We often get asked about the best time to send personalized videos during the sales process.
The best answer depends on your business and sales process (specifically, how much time can you afford to spend on each lead), but this is my general take on sending personalized videos:
Best Time to Send Personalized Videos:
1. It's rarely worth it to record truly personalized videos for cold prospects.
Personalized videos for cold prospecting do result in more replies and meetings scheduled, but the time and effort costs are high.
You can definitely get personalized video to work here (I've seen it happen!), but there are big caveats:
- How clean is your data? It will be frustrating to spend 5 minutes recording a personalized video, only to have your email bounce back because your prospect left the company 6 months ago.
- Does your recipient have a compelling reason to click? They don't know you or your product yet. Why should they watch your video? You'll need a couple lines of text to pique their interest.
- How personalized can this video be? You haven't spoken to them, so you don't know much about them or their needs yet.
2. It is nearly always worth it to include a general video in your prospecting sequences
Good overviews videos, customer testimonials, and demos are great to include in your outreach as sales collateral.
These take very little effort, as you can send one video to multiple prospects.
59% of senior executives claim that if both options are available, they prefer watching a video on a topic over reading it in text. So, if you’ve managed to pique their interest with compelling text, a video will cinch the meeting for you.
And, there are many people who respond ONLY to video, so you want to make sure you cover all of your bases, especially if you can do this in minimal time.
Sales teams who send videos in prospecting sequences see 100-400% better outcomes.
A good, general video will do the job here. There is rarely a need to record individual, personalized videos for the very first touch.
3. Personalized videos are most effective later on in the sales process.
You'll see the biggest impact for personalized videos for follow ups, recaps, and to answer specific questions.
For example, someone just asked me how Sendspark is different from Vidyard for his use case, and I replied with a quick personalized video to show him how Sendspark is going to be better for what he’s looking to do.
Videos like these are powerful because…
- They get the point across perfectly – you can show the solution, and not just talk about it!
- They feel special – he feels seen and valued, as I took the time to give him a proper answer to his question.
- They are relevant – I was able to show how his exact use case would work in under 1 minute.
The Sendspark chrome extension makes it super fast and easy to record quick video replies right from Gmail and LinkedIn.
4. Personalized videos are also super effective later on in the customer journey.
You should use personalized video for customer success, support, product updates, and anytime customers WANT to communicate with you.
This is when you'll stand out for going above and beyond to deliver an amazing customer experience.
We receive feedback this everyday that stresses how customers really like receiving videos.
For later-stage customer communication, creating videos feels shockingly low effort for the high impact!
Final Thoughts on Sending Sales Videos
The key thing to remember is that video is NOT a silver bullet. You can't JUST use video and expect it to work… Your content has to be valuable, relevant, and succinct, just like with the rest of your sales communication.
Sendspark makes it easy to create great videos for sales. Get started for free to start improving your communication across the funnel.
