Video Helps Build Relationships in Virtual World

Video is a great way, among other things, to help build relationships in a virtual business world. Since your companies are typically cutting back on business travel due to the economy, the greening of the environment or just for plain efficiencies sake, you need to get creative to drive the same type of connections that you would have made in person. There is a great post on using video on Chad Levitt's blog The New Sales Economy called "Next Generation Sales Reps Use Video To Win". I saw it on The Customer Collective page.

I have found video to be a very effective tool to show people what you look like and to draw them into the typically little screen they are watching as opposed to being distracted by what is going on around the screen. You can video yourself as part of the presentation or better yet include video of your customers talking about your product or service.

Beyond video, however, another very important way to keep your virtual customers engaged is to prepare for the presentation so that you can customize it for each audience. Customization and specifically targeting content at your customers' needs will keep them interested and engaged.

Finally, use social media to surround your customers with relevant content that they can go find or subscribe to so that they can keep up with what is going on around your market segment. Tools like blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and etc work great for building a stronger community than you could ever build over the phone. My company Exari just launched a "Community" page on our website to aggregate the things we are doing to build relationships with our customers.