3 Secret Ways Use Video For Sales Emails = Success!!

Rob  00:09

Welcome back, everybody to The Slow Pitch Podcast. And over on the other side there I see Lane…Lane. How are we doing?

Lane  00:15

Doing great, Rob, how are you today?

Rob  00:18

Good. I’m doing well. That’s good. I’m glad you’re doing well. It’s, it’s almost the weekend. So for us, but you know, for whoever’s listening, it’s probably, you know, who knows what’s gonna be the middle night? What are we talking about today?

Lane  00:30

Well, Rob, I thought we’d we talked about a webinar that you and I both watched this week, from Vidyard about, about the service they’re offering, maybe talk about the message that of how they see their service being used, and, and maybe some ways that you might see other ways to use it.

Rob  00:44

That makes sense to me. Okay, so yeah, that was a good, that was pretty good webinar, because it gave you an idea of how to use it. Um, also for the people listening, what is Vidyard? So we can get that to make sure everybody understands what Vidyard is. What is it? Can you describe that for me?

Lane  00:57

Yes, I had never heard of them before this, this webinar, but Vidyard is a video hosting service. They help you record the videos with the the intention of sending those videos and emails and they they track the statistics for that how much how much of a video was watched, how many times it was watched, all that kind of good stuff.

Rob  01:17

So it’s kind of like a you can create a short little clip of video to send a message in a sales setting via email, they can see you they can see a little Gif or Gif (Jiff), or however you pronounce that, and then decide whether or not they want to watch it. And then they watch it. And you can know that they’ve watched it for how long is that? You’re saying kind of like that, right?

Lane  01:34

Yep, yep.

Rob  01:35

All right. So for those of you listening, this is one of the more powerful tools you can have in your arsenal. But it is obviously not the only tool. But this is a great tool to have in your arsenal for a good sale. So let’s get started.

V/O  01:49

You’re listening to The Slow Pitch Podcast, a podcast about selling less and closing more.

Rob  01:56

Alright, so, Lane, Vidyard, you’d kind of describe what it is everybody kind of what the what the webinar was like, what what did we learn? What are some of the things that we picked out of that, and I’ll add to as well, but

Lane  02:07

So, Rob, before we do anything, I think we need to make explicitly clear that this episode is not sponsored by Vidyard. It’s just something we’ve watched, and we want to talk about, we will set up a link on on TheSlowPitch.com.

Rob  02:19

Yeah, and on that link, just understand that it costs you nothing extra to buy it, if you buy it great, it doesn’t cost anything extra, they’re just going to give us a little bit for helping promote it. It’s kind of a way of marketing really. And so it doesn’t really mean that we’re going to say anything better or worse, we’re going to give you our honest feedback as to what we think of the program. And I’ve used it and I and I think it’s really important for people to understand that the program is a little bit dynamic, and things that you can do and how you use it. And I think that’s what’s really important to get out of this. So let’s talk a little bit about what it is that Vidyard is and what did they say that the program could do? Lane, you want to start us?

Lane  02:55

Yeah, there’s there’s a couple points that I took away that I thought were very interesting, you know, one, they they really emphasize that it’s a way for you to show your personality and portray your intended tone when you’re, you know, sending out your your essentially cold emails and just introducing yourself. And they they also pointed out that, you know, they they specifically said no one is using video and emails right now. And they say it’s highly effective. I, you know, I kind of wondered about if Vidyard isn’t the best kept secret because they’ve been around for five or 10 years? And if you know if it was that highly effective, I kind of wonder, you know, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Rob  03:27

Yeah, I agree with you. I don’t know why more people aren’t using it. I do know that, you know, it is hard to send video through email, I know that there’s really not a way that you can just embed a video into an email because usually the file sizes are too large. So what they do, or what they’ve done is they’ve converted things over to a GIF or a GIF, depending on how you want to pronounce that. And what that does is it makes it so that the program can embed into an email. And I know there’s integrations in there. So but if you use Outlook, it’s not exactly the same, where you can copy and paste some stuff, basically copy and paste the GIF along with some links. So you can put that in your email and outlook. But if you’re using Gmail, or you’re using some other programs that they have in there, it literally will integrate together so that you can I mean, essentially, email from videos program itself through your email platform. So it makes sense.

