Loom is my new love language

As a species, we are yet to establish an accurate timeframe for when early humankind began communicating using voice.

There is a rather romantic notion in a study carried out by archaeologist Natalie Tha?s Uomini and psychologist Georg Friedrich Meyer that tool-making skills and language skills evolved together.

I’m currently binge watching Love is Blind 2 on Netflix, so I’m clearly a closet romantic. And it’s certainly a nice idea that we evolved technologically and verbally in tandem.

As a visual learner, I also like the idea that we actually developed our ‘parietal art’ (that’s cave paintings, petroglyphs and engravings to you and me) before we refined our language skills - but who knows!

Pale, stale email

Anyway fast forward a few million years to the 1970s and we progressed from drawing on walls and using the telephone to…email.

And it kind of stopped there.

All we seem to have done since then is added a plethora of instant messaging tools and notifications that might as well be screaming “NOW, NOW, NOW!” for at least eight hours a day. (More like 24/7 when it comes to the ‘Helen’s Hen Do’ WhatsApp group that you feel rude leaving despite the fact Helen has divorced and remarried twice since that group was set-up.)

Let’s ignore the predictions like this one, that email is about to disappear any day now. There is nothing tangible that I can find to suggest that’s true. Prove me wrong in the comments by all means!

Marie Kondo my comms

So if we’re stuck with email as our main method of communication, then every email needs to do more. It needs to be useful or insightful, well thought out, funny, clever, or somehow save me time.

And that’s where Loom can really shine. Ah Loom, you lovely thing.

Although Loom has been around for about six years, its utility really became evident to me as we moved to remote and then hybrid working. Loom offered reduced prices at the peak of the pandemic. Cute but if you’re tight like me, you can still benefit from the platform for free.

I’ve been using it for short explainers, content and document reviews, and providing feedback to my team – and encouraging them to do the same. It’s a huge timesaver.

Loom’s love potion

You will probably have seen (and deleted!) emails/InMail from sales reps using video clips clutching whiteboards with your name scribbled on them or recording Looms for initial outreach in terms of product social selling. If done well, it can trigger action but it takes a very special mix of salesperson, product and approach to evoke the right response.

Beyond the sometimes chilly product emails, it can actually be applied in a variety of ways for marketing, new business and personalisation/Account Based Marketing.

Maybe I’m the last person to discover them but here are a few:

Slaying with content

For marketers, creating Looms to announce new content on social will get you higher engagement than static image or text based posts.

For thought leaders, bringing that profile pic to life, or putting a face to a name and briefly talking through the thought process behind the content offers a more personal connection and can help brands stand out.

For building new relationships, before you attach that 60 slide PowerPoint deck, think about creating a quick Loom to pull out the key points and show the other person what makes you different.

Side note: when creating content, if you can’t work out how you’d explain it in a quick Loom, then maybe your content brief needs rethinking…

Wooing new work wins

Maybe you have a potential client who flagged a particular pain point in your initial chat and you’ve just thought of a way that they can approach the challenge. Sure, you can email John's assistant inviting him to a call but with time zone differences and packed calendars, this may take three or more emails to arrange. By then you’ve invested more time than you should have at this stage, and have forgotten what it was you were going to share with him anyway.

By recording a quick Loom video, you can memorialise your suggestions in seconds and your potential client can view your thoughts when they have the headspace. They can also see that you listened to them and are being proactive before they have even agreed to work with you. Nice one.

Further down the line, that potential client might also benefit from an explanation of the proposal or contract you’ve just sent them which you can run through on screen.

That thought and attention to detail is unlikely to go unnoticed.

This is especially useful if a potential client goes quiet. Where email alone may fail, and you’re unable to call, a friendly personal message on Loom checking in has got to be worth a shot. ?

Dear client, with love

Perhaps your client has just signed on the dotted line which has kickstarted your onboarding process. What better way to guide them through that than by explaining what you need and why. You can use Loom to set agendas and expectations for calls and issue post-meeting recaps with reminders of what they need to do. These videos can be paused, replayed and shared to ensure the onboarding process is as straightforward and smooth as possible.

You do what you do every day but it’s likely to be a first for your client, so receiving information in this way can be truly invaluable – especially if they need to bring others into the conversation.

Making meetings more productive by setting expectations early and following up with the next steps, sending more meaningful responses to address questions and offer solutions is the sort of stuff that can enhance your relationship and really add value.

Let’s not forget where you have identified a need for additional services. Perhaps the client has reached a point in their lifecycle where they’d benefit from a chat with Barbara in corporate tax. Maybe you can briefly explain why you think a chat with Barbara is a good idea for your client. They're more likely to want to have that conversation.

All you need is love ?

I like to talk. A lot. Ask my husband who has taken to wearing earplugs permanently.

Speech has a way of giving everything so much richness, so much context. Emails all too often lack the pizzazz and emotion that you get from a human face saying words in their own unique way. Now more than ever, we need that emotional connection.

So, if you’re not using Loom already, what are you waiting for?

And if you’ve come up with a way we can eradicate email, then I am here for it. Please share.

XOXO