Today, we’re going to talk about how you can use customer testimonials videos in your sales process to help close more deals. These videos will not only add social proof, but they will help you create conversations too, which could lead to potential sales.
We recently hosted a webinar with Jorge Soto, CEO at First Cut, talking about how using customer testimonials can help you close more deals. In the webinar, Jorge covered various strategies along with his story behind how he got started with First Cut, a small team of internet entrepreneurs with over a decade of experience in both technology and production.
If you are interested in watching the webinar on-demand, you can access it free here.
Back in the days, Jorge used to be a salesman when he was at college and subsequently in graduate school.
He found that one of the most powerful tactics to generate sales was having a sheet with buyer’s names that were essentially people that generated social proof, trust and confidence.
The tactic was simple, doing product demos on a porch where everyone could see them, those that were interested decided to buy the products. Afterwards, he asked them to write their names on the sheet and write the particular reason why they bought the product.
According to Jorge, this tactic was very successful and soon he began having notebooks filled with testimonials.
From notebooks to digital marketing
When Social Platforms arrived, these testimonials became case studies and other similar marketing efforts focused on the same strategy, which is getting customers to talk about a good experience they had with your product or brand.
As Jorge says, it seems like a no-brainer right?
Now, from a sales perspective, you might be running an early stage startup and at this point, you may not really have customer testimonials to show or ask for. If that’s the case, you will then have to start building these cases and get involved in sales.
Why testimonials?
Testimonials are an essential part of a business. They help add trust and sometimes encourage prospects to convert to customers. Whilst written testimonials are great, a video is even better. Customer testimonial videos can help increase conversions massively, especially as your customers will be speaking positively about their experience with your company.
Let’s face it…what’s better than a customer testimonial video?
A win-win deal
If you already have written customer testimonials that’s brilliant. You should now consider going the extra step and ask them if they would be willing to give you some of their time, to record their words about your company, take footage and produce it. To make it easier for them, you might even consider meeting them and recording it for them or hiring some videographers.
Of course, this can be more time-consuming, but it will definitely be a win-win situation for both. They will get exposure as well as you, and ultimately, you will have a quality video with a very positive strong testimonial. The perfect addition to help drive more sales.
Filling the top of the funnel
Let’s talk a bit about how to use your customer testimonials to build a funnel and how to integrate this powerful and targeted content into your sales process.
Think about this: What better way of executing your current ABM strategy than with a set of videos that are also segmented, tagged and categorized by all the ICP categories that you’ve thought about while doing targeting with your ABM?
The social proof that’s generated by your customer getting in front of a camera, that’s what adds real value. Regardless if they talk about your brand for 5 minutes, only the time commitment that they show by appearing on the video testimonial is enough.
How do you use testimonials across sales & marketing?
As we referenced earlier, you should be able to use the ABM Categorization, tags, keywords and the sort of data that you used on your sales funnel integrations. Then you should consider using tools or agencies such as The Creation Agency to be able to manage these efforts whether it’s organic, paid, earned or owned media, so wherever you’re putting these testimonials, you’re doing it strategically to drive people to act and purchase your products.
It all comes down to giving your sales team something valuable to work with and save a lot of time and effort instead of trying to find leads without the proper targeting and poor material.
How do you drive things forward using video testimonials?
Once you’ve created some of your testimonial videos in short form, maybe 60 to 120 seconds, optimized for digital purposes, you can segment them with tags and objections you’ve gotten from your sales meetings, and who better to answer objections than your own current customers?
Speak to your sales leader and find those objections, identify them as specifically as possible and then based on that material, you can build the interviews for the next testimonials, you may use the ones you already have and chop them off in a way that your sales reps are able to have perfect answers to the objections they encounter along the way.
One of the obstacles that sales reps find repeatedly is that they don’t have a strong product/service experience to offer to their leads. You got all of these methodologies in sales that are basically self-serving. Now, with testimonials, your sales reps will have a way to provide that experience to your potential new customers, and the best of all is, they can watch it at their own time! You can’t get a better deal than that.
If your material is professionally produced, organized, branded and targeted, your sales reps are going to love it and they will leverage it in every chance they have. Ultimately, when we talk about success, there’s no better way to communicate it than saying “We’ve been able to get 20 customers in front of a camera to talk about the value they found in our company”.
