EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENTHOW CREATING CONNECTIONS DRIVES SALES

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

IntroductionThe digital age of sales is an age of constant measurement. Sales leaders tally leads prospected, emails sent, and phone calls made while tracking lead response time, opportunity win rate, sales funnel leakage...the list goes on. Yet despite the many metrics sales leaders turn to, they still add up to one key question remaining unanswered: how emotionally engaged is the customer with the sales process?

Many seasoned sales leaders might scoff at that question; after all, engagement is a marketing metric...isn’t it? As the line between marketing and sales continues to blur, engagement (particularly emotional engagement) is becoming an increasingly vital metric to the success of sales teams. An estimated 75% of sales professionals believes that their approach, either with their outreach, messaging, or value proposition, differentiates them from the competition (via Sales 2.0). Despite this confidence, only 3% of buyers believe that sellers have an approach that stands out. While high numbers of emails sent and calls made might look good in a sales report, those metrics say very little about how a prospect feels about a product or service, their attitude towards a company or organization, or their relationship with a sales representative. Without measuring prospects’ reactions and interactions with sales outreach efforts, sales teams are left playing an infinitely increasing numbers game, hoping that the quantity of their outreach will

make up for the quality of its contents. These sales teams will continue to see diminishing returns: according to Openview Labs, callback rates are below 1% while only 24% of sales emails are actually opened. This means the spray-and-pray method of selling is quickly dying, and only by engaging customers with quality sales content that fosters relationships and provides value can sales leaders hope to reach the customers of tomorrow.

But measuring emotional engagement goes beyond just adding more numbers to a sales report. Click-through rates, open rates, and other standard engagement metrics, though helpful in understanding if prospects are interested in the sales content sent to them, are largely vanity metrics that say very little as to how the prospect feels. Measuring the emotional impact and engagement of sales outreach efforts, though largely more qualitative than usual sales metrics, can yield far more actionable results than the rank and file data points sales teams usually track.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

Through the course of this ebook, you will understand three aspects of emotion-al engagement of sales outreach:

Why Emotional Engagement MattersEmotional engagement is more than just feel-good sentiments for filling up reports; they have a real and measurable impact on the efficacy of your sales efforts as well as your bottom line.

How to Measure Emotional EngagementWhen measuring emotional engagement, it’s important to identify which metrics will help you to draw insights and which ones will just clutter your results.

How To Create Emotional EngagementImplementing a plan to create that emotional engagement is imperative in reaching decision makers and inspiring the trust necessary to win their business.

1

2

3

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

Why Emotional Engagement MattersEmotional engagement is more than just feel-good sentiments for filling up reports; they have a real and measurable impact on the efficacy of your sales efforts as well as your bottom line.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

Emotional engagement is more than just feel-good sentiments for filling up reports; they have a real and measurable impact on the efficacy of your sales efforts as well as your bottom line. According to Gallup, fully engaged customers represent a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer. Similar findings by CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council in partnership with Google contend that 53% of the purchasing decision is driven by the buyer experience, including the content used for sales engagement. Conversely, in a Salesforce survey, 63% of respondents indicated that they had engaged with content at some point in their career only to be disappointed by what they received. Of that same 63%, 97% said that the negative experience somehow affected their trust of the brand. With such an onus placed on the quality of prospect engagement with sales content, one would expect tracking that content to be a priority for any sales team, yet according to CSO Insights, 93% of organizations don’t track content used by sales reps. At best, this means sales teams are operating with insufficient data to optimize their sales outreach. At worst, it means sales teams are ignoring the new reality of digital sales.

B2B buyers want to feel some sort of emotional connection with the vendors they purchase from. Another joint report

conducted by Google and CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council studied nine B2B brands and found that seven of them had fostered emotional connections with more than 50% of their customers and attributed that emotional connection as a major driver of sales. This suggests that sales content has to be more than just relevant to a prospect; it has to be emotionally engaging and help foster a relationship of trust with a company or sales representative.

Sales teams that are proactive about engaging prospects and measuring that engagement have a decided advantage over sales teams that don’t. According to Sales Benchmark Index, sales teams have a 56% greater chance of attaining a quota if they engage a buyer before that buyer contacts a seller. This suggests that sales teams must be able to quickly produce high-quality sales content that engages prospects emotionally, conveys value as well as brand messaging, and influences the prospect’s buying decision. A sales engagement content solution must then control for all these aspects while being fast and easy to deploy across a large sales team.

53% of the purchasing decision is driven

by the buyer experience

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

How to Measure Emotional Engagement

Any marketer will tell you that they are inundated with data, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult to make sense of all the noise. When measuring emotional engagement, it’s important to identify which metrics will help you to draw insights and which ones will just clutter your results.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

While determining which metrics matter is largely de-pendent on your company and its goals, in general there are four main engagement metrics that will help any sales team refine and optimize its outreach.

