Humanizing the Sales Outreach Strategy
- Jacquelyn McColl
- Apr 25, 2022
- 4 min read
My Role: Market research, Video writing, Filming, Editing
Project Goal: Create a human centred approach to sales outreach and help develop relationships with future clients.
Project Tools: A Notepad, DSLR, Adobe Premiere pro, Photoshop
Timeline: 2 Days
The Challenge: Trying to capture the attention of our clients in the oversaturated email marketing channel.
Background:
In the traditional sales outreach methods of my company, we usually reach out to clients through three channels, calling, texting and email. However, we are not the only ones trying to reach our clients through these channels. Most people no longer answer numbers they are not familiar with, and email inboxes are overflowing with businesses competing for just a few seconds of attention from these shared customers. Whether it is spent sharing a promotion, new feature or reason to invest, most people could spend all day reading sales emails and never quite reach the end of their mailbox.
I had been working in this sales role for about 8 months in this role when I started to look at innovating a new method of connecting with potential clients. Based on some of the relationships I had been able to build since I started in my role, I knew that some of the most loyal clients were ones that not only knew me by my email signature. Zoom was a tool I had relied on to help me build more human connections with my clients. Being able to chat face-to-face helped me to establish myself as "Jacquelyn the Tour Consultant" instead of the girl from the travel company. Being able to put a face to a name had helped me so much in developing those successful relationships, so why not dive in face first into establishing new ones?
The Process:
1. Storyboarding:
The first step in creating this video was outlining the story I wanted to tell. Since our company sells such an impactful experience, I wanted to share about how the brand had impacted me and how that was a large part of the reason I was passionate about sharing it with my now clients. I also wanted to help the viewer picture themselves experiencing travel as well, since what we are selling was not physically tangible, I wanted to do as much as I could to set the scene for them to jump right into. Finally, I wanted to make sure there was a sense of urgency conveyed at the end of the video as well to help prompt the viewers to reach out and get in touch so we could get started in planning their school's next trip as soon as possible.
With those three goals in mind, I sketched out a rough story board of the scenes I wanted to capture in my video:
2. Filming:
Once I had planned out my storyboard, I set out to the office over the weekend (so the space would be quiet and without interruption throughout the process) with my camera and tripod to film the video. II also used the microphone app on my phone to record all of the audio since I could place it closer to myself while filming to result in better sound quality.
3. Editing:
Once I had collected all of the footage, I popped the video, audio and b-roll clips into Adobe Premier and went to work on making a cohesive video. After aligning all of my clips, I cut down the duration to be under 2 minutes as I know that is just over the length of your average TikTok, I wanted to keep it short enough to hold their attention, but long enough to convey my story and start those relationship building blocks.
I also created some graphic assets in Photoshop, like the one in the scene below. I made a small bar to make the window in the middle of the screen appear to be from a video conferencing browser tab.
After setting a warm colour tone and upbeat background music, I was happy to publish the video and share it with my pipeline of clients, some of whom I had never spoken with annd most that I have only interacted wiith briefly over the phone or through email.
Final Video and Result Metrics:
After sending out this video to nearly 200 prospective clients, I definitely saw a change in the kinds of response I was receiving to my outreach. Although there were many who responded that they were not yet ready to start planning, everyone who reached out responded very kindly with many mentioning that they enjoyed the video.
For those who did decide to move forward with getting started in planning their next trip, I believe that this video truly helped in providing personalization of a travel partner rather than just another generic email.
While this is still a new campaign I can't quite see what the true impact will be yet, but I will update this article in a few weeks to provide more insight into the long term result.
For now, please enjoy the video below:
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