Lane  04:15

Yep. Yeah, totally.

Rob  04:17

Yeah. So and I think that’s the that’s the interesting part is that in your process of doing sales, if you can use Vidyard, there’s a benefit to that. So I think let’s talk about how the ways that they said that they you could use it, I think they one of the things they talked about that I remember you that I’m talking about was if you have a an estimate that you want to share with somebody that is has some complicated parts, or what questions usually come up, that’s a good opportunity to share this video link where you can say, hey, here’s an estimate. Let me explain some issues that kind of come up with an estimate. Sometimes that’s what they said. And Lane you and I both know, based on our conversations. What do we think of that?

Lane  04:54

Yeah, you don’t send an estimate… You want to do that in person.

Rob  04:58

Yep, I would never use Vidyard to send an estimate over and have them have this video explained the problems with my estimate. It’s like, Hey, here’s an estimate, here’s my problems. Yeah, that’s not the way you want to come across, right? So what I would rather do is I would rather sit down with somebody on a zoom call, and share my screen, or I would sit down in person and then go through this estimate and say, okay, here is what this is saying, here is what we’re committing to, here’s what you’re committing to client. And is there anything that’s stands out to you that shouldn’t be? Is something wrong? Is there anything in here that’s incorrect. And what that does is it really makes them commit to what you have there. And I will say this, when I do that, nine times out of 10, and maybe even higher, nine and a half out of 10, everything goes through just fine. And I sometimes will find, can you word this this way, because I know that when we get to the finance person, or we know that when we get to this, that’s what they’re looking for. Remember, when we met we talked through, that’s what they want, with those types of things, especially the size of the company, if you’re bigger than the bigger size company, you end up with some of that if you can’t get in front of all those decision makers. So when you go through that estimate your your fine tuning and tweaking, you’re not saying here’s my estimate, you read it, figure it out, by the way, these are the areas where people are struggling, stumble through this estimate, and they can’t figure out what I’m saying. I would rather make sure that it’s clear. If they need more stuff added I can easily add that. So that’s one of the things I remember them talking about, what do you is there anything else you that stood out to you that you remember the how they use it?

Lane  06:21

Yeah, the the, one of the big things they do they use it for sending like introductory email, …an introductory emails, kind of the the cold call version of an email. And they highly recommend that you you customize your your short little video, maybe having a holding up a little whiteboard with a person’s name on it so that it gets their attention increases the chance of someone actually clicking the the video to watch it. And then of course, I also recommend you keep that really short, maybe 15, 30 seconds, just enough to kind of capture their attention and get someone to to act upon it.

Rob  06:52

Yeah, and I think that’s actually a smart way to use it. I from a cold calling standpoint, and I don’t know what you think. But is there anything you would do to improve on that even…anything come to mind for you?

Lane  07:04

Yeah, I don’t know that just based on watching the their presentation that I I definitely have a ideas on on how to improve on that. I do question the amount of time you might need to spend customizing 15 to 30 second videos, how many of those can you do in an hour and send out I see the benefit. But I also worry about how much time you end up?

Rob  07:26

Yeah, spending on creating videos. Exactly. Yeah, and I, she talked about that a little bit for a very brief moment. And I think one of the things she talked about is is, you know, if you’re going to craft a message, using video, you are going to need to do a little bit of planning, whether that’s writing something down kind of thinking about it, maybe doing a couple of tries to get it to be come across correctly on the video. So it’s not gonna be nailed perfect every time the first time most people won’t. And so she’s saying, if you do that, you might get six of those videos done in one hour based on what her numbers were, you know, a few get good at it, you know, a few minutes. And then you got to go through the process of sending it everything else who every hour, you can get six, I think that’s what she says when I

Lane  08:09

say yeah, I believe it was Yeah. Because she she used the example of checking LinkedIn seeing what school they went to, maybe you could customize the subject line with the school mascot or you know, something just to get their attention. Yeah, really get them to open the mail first.

