This is a guest post by Simon Cliffe from Branch Road.

Recently my wife tasked me with booking the family summer holiday. I have a 40-minute train journey into work, so a perfect window for doing research.

Typing ‘family summer holiday’ into Google, I was bombarded by zillions of search results recommending holidays from Costa Brava, to Malta, Crete, Mexico and so many more.

After five minutes of flicking through the various web pages, I felt overwhelmed and confused. Then for the rest of the day, I was followed around by an online advert trying to convince me to book a cruise.  

Sound familiar? 

For consumers, the colossal amount of content, PR and marketing messages out there can be quite a turn off. We’re busy people and we don’t have time to sift through it all. For brands, cutting through the data deluge and attracting our attention in a meaningful way, has become a real challenge. So, how do you do it?

The power of video storytelling

I recently re-read The Challenger Sale. 

Granted, I don't work in sales but everybody sells - whether it's a product, a service or your personal brand. 

I also believe that sales skills are essential for any consultant because they teach you to think differently when you're trying to provide solutions, are doing presentations and pitches or are simply talking to a customer about a difficult situation.

Especially when it comes to solutions, you need to help your customer get to the solution on their own by probing them with questions and guiding them rather than point-blank dropping the solution onto them because that's not how they'll truly adopt it - they need to come up with it on their own so that it sticks and so that they firmly believe in it. 

Back to the book - it lays out the ideas and strategies behind some of the most successful sales teams and sales reps and how they perform the job in today's world of sophisticated buyers.

Most of the selling approaches used nowadays are no longer effective because buyers are fed up with being interrogated without receiving any value.

There's a better approach to successful selling that the book promotes - the Challenger model.

Why the Challenger Sales Approach Works?

Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority that cannot be isolated to just the marketing or IT department. Everybody in the organisation has a role to play. 

I've just finished reading the 2018-2019 State of Digital Transformation report which clearly illustrates how disruptive technologies continue to impact organisations and markets and how digital transformation as responsibility is moving beyond IT and is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement but there's still a lot of work to be done. 

As the report describes, digital transformation means modernising how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy where customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and organisational culture are the clear drivers that empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.

Let's take a look at some of the key findings that stood out to me while reading the report.

The Top 4 Learnings about the State of Digital Transformation

Video is no longer an awareness play, left to big businesses with big agencies and big budgets. 

Video is now everywhere and anyone with a smartphone can play. 

Many brands are jumping on video marketing as they recognise the need for it but are still struggling to create the type of engaging videos that their audience can connect to or be interested in watching until the end. 

Social networks too are placing video at the very front - Facebook launched a whole section that surfaces personalised videos to your interests and past activity, Instagram Live is booming, YouTube is at an all-time high when it comes to usage. 

But creating videos that are personalised and authentic is hard. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. And everyone has a different opinion.

Take the latest Gillette ad campaign "We Believe" - it sparked a lot of controversy, some loved it, others really hated it. 

I often get asked two questions: 

• How did you manage to build your own brand? 
• What makes companies stand out in a blue ocean? 

To both of these questions, the answer in its simplest form is value. 

I began blogging in 2012 while I was still a student with a couple of important goals in mind: learn how to write better as I wanted to pursue a career in PR but was studying International Business, and share all the knowledge I was gathering with the world so that I can help others and by doing so, build an audience. 

Over time, I developed a pretty good readership, expanded my social networks, made tremendous connections and eventually became recognised as the person who invented Inbound PR that led to a book and a ton of speaking engagements. 

I did this by recognising the unique value I could provide to the market that was somehow not there - contributing my inbound marketing knowledge to the public relations practice. 

As for companies, I spent years in consulting