1. Open RateBefore you can measure any other engagement metrics, you have to make sure that prospects are actually looking at the content you send them. As cited earlier, 24% of sales emails are opened on average. Statistically speaking then, more than ¾ of the emails you send are disregarded out of hand. This is especially true of automated marketing emails sent without any personalization.

Optimizing your open rates should be your first priority when engaging with prospects. Without a solid open rate, your sales team’s efforts will be largely wasted. Some strategies for increasing open rates include:

• Creating eye-grabbing subject lines The subject line of an email is the first thing a prospect sees when one of your sales reps first reach out and determines whether or not the email is opened. Some simple A/B testing will let you experiment with different subject lines and identify the kinds of words that prompt prospects to pen emails and keep reading.

• Write to one prospect at a time Prospects are turned off by programmatic emails that look like they were sent to a huge batch of people all at once. By personalizing a subject line with something that appeals specifically to one prospect, you can increase the chances of that prospect opening the email.

• Send emails from a person Emails addressed from a company rather than a person look like spam or bulk marketing outreach, and prospects don’t like to open either of those. If the goal of your sales outreach is to foster relationships and emotional engagement, then addressing an email from an individual sales rep is the best way to establish that connection and entice the prospect to open the message.

• Send at the right time This is dependent on multiple factors, including simple ones such as time of day and day of the week, as well as less obvious considerations such as the context of conversation. Is this email being sent immediately after a prospect has taken an action on your company’s website or landing page? Is this the first interaction your sales rep has had with the prospect, or is it one of many? Context is crucial in framing your message and optimizing it specifically for your prospect and their stage in the selling process can dramatically increase your open rate.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

2. FrequencyA clear sign of a prospect’s engagement is the frequency with which they interact with your sales rep and the content they send. If they never open the emails sent to them or only occasionally look at the sales content catered to them, than they either aren’t being engaged with correctly or are simply uninterested in what your organization has to offer. However, if they regularly open emails and click on attachments and links, then you can tell that they are very engaged and are ready to progress further in the selling process.

The frequency with which prospects engage with your sales content is largely dependent on the frequency with which you engage prospects, and optimizing for send frequency is far from an exact science; it depends on the prospect, the kinds of content you’re sending, and, again, the context of the prospect and their stage in the selling process. Sending too little too rarely can hurt the frequency prospects engage with your content, but so too can sending too much too often; overwhelming a prospect with content can cause them to turn off and start ignoring you. Watch for changes in a prospect’s engagement frequency and alter your outreach frequency accordingly.

3. InteractionsRecording what prospects are doing with your content (if anything at all) is key to determining whether or not they are engaged in the sales process. If they’re regularly interacting with your content, it’s a good sign they’re interested and thirsty for more valuable content. If not, that should be a red flag to either adjust what sales content you’re sending as well as who you’re sending it to.

According to the Data & Marketing Association, click-through rate (CTR) is the top performance indicator of your email’s engagement. A higher CTR means prospects are interested in the content and offers shared with them, prompting them to take more action and allowing sales reps to move the deal down the pipeline toward closing. In general, a higher CTR means a higher conversion rate; in fact, doubling your CTR can increase your conversion rate by as much as 50%. Giving prospects something worth clicking on increases their chances of signing up or making a purchase, making it easier to frame the sales conversation and move the deal along.

Some of the best strategies to improve your CTR include:

• Concision Avoid overwhelming the prospect with excessive text. By keeping your message short and to the point, you can drive the prospect’s attention to the valuable content you wish to share with them.

• Personalization Sharing content specifically suited to the prospect increases the likelihood that they’ll click on it. Center your message around that prospect and the relationship you’ve built with them up to that point in order to increase engagement and strengthen the emotional impact of the content you share.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

• Personalization Sharing content specifically suited to the prospect increases the likelihood that they’ll click on it. Center your message around that prospect and the relationship you’ve built with them up to that point in order to increase engagement and strengthen the emotional impact of the content you share.

• Mobile Optimization Odds are that your prospect will open the email on their phone, so make sure that the content you include looks good on any screen size. A text-heavy piece of content with small fonts won’t engage a prospect as well as a video that adjusts for mobile screens. Again, be mindful of the context of your engagement and share content that the prospect will be able to use and enjoy when they receive it.

4. DurationGetting a prospect to click on your content is half the battle, but getting the prospect to consume it entirely is a completely different challenge. For that reason, measuring the duration of time that a prospect spends with your sales content is an important metric to measure overall engagement. If a prospect clicks a link or plays a video only to navigate away a few seconds later, that’s your signal to make your sales content more engaging. This can be done by better personalizing the content, increasing the content’s visual appeal, or shortening the length of the content.

