The Right Tool For The Job

I was reminded recently of a football manager's analogy from a few years back; 'you don't ask a brickie to hang a door, do you?'

When canvassing cold old-school, I know when I'm talking to the wrong person.

It's when they dismiss my opening query about video call performance with the block;

"We're happy with Teams, thanks".

Leaving aside (for now) that as a pats objection, wholly unrelated to the mooted subject matter, it brings to mind the real issue that there is a burgeoning scene of niche video platform players right now.

All manner of sector or activity specific alternative solutions are emerging.

After all, you don't use Teams to run a customer webinar. (And if you do, feel free to scream now.)

Whether for such like multi-person marketing attendance, training sessions, or customer service responses, to borrow a phrase from a decade back, there's now an app for that.

Consider too how apps already trying to become central to our work lives are beginning to sneak in video components. Hoping to keep us forever within their walls.

One such arena gaining attention is the sales call.

Several startups vying to own a (the) slice of the visual vendor-buyer conversations.

Rather than highlight any relative merits of such players, my aim is more to suggest that the very fact that they exist should tell anyone still using Teams (or in fairness, any of the early land-grabbing major platforms) that there is a raft of sales focused functions not being covered by them.

New products often flow into a vacuum. And that empty space currently covers a wide range from the nice to shine bells and whistles, all the way to those capabilities that are fundamental to (better and true) solution selling.

The broader point, is that if you are using video with prospects to merely talk as you might on the phone, say with the occasional screen-share added in, then you are missing a whole big box of tricks.

And you don't need a new video system to start using them.

Here are a half-dozen to get you thinking. Each of which is done slightly differently now over a video call. Have you begun to work out how?

• riffing on an idea
• key diagram build
• product walkthrough
• running the numbers
• determining priority rankings
• understanding urgency timeline

(And that's without one of my favourites; the ongoing assessment of the political landscape prospectside.)