Chris Bogue
SUMMARY
What are some applications for video in the sales cycle, and how can sales teams effectively use video?
Instead of sending lengthy product demos that the audience did not request, sales teams can employ brief, compelling videos to drive the sales process. By producing brief introductory films for follow-up, salespeople may utilize video to control their message, appear more assured and at ease, and move the engagement to the next decision maker.
What are a few factors that contribute to individuals not like video?
Self-consciousness about one's appearance is the biggest obstacle to routinely appearing on camera, but the audience is more interested in the speaker's message than their appearance.
How can businesses encourage video adoption among their staff?
Using regular people speaking directly to the camera is more effective in influencing consumers' opinions than advertisements featuring celebrities or special effects, so businesses should make a financial case for video adoption and demonstrate how much money is spent while relatively few videos are produced. They should also encourage sales leaders to produce more videos and assist them in improving their techniques.
Chris Bogue suggests the following for sales leaders who want to use video on LinkedIn.
In order to track results, see how the video is being received, and make follow-up calls and chats easier, Chris Bogue advises sales leaders to create videos externally using tools like Bombbomb or Vidyard.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00]
Ricky Pearl: So today on a Couple of Pointers Podcast, we are lucky enough to have with us Chris Bogