Time is money, and that’s doubly true when you work with customers. For the last six years, I’ve been an avid user and champion of using async video in my day-to-day as a seller — well before joining Loom to lead its Sales and Customer Success teams. I’ve seen the benefit of async video messages to close deals and build prospect relationships as both a quota-carrying seller and a sales team leader.

Getting comfortable and confident recording async videos is one of the most impactful soft skills I recommend a new seller develop — and recording practice videos (then replaying them back and looking at the transcripts to see if you’re relying on filler words or meandering too much) is a great way to improve your pitch.

Why is video so effective at increasing email response rates, generating engagement, and improving close rates? It all comes down to the importance of storytelling and authentic connection. We’re in an age of email and message overload at work, but in our personal lives we’re constantly scrolling through short videos.

5 Ways Sales Professionals Can Leverage Async Video to Crush Their Quota

1. Improve open rates by including video messages in your cold outbound outreach.

Video messages help your email stand out in a sea of impersonal, spray-and-pray text emails. Hitting “play” on a video message and hearing a real person introduce themselves, answer questions, and share excitement about a solution really resonates with prospects in a way that bulleted text never will. At Intercom, adding personalized video into outreach sequences improved their cold email reply rates by 19%.

2. Keep the momentum going after a meeting with a video recap and summary of next steps.

After the initial qualification meeting, video is a great tool for keeping the conversation moving forward. A five-minute recap and next steps video is a powerful way to demonstrate that you’re a trusted partner and collaborator.

Share the top three things you heard, the three ways you think your solution can solve them, and then cover next steps or ask any clarifying questions that there wasn’t time to answer live. I coach my team to do this after every call because it’s a great way to continue building strong connections with buyers and customers post-meeting and keep us top of mind.

3. Reduce meeting no-shows by sending a preview of the meeting agenda.

Ghosting rates decrease dramatically when you send a personalized video note that demonstrates expertise and shares excitement to talk with your prospect. Spending just a few minutes explaining the value they’ll get from your meeting will help ensure they show up focused and enthusiastic. This is also a great way to multi-thread and uncover new stakeholders within an account — you can require an email to view your video and know who has watched it.

4. Share company updates without unnecessary meetings.

Async video updates are a great way for reps to access company updates on their own time, while keeping calendars clear for prospect meetings. I’ve moved the majority of process updates and business readouts into async video messages that the sales team can watch on their own time, even at 2X speed if they want, and easily refer back to when needed.

My first week at Loom, I started a tradition called “Monday Musings.” Each Monday, I drop a five-minute video into our company-wide Slack channel to highlight key wins across the revenue team. We celebrate notable pipeline updates and key new logos.

We also gamify a leaderboard to drive healthy competition and share a customer spotlight to highlight learnings that will make everyone in the sales org more effective. This async tradition means the entire organization can hype up our sellers with comments and emojis, understand their challenges, and help us solve any blockers.

5. Pull in company subject matter experts to help you answer technical questions or create executive alignment.

Bringing in a technical subject matter expert or executive is a great way to show prospects and customers that your team is invested in their success. But it’s not always possible with today’s busy calendars. That’s where async video can help you make easy asks of your business partners. Our team regularly asks our product managers things like, “Hey, could you please record a video message answering frequently asked questions about setting up our integration?” or our marketing team “Would you please record a demo of an upcoming feature?”.

All of these async practices will help you get more engagement on outreach, open more opportunities, and close deals faster because you’re proactively demonstrating value and cutting down on the number of meetings each deal takes.

Ready to bring async video into your sales cycle? Get in touch with the Loom team.