Rob  08:21

Yeah. And so I think to me, all that is good, but I would almost come to you and say Lane, if you were using this, I would say to you, what she’s saying is good information. But let me ask you this, if you’re a regular normal salesperson, that’s kind of the first way people do that. Like think about it, when you’re in person, before video, before you would go in there and you’d walk in, you’d look around their office and look for things that are similar, Oh, you went to this school and you’re talking about that school, oh, you have a boat on the wall, a picture of a boat, that must be your boat, or there’s a fish on the wall, or whatever it is, you’re going to find something in that office to talk about, right? I tend to feel like that’s not the way to go. My goal is to figure out what their personality is so that I can speak their language. So are they high D? Are they I? Are they a C? Are they an S, that’s where you’ll have more of a message. So if you’re going to talk to a C, you’re going to use a Vidyard message that’s going to be more focused to see if you’re going to talk to an S, you’re going to talk to an S style person, that message has to come across that way. So if you’re talking to an S, you might say, Hey, listen, I know you’ve got a pretty big size team there. And you’re probably going to want to work through with them some some of these concepts. But you know, I got to think and maybe it might make sense, maybe not. But it might make sense for us to have a quick five, five minute conversation between you maybe a couple of your key team members that can help make some decisions of whether or not we should even talk some more. And maybe that’s the way you have that conversation starter, if you will. Now layer on top of that, I would look at it and say do you do a sales cold call that way? Or do you do it as a precursor to a sales call? Or do you do it after a sales call and you’ve actually had some sort of a conversation and you do something to layer on top of that. So how you use it. It’s kind of up to you, but there’s options either way? Right. But it to me, I feel like there was things that she said that was good. And there were things that I don’t agree with.

Lane  10:05

So let me ask you this. So if you, how can you try to figure out? I know you can’t do it definitively, but how can you try to figure out what someone’s personality type is? If you haven’t even talked to them before?

Rob  10:15

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s a couple of ways. One is, if you look at their LinkedIn profile, a lot of times you’ll see, based on the messaging, you can see some things that will give you clues and hints. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re 100% accurate, because sometimes people have perfect people, other people professionally, right, their their profile, right, but if you have a high, if you have a high D personality, there’s their sentence structure, and their their statements are going to be a little shorter, a little more curt, they’re going to be more about me, me, me, I did this. And then I did this, I did this versus somebody that’s like an S who’s gonna say, my team did this and my team did this can be a little longer form of my informations can be a more detail, a high C might have more detail might be a little more analytical, you might look at what kind of groups they follow. You might look at the type of people that they’re connected to the type of people that they follow, not so much groups, but the people. So somebody that follows somebody like Bill Gates versus somebody that follows like a Gary Vee two different style personalities, right? If they’re, if they’re following one versus the other, you might find that they if they’re following Bill Gates are probably more like a C style personality, because they like that analytical side that he has. And that’s the kind of messaging that he likes to put out there talks about his favorite books and all those kinds of so there’s different things that you can get clues from? Does that mean it’s accurate? No, that’s one thing. Second piece is that one website called CrystalKnows, and we’ll put a link in TheSlowPitch.com to see it. But Crystal Knows is another one where you can tie it to your LinkedIn, you can enter their LinkedIn profile in there, and it’ll pull back from their profile, what they believe is their personality profile. And then you have to test it, and you have to look at it, you have to figure out is this accurate or not? And it’s pretty good. It’s not, it’s not 100%. But let’s say it’s 80%. Accurate? That’s a better chance than just doing it yourself blindly. Right?

