorder, challenges can still arise …  especially if the idea of creating a sales presentation video seems alien (or even scary!) to you. Thankfully, video is just about the most forgiving medium; no one’s going to judge if you shoot multiple takes in order to perfect your sales pitch. As you make your video, here are a few useful pointers to keep in mind:

Show yourself

As wonderful as it would be to cower behind your computer and let your voice and screen do the work, your prospects need to see your face! The good news is that you don’t need to show it the entire time. Notice how Shannon seamlessly transitions between herself, her screen, and both together at once? That’s the magic of Wistia. Even if it’s only for a few seconds, presenting yourself at the beginning and end of your video establishes familiarity and trust more than you might think.

Share your resources

Here’s where your slide deck, PDF, or website can have its starring moment. As Shannon’s video shows, incorporating sales enablement materials into your pitch lets you hold onto all of your best information (in this case, a beautifully designed slide deck), while at the same time using it in a more engaging way.

Add a CTA

Want to send your prospects to a blog post that will give them additional information on a topic they have questions about? Maybe you want them to visit your pricing page to see the clear breakdown of your tiers. In her video, Shannon opted for sharing her calendar so her contact could book more time to chat with her. Whatever action is most important to you, presentation videos made with Wistia are interactive and CTA-friendly, so you can close your video on a strong selling point.