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As is common in most large organizations, sales and marketing are set up as distinct departments with a different set of goals and tracking metrics.
While both the departments are customer-facing, a fundamental lack of alignment between the two can be severely problematic, which is why we are seeing the emergence of practices that align the functions of the two departments in order to give the customers a single, unified, smooth experience.
Evolution of industries is arguably accelerating in 2019, with technology hitting even the most unsavviest of businesses with the promise of lasting disruption. Both sales and marketing departments have evolved into forms such that they are beginning to resemble each other increasingly.
Sales is losing its historically transactional nature and the focus is shifting towards building lasting relationships, while marketing is gearing towards promoting the best sales outcomes.
Therefore, it is imperative to devise strategies (like Account-Based Marketing, for example) that can fully leverage the skill-sets of both departments by making them work in tandem with each other.
Video has turned out to be an unlikely contender in this race; a fabled tool that promises to take this alliance to another level altogether.
One Tool, Many Results
Sales and Marketing have traditionally used distinct tools to achieve their goals. For instance, marketing departments distance themselves from methods like cold-calling, while salespeople do not want to burden themselves with the technicalities of buying ads over increasingly targeted (and complicated) social platforms.
All of this changed with the arrival of widespread video marketing on the scene.
Why, you ask?
Because video provided staggering results for both the departments.
In previous articles, including The 3 Big Obstacles Video Marketers Face - And How To Overcome Them, we have increasingly stressed the importance of building video marketing strategies with shared goals encompassing multiple departments. This is important because the power of video is immense for both sales and marketing, and building a strategy with only one side of the coin in mind will lead to their counterpart missing out on the benefits of video (Unless you want to run two parallel video marketing strategies, in which case the question arises: WHY?).
Video is, by far, one of the most potent tools in the marketing department's arsenal. Video content can improve web traffic by as much as 40%, while studies have also pegged the increase in organic search engine traffic due to video content at roughly 150%. That's not all: 70% of marketers believe that videos drive more conversions than any other form of content. No matter where you are in the customer lifecycle, there is a video out there, waiting to be produced, that can seriously amp up your game.
On the sales side, video doesn't disappoint. Video is staggeringly preferred over text-based emails by most decision makers, with 59% of executives rating it over vanilla sales emails.
Consumers, likewise, prefer to watch a product video instead of reading a description by over 4 times. Video viewers are also 85% more likely to convert to buyers than those who have not encountered the product's video while prospecting.
Tug Of War No More
Video is one of the very few, possibly only, tools that yield extremely high benefits for both sales as well as marketing. This makes it a very attractive opportunity for active collaboration between departments. With goals that are directly impact business health and bottom line of the company, marketing and sales can use collaborative video marketing strategies to ensure that they share the benefits of video in a manner which maximizes company growth.
As we have said in previous articles, video is amplified in its efficacy by combining it with deep analytics. This is important, as a well-executed, analytics-infused video marketing strategy gives both the departments a shared metric to track, in turn fostering cross-department sharing of knowledge and promoting collaboration.
By tying the KPIs of both the departments somewhat together by tracking a common performance indicator, especially one with incredible power to attract, engage and convert customers, you can effectively create a culture of collaboration and shared hustle in your company that can be otherwise hard to achieve.