Lane  12:03

Yeah, absolutely. That would mean I would take 80% accuracy over over zero. Because if I can craft that, that initial intro email towards a personality type and be reasonably confident that I’m, I’m hitting it, then I think that’s a huge win. Yeah.

Rob  12:20

I’m gonna stop this conversation right now. If you’re finding value in any one of our episodes, we want you to share it with somebody else. Just tell somebody, Hey, go listen to these guys, this has been good. Second, give us a review. Tell us what you think. And the third thing, hit that subscribe button so that you always get updated every time we release an episode.

Lane  12:36

We’d really appreciate it. Now back to the show. So Rob, one of the other things that I really liked about Vidyard that they talked about was being able to have the statistics on the video, how many times the video has been watched? How far along? The person watched the videos, you know, did they they take…, you know, do they watch 10 seconds of your 30 second video, or did they actually finish the video? All that kind of fun stuff?

Rob  13:02

Yeah, that that is probably the most powerful part of this, I think is the stats. So if you have a video that you send somebody, and they watch it in your video, let’s say it’s 30 seconds long, and they watched five seconds, what does that tell you? Especially if you’ve already had the conversation… you’ve had a conversation with him, you feel like it’s a possible sale, and then they get them out message. They look at it for five seconds, and they don’t ever come back. What does that tell you?

Lane  13:26

I think they probably not all that interested.

Rob  13:28

Yeah, I would think so too. And you have to verify it. But it gives you a start to be an indicator. And so if you found that to be the case, how would you verify that?

Lane  13:37

Well, I don’t want to look like like I’m a creeper. So I’m not going to tell them. Hey, I watched five seconds of my 30 second video, I’m not stalking you. And I think that’s personally I wouldn’t want someone to say, haha, I know you only watched five seconds of my video don’t lie to me. But I guess I would, I might follow that up with either a quick call or an email and just say, Hey, I just want to touch base and see if this is something you’re really interested in. If not, no worries, we’ll still be here. When if you if you have the need, you know, just let me know.

Rob  14:07

Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling out that they’re that you’re stalking but I wouldn’t do it in such a way that you would say, Hey, I saw you only watched it for five seconds, I wouldn’t do that. But what I would do is I might email them and say, Hey, I noticed you didn’t really get a chance to take a look at the video and that’s okay. Sometimes that means that there’s very little to no or zero interest in talking again, if that’s the case, that’s okay. I don’t mind just simply drop me a note and tell me that on the way, you know, reply to me and let me know or saying something like give me a courtesy email back so that I know and I use like throw the word courtesy email in there because it’s like how do you read the words courtesy email, courtesy email back and not do it to me I feel like the only way that you would call out the fact that you know that would be more of like, Hey, I noticed you didn’t get a chance to really watch it. Maybe you run out of time. Maybe you’ve been busy. maybe now’s not a good time for us to even proceed or your there’s zero interest If that’s the case, would you mind just shooting me a note back? So I know there’s zero interest, just send me a courtesy email. So I know that’s how I would use it. And I wouldn’t want to come across as a stalker. I don’t think I’ve ever been called a stalker because of that. But you know, maybe they do and I don’t know.

Lane  15:14

Well, I know you’re tunnel stalker, but you know?

Rob  15:17

Well, I think the other way that I would look at using Vidyard is, and this is kind of probably a no brainer to most, but one of the ways to do that is to just after you’ve already had your initial call, you’ve already had a good conversation, you know, there’s some form of interest there, you don’t know if there’s a lot of pain in there yet, or not a good time to send an email like this with a Vidyard video is, is to say, hey, I really appreciate and you’re looking at the camera and you’re saying, I really appreciate your time, spending a few minutes with me to kind of get an initial conversation, I just want to prepare you for the next call the next call, we’re going to talk about 123 Whatever that is, ABC, I don’t care, the the three top two or three topics you want to talk about. And when we have those conversations about that, I want you to understand it any time you think now is not a good time to for us to continue talking or you feel like we’re not going to be a good fit, I just want you to feel comfortable telling me, it’s not a good fit. And that’s okay with me. Okay, so I look forward to our meeting. And you know, I know we’re set up for whatever, and then we have your script ready. But whatever that is in your next meeting, and I look forward to sit down with you. And that’s it, leave it at that. But what it does is it really says in a way that’s got the tone to it. So I imagine if I send you that email written out, first of all, you get to read it who wants to read right nowadays?

