Why your prospects will pay more attention to your customers
Most people looking to solve a complex problem will seek the advice of others who have faced and solved similar problems. Your serious prosects are no different, they're taking some pretty big decisions with their businesses and, nine times out of ten, will gladly watch a video case study it meets the following conditions:

• The subject is from a similar sector
• The issues tackled were relevant
• The subject organisation and interviewees are credible

Improving Success Rates for Early Sales Cycle Activity
If your video case study meets these criteria then it can be a powerful sales tool to assist in early sales cycle activity and increase your success rate for making prospect short lists. The Rich Partnership has a proven approach that is designed to create videos that map directly onto your prospects' pain points and then provide explicit answers in customer language. How we do this is explained below.

Planning
The first thing to do is to define the type of customer (sector and role) you wish to target and then define their pain points. When selecting a case study subject it's important to choose one that will demonstrate excellence in the areas that are relevant. We can then prepare a mind map of these key pain points in order to create and interview plan and a rough programme timeline. We also need to agree a format that will impact your sales cycle and fit your budget. Typically this means the length of the movie and the level of post production. You will get a better idea of what's possible by watching the example list on the right-hand-side of this page.

Preparing the Subjects
It's not a good idea to rehearse questions and answers with the interviewees. They're not TV professionals so anything less than a spontaneous answer will come across as wooden and will ruin credibility. That said, we need to let them know that there nothing to worry about, typically this takes the form of a short call a couple of days before the shoot to let them know how long it will take, what they should wear (whatever they're comfortable in) and that they don't need to rehearse as we'll only be taking their best bits (which will be things they know already).

Shooting the Video
Typically we shoot 3 people from the subject  and 1 person from the supplier. During the shoot any interviewee can tell the camera not include anything they have just said and we will scratch it We will also film shots of the business and solution in action. The shoot duration is a single but long day, however, we may travel the night before depending upon the location.

Working with the Transcripts
After the shoot all interviews are transcribed and then the best bits are highlighted as potentially useful. These are sent to you for review so that you can make additional highlights for anything that must not be used and anything that should definitely be used.

The Audio Edit
We create the narrative of the case study and export it as an audio file. This file becomes a sign off before we add the footage of the business and the solution in action. By taking this approach we are minimising production costs for amends which means that we can quote a lower price at the outset.

Post Production
Once the audio file is signed off we then add the business and solution footage and the music in order to create a draft version for sign off or amendment.

Final Master Formats
Once the draft version is signed off we can create the final video in the previously agreed formats. Typically, these are:

• high quality .wmv files for playback from hard drive or CD ROM
• Lower quality and smaller file size .wmv or flash files for web playback
• MPEG2 for DVD playback
• Mastered to tape for broadcast playback

We are also able to create cue point files for use within the Tx content management sytstem.

Watch Tectura's video sell ERP to the Fresh Produce sector.

See how Alphameric's video gives prospects the elusive feel good factor