Connecting with Customers

Video clips in a sales presentation are powerful. Each visual speeds up the pace of the delivery and adds credibility to your sales message. The key is to use the right sound bites from the right source right on cue. How can one marketing video budget deliver those sound bites with a complete 6 minute knock out sales overview to bat clean up?

The video in the YouTube link is a short story I produced on a recent assignment. The primary goal was to produce a 6 minute long overview of two products working together. The secondary goal was to produce multiple short (10 to 15 seconds long) sound bites that could be used in specific points of a sales presentation.

I spent three days in California with a sales director and regional sales representative visiting two locations for the interview and set up footage. The first day was spent collecting all of the interviews for the project. Later that day I was able to export movie clips with embedded time code for the sales director to log. Having the key points from the interviews as a reference for the story, I was able to move more efficiently in the task of gathering meaningful visuals and natural sound to tell the story. By day 3 I add the footage I needed for the 6 minute video. At the airport, the sales director emailed to me a complete shot list of the requested short soundbites. I was able to turn around a handful of clips for use in a sales presentation the next day.

The next week I produced the 6 minute video and invited the sales director over for a review session. The video was a success and the fast turn around of short soundbites added a sense of relevance and energy to sales presentations before I even had a chance to unpack.

One modest budget, multiple ways to help the team win.

Mobile Me Pro?

Yes, your Mobile Me account is an easy way to collaborate with clients and other professionals. Sure, you can use other services such as box.net or yousendit.com for large batch jobs. But, if you already pay for a Mobile Me account, then you have a great FTP service at your fingertips.

Let's see it in action.

Count and compress your files and log in to me.com are the two steps to sending files using your Mobile Me account. First, identify how many files you need to send. If you only have one file to send, then jump ahead to the log in step. But, if you have a project file and several art files, or several video files for review to send, then you need to compress those files into a handy .zip file. With a Mac, compressing files is very simple. Just select the files you want to compress, right or control click on the group and select "compress" from the pop up menu. Your Mac with automatically compresses the files in to a neat, easy .zip package and you're ready to upload to Mobile Me.

Step 2, log in to your Mobile Me account using a web browser of choice. Remember that you can log in to your account from any computer, so you can FTP files from your MacBook Pro laptop or Mac Pro workstation depending on where the files live. No dealing with slow internal networks or jump drive juggling files is necessary. Next, head over to the iDisk icon and select "Public" from the menu. I usually make a new folder to upload the .zip file to keep things organized. Select the upload icon from the top tool bar and select the .zip file from the location on your drive of choice. Once the file is uploaded, select the file and then select "sharing options." The sharing dialog box is loaded with helpful features. For example you can email the shared link directly from dialog box. You can also set a password for sensitive files and set a time for the shared link to expire. Get options for professional users. Hit "Share" and your file is live.

How easy was that?

You recipients are now one click away from the file(s) you want them to use or review. Management is easy and you can even use the links in your HTML snippets for easy web sharing on your website. At $100 a year (that's about $8.33 a month), Mobile Me is a great value for professionals who need a flexible and easy to use FTP, email and basic hosting solution.

Check out other articles on this topic here.