Lane  16:35

You know, I want to read Rob,

Rob  16:38

You’re the only one that wants to read anymore. Everybody I watch the video?

Lane  16:42

Well, this is this is why I was gonna mention this as well as I, you know, to me, you need to include at least a fair amount of information in the email as well, rather than just here watch my video because people like me, and maybe there’s maybe there’s not many of us. But I would much rather take a moment to quickly read that and go yep. Rather than how I kind of watch a video, how long is this? I got better things to do.

Rob  17:06

Yeah, so that’s a good point. So in your email, when you send it to them, that’s exactly right, I would I would put in their hand. I mean, like to have your watch this 30 seconds, whatever number of seconds it is and be exact video, and I’m going to hit on these couple bullet points, 123, whatever it is. And so it might be as simple as it are. In this video, I’m going to hit on what we’re going to talk about how long to expect and what the outcome should be from that conversation. And that’s really what you’re saying in that video is, hey, let’s I know we’re gonna, we’re scheduled for this day, this time probably going to be about 30, 45, 60… whatever the number of minutes is that you’ve decided and agreed upon. That’s already been done before you left that last call right Lane? That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

Lane  17:45

That’s right. That’s right.

Rob  17:46

Right. So now you’re saying in a video one more time, this is the day, this is the time, here’s how long we’re meeting, we’re going to talk about X, Y, and Z, whatever that is, and they should be related to pain messages. So we’re going to talk about some of the frustrations you’ve had with. And we’re going to talk about some of the things that you’ve done to try to fix these things. Those are the pain questions, you’re going to start to throw in there a little bit to get them prepped and primed and ready for that conversation, then honestly, at the end of this meeting, we’re going to decide whether or not we’re going to take another step forward and have another conversation or we’re done. And that’s okay either way. So just want to make sure you’re comfortable in what you’re doing versus writing all that out versus what’s in the email. It’s two things, one that what people want to read, they can see some of that they don’t have to read all of it that you’re going to say the other thing you can do is, is they can watch it, but they can understand the tone that you have. I don’t know how many times you’ve written an email Lane where you’ve said something, and the person interpreted the tone wrong. Have you ever had that?

Lane  18:40

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it’s it’s another one of those pain points of I write an email, and I sit there No, no, I have to rewrite this again, because it may not be interpreted correctly. And how many times do I read this email before I actually send it?

Rob  18:51

Yeah, so like, to me, I agree with you. I think Vidyard cuts a lot of that time out in terms of trying to figure out how you’re going to say it perfect without having to misinterpret it. It’s like, if I said to you on a video, I’m really looking forward to meeting with you. We’re going to talk about these things. And you know, at the end of the thing, don’t worry about it if you’re not interested or if it’s not time read, it’s not time for us to go continue talking, or if you just don’t think we’re good, but that’s okay. But if I sound that way, and I looked that way, and I’m squinting my face like it’s painful, like it’s okay. They see the emotion and they see the tone. They know that now it’s he means it, he means it that’s legit. It’s not just what he’s writing. Right. So yeah, there’s that’s the key. And that’s the that’s the that’s the useful part, I think to Vidyard not the let’s have them try to figure out where my problems are in my estimate. That’s, that’s nice if you want to be like a rhythm salesperson. So that’s how I would use it. And I know that one of the things that I would use it with a better way that I could think of using it even still would be a team welcome. So hey, you’ve been on boarded. We’ve already done the onboarding video, we’ve gotten started. I told you what we need to do what we need to have ready for the next conversation or what you need to get done for me. So I might in the onboarding process, right when I say hey, you need to send Is this can you just send us that whatever, so we can get started all that stuff as part of the onboarding. But once they’re onboarding, what if your team does a little video, these are the people, they’re going to be involved in your project. So here’s so and so. And here’s Joe. And here’s James. And here’s whoever you want to have showing, you can show all those people and say, Hey, welcome, we’re looking forward to working with you that kind of thing. You could do a team welcome. And because of today’s world, being virtual, and because of today’s world being a little bit distant sometimes, and people can do work all around the world, why not? I mean, if I’m in a different state in a different time zone, and I send you a message, and my team’s welcoming you and you’ve got four people saying hi, and we’re looking forward to it, what a difference that can make in terms of building a relationship with that new client. So…

