Selling While You Sleep: Smart Content for Your Business

Creating Content That Keeps Giving

As a sales guy by trade, I will always take a direct conversation with a prospect over any other means of communication. my experience in life and business has created a great gut feeling, and I love the talk to people and can usually instantly have a first impression on the opportunity that exists. But that just doesn’t scale, especially in a startup, a small business or as a hustler trying to get a side gig up and running. How can you create efficient “sales hours” beyond your awake time, and possible working hours? You need a clone, right?

Until clones and AI can help you out, we are stuck with the hand we are dealt. So today, what can you leverage to help in this area. The answer is video, and there is no comparison. Creating a handful of videos that are professional, well done and tell your story can be priceless for aspiring businesses, and even individuals. In every position I have held, one of the first things I do is create a video of my sales pitch, end to end, and upload it to my YouTube channel. Why? I now have an asset I can share on my LinkedIn profile, as I send prospecting emails or In-mails, when customers or prospects request more info, or I want to do a quick pitch in an elevator ;). In fact, I usually have a handful of videos:

• The Short Pitch – a quick 1 minute pitch to use for prospecting.
• The Full Pitch – End-to-end demo including a few slides and the product demo.
• Technology Demo – Just the demo of the product.
• Specialty focuses or hot topics – maybe its a new feature being released. How security works. Maybe a vertical specific pitch. The Topic du jour!!

These become indispensable tools in your day to day, and if done right, over time can get you leads and inquiries too. In simplistic terms: If a video helps you get 100+/1000+ extra touches per month with no extra work, do you think its worth it?

I commonly hear excuses on this topic:

• I don’t know how to create a video.
• We don’t like to show our product in videos for competitive reasons (Stealth marketing technique…lol)
• I just don’t think that will work for my product.

To answer these, first off, if you can do a Zoom meeting, you can record a session and instantly have your video. The free version of Zoom let’s you record locally, and it takes 2 minutes to sign up. There are also a number of recording tools out there at a reasonable price point (Camtasia, SnagIt), that are simple to use and create great quality videos.

Secondly, the stealth marketing attitude. This one drives me nuts, and I’ve dealt with many a product marketer that was vehemently opposed to sharing any type of product demo. This is absurd. The benefits you glean from creating these assets far outweigh the downsides.

Every product has to be sold. If a video can’t do that, you should reevaluate your business. Be creative, and just pretend you are presenting in person to a room full of prospects…no brainer.

Thoughts? Anything I missed here?