While being one of the more valuable metrics of engagement, duration is also one of the more difficult metrics to track, requiring specials tools or content in order to gauge how much time a prospect spends engaging with a piece of content. Videolicious, for instance, makes it easy to track the duration of time a prospects spends watching a custom, automatic video sent with an email, as well as how many times it was watched and whether or not the video was clicked on. Integrating such tools into your sales engagement is critical in order to empower your team to accurately measure the efficacy of its sales efforts.

Though these and other engagement metrics are helpful in understanding how a prospect is interacting with sales content and outreach, they remain limited attempts to quantify a prospect’s emotional response to a company, product, sales representative, or a combination of all three. These metrics indicate whether or not prospects are engaging with your content and how often, but they don’t directly tell you how the prospect is feeling. Translating views and clicks to emotions is far from an exact science; in order to understand a prospect’s emotion, sales professionals have to learn how to use more qualitative metrics. These might include:

1. Net Promoter ScoreTracking a prospect’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives indication of how a prospect feels about your brand or product based on their likelihood to promote your content, company, or product online. Those who rank with a high NPS are your company’s promoters; these are the people who are intensely satisfied with your company and regularly share both its content and offers to their own networks through their own channels. Those who rank with mid-range NPS are passives; they don’t promote or detract from your company online. Finally, those with low NPS are detractors; they generate negative

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

reviews and posts that adversely affect your company. Since NPS is highly correlated with a prospect’s overall feeling toward a company or brand, NPS can be a critical metric in managing both your customer experience as well as your company’s emotional engagement.

While helpful in gauging a customer’s emotional engagement, NPS is often a much later metric that comes into play after a prospect has converted. Though highly indicative of a emotional engagement, it must often be used in concert with other metrics in order to accurately understand what points in the sales process prospects feel positive about as well as what point they feel negatively about.

2. Customer SatisfactionMeasuring customer satisfaction through surveys, though more manual than other approaches, allows for a granular peak into a prospect’s emotional engagement. When well-written, surveys allow for more qualitative feedback that get to the heart of how a prospect is feeling, providing valuable feedback that can be used to improve the customer experience and create more impactful emotional engagement for prospects. Allowing for longer form feedback in the form of a sentence or paragraph provides the prospect with an opportunity to express their feelings more fully in a way that tracking clicks and views (as well as an overall customer satisfaction score rating) simply can’t.

There are obvious limitations to this kind of engagement metric. Firstly, it requires buy-in from the prospect; they have to agree to give the feedback and it requires additional time and effort on their part, which could potentially have the unintended consequence of decreasing their customer satisfaction if they feel put upon or inconvenienced. What’s more, feedback from a survey is only as good as the survey itself; if the questions are asked poorly or if the right questions aren’t asked at all, then the survey won’t be able to generate any meaningful insights for improving your emotional engagement.

3. ToneProspects regularly provide a lot of verbal feedback, either directly through email responses or phone conversation, or indirectly through comments, mentions, and other messages online. The tone of this feedback is highly telling; by discerning tone, you can get a pretty idea of a prospect’s level of emotional engagement through either positive or negative language.

Measuring a prospect’s tone can be one of the best indicators of a prospect’s emotional engagement as well as one of the most difficult metrics to quantify. While there are digital tools that help with measuring sentiment analysis, analyzing tone relies largely on a sales person’s intuition and instinct. Because of this, it’s important to keep all communication records between prospects and study them carefully; if there are trends with positive or negative tone, that’s your indication that there is something to either optimize or fix in the way your team engages prospects.

These are only some of the engagement metrics your sales team might track. Again, determining which engagement metrics depends on your company, your business needs, and your prospects responses. By analyzing your results and adjusting based on feedback, you can optimize the engagement metrics that matter to you.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

How To Create Emotional

EngagementImplementing a plan to create that emotional engagement is imperative in reaching decision makers and inspiring the trust necessary to win their business.

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

So far, we’ve seen that measuring emotional engagement is a qualitative, largely interpretative process that depends greatly on the context of the prospect and the company. Perhaps even more qualitative is the creation of emotional engagement in the first place. Quantifying something as intangible as a prospect’s emotions and feelings isn’t easy to do; even if it was, there isn’t much consensus as to how to do it in a meaningful way that translates to dollars earned. Despite this, it’s well understood in business circles that how your prospect feels about you impacts their likelihood of buying from you, and that only by creating emotional connection can sales teams inspire the trust necessary to close large, enterprise deals.

Imagine how you might court a high-profile prospect, a VP of Sales for a large company, for instance. It’s very likely that you would take the prospect out for lunch or dinner to discuss the deal. Throughout the meal, you might discuss shared interests, tell personal stories, or swap jokes. After the ice has been broken, you would take the prospect through the proposal, answering questions and offering solutions, all the while communicating a genuine sense of concern in the prospect’s business interests and a commitment to serving their company in the best way possible. After the meal is over, you set a day and time to follow up and further answer whatever questions you can to help close the deal. You shake hands with the prospect and wait until the appointed follow-up date to learn that the prospect enjoyed meeting you and looks forward to doing business with your company.

In this scenario, what quantifiable metrics led to the sale? Was it the cost of the meal? The number of jokes told? The overlap ratio of shared interests? While it might be possible to quantify elements of the meal, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the prospect signed a deal because the overall experience felt authentic, created trust, and made the prospect feel emotionally engaged.

The digital world of enterprise sales does not always allow for you to directly engage with a prospect in person. Because of this, implementing a plan to create that emotional engagement is imperative in reaching decision makers and inspiring the trust necessary to win their business. You can create effective emotional engagement with these three steps.

Represent Yourself AuthenticallyThink of the example with the client dinner. By sharing stories and telling jokes, the prospect felt emotionally engaged with the selling process and felt enough trust to move forward. Without physically meeting in person, creating that emotional engagement takes a little more effort and a little more planning. Psychologist Albert Mehrabian postulated that 7% of a message is conveyed through words, 38% through tone of voice, and 55% through body language. This means that 55% of what we’re saying can’t be conveyed over the phone, and even less over email which relies on words alone, significantly decreasing the amount of emotional impact we can have with prospects when not meeting in person.

Fortunately, this communication gap can be lessened through video. With tools like Videolicious, it’s easy to create engaging, high-quality messages that emotionally engage prospects and

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

convey the authenticity often lost through other digital mediums.

Provide Upfront ValueThis means more than just explain the value proposition of a product or service. In order to emotionally engage a prospect, you have to communicate your value as a person and as a business professional. By doing this, you signal to the prospect that you are someone worth listening to, someone with ideas and motivation. This adds dimension to your conversation and makes the prospect see you as more than just a cold-hearted salesperson trying to close a deal, but an actual person that the prospect can connect to emotionally.

You can do this best by offering your personal insights or recommendations based off research you’ve conducted on the prospect or their company prior to contacting them for a potential deal. Even better, you can provide value based off previous conversations you’ve had with the prospect by answering a question they had or offering a solution to a problem they’ve expressed, one either related or unrelated to the deal. This gives you depth and incentivizes the prospect to continue their business relationship with you.

Personalize Your CommunicationIn order to create real emotional impact, the selling process has to be personal. The defining characteristic of a good sales professional is people skills, and by treating the prospect like a person first and a prospect second, the prospect is more inclined to feel an emotional connection. Small acts, like remembering a birthday or asking about a wedding the prospect recently attended, go a long way in paving the way for an emotional connection in the business relationship, which leads to an increased willingness to sign deals.

With Videolicious, personalizing sales video is fast and automatic, allowing you to quickly produce engaging personalized videos addressed specifically to your prospect in a way that differentiates you from competitors and the other noise cluttering their inbox.

The art of creating emotional engagement is almost inseparable from the art of sales. By being authentic and relatable, you can do more than close a deal forecasted in your pipeline. You can create the foundation for a working relationship that will last for years into the future.

According to research from psychologist

Albert Mehrabian

Only 7% of a message is conveyed through words alone, meaning 93% of

what you’re saying can’t be interpreted standard

email

LEARN MORE AT VIDEOLICIOUS.COM

ConclusionEmotional engagement, unlike other sales metrics, is difficult to quantify, but just because it can’t easily be assigned a numerical value doesn’t mean it should be ignored. In fact, emotional engagement is arguably the biggest determiner of a sales team success as it indicates whether a sales team can build relationships with prospects and create the mutual trust necessary to close large enterprise deals. According to Gallup, only 29% of customers feel fully engaged. In a changing digital landscape where B2B customers consider ROI just as much as how a company make them feel, this means there’s a lot of room for sales teams to improve their emotional engagement with prospects using new digital innovations and strategies than traditional outreach through email and phone.

Videolicious allows your sales team to fully unlock the power of video with the same tools they carry around in their pockets every day, while giving their managers to control the quality and types of videos they can create. With Videolicious included in your sales stack, you have a powerful tool to emotionally engage your prospects with high-quality, personalized video that fosters relationships, build rapport, and closes deals.

Ready to drive emotional engagement? Schedule a call with one of our emotional engagement experts to start building connections with your customers today.

Schedule a Call