Lane  20:39

I really like that.

Rob  20:40

Yeah, and I think that’s really the way that I would, I would look at video is it’s more about not getting the sale, it’s about building a relationship long term, there is nothing wrong, I would even look at it and say with Vidyard, and I would even say, after two months of working with a client, maybe to do a quick check in video, hey, we’ve been looking at this, we’ve been working together for two months, we think things are going pretty good. But we don’t want to assume anything, we think you might have some things of thoughts on how things could be better as working with us. We’d love your input and and invite them to go fill out a form or fill out a survey of some form that specializes and directly related to their project. And we I could do another show on how to do that kind of conversation and get so much information and we’ll have to do that one day. But there’s a whole bunch of ways to use Vidyard to really work on a relationship building process that is all the way through from the beginning of the sale, before the sale to the sale to after the sale to even after you’ve finished your project. You’re done. What’s wrong with sending a video that says, Hey, I know we completed your project. And we really enjoyed working it. We’d love to work with you again. However, we know we reached the end and it’s time. But you know what’s even better, is when we have clients that work really well with us. We like more of those clients. And if you know somebody who had the same issues that you had, and you think you could introduce us, we would love that. And by the way here is this, whatever that might be for a reward for doing that. Or a little you know what, you could do all kinds of different things. You could give them a referral fee, you can get whatever you want to do or nothing at all, they just be happy that you got a referral, asking for it and getting it whatever you want to do. It’s all the way through the whole process of being sales to being a client to post client all the way through. You can use Vidyard. So I think it’s a good tool. I don’t know about you.

Lane  22:32

Yeah, I’m really interested in incorporating this into my my cycle.

Rob  22:37

Yeah, it’s helpful. So alright, so hope that helped everybody else out there. And hopefully Lane you get stuff out of it. I you know, I got stuff out of it from what you said, Yeah, and we got a lot of stuff out of that webinar. I think that webinar was helpful. Just, you know, I always think, just remember, it’s not about using technology to get your sale. It’s using technology to improve your relationship. And that’s where you’re going to get the sale. So with that, we’d love to get any input, feedback, anything where you’re using video or differently than what we’ve said, we’d love to hear that. So please email us write us, reach out to us. So we know and if you have a question of your own, we’d love to hear about it. So until next time, Lane, we’ll see you  See you, Rob

V/O  23:15

Thank you for listening to The Slow Pitch. Do you have a question about sales? Call or text your question at (608) 708-SLOW, that’s 608-708-7569, or you can email them to Questions@TheSlowPitch.com.  Slow Down and Close More.

Rob  23:57

Welcome back everybody to The Slow Pitch and I am sure Lane wants to say hello.

Lane  24:03

Hello.

Rob  24:06

What? You did a good job you did a good job. Probably Probably not the best way to start that Hello. Alright, let’s try this again. Thanks as always for listening today. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review. We really appreciate it. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at The Slow Pitch. We were mixed today as always by Johnny Polakis. And we were produced by High Gravity Studios. Music credits and other notes are in the show notes section on TheSlowPitch.com And we’ll be back with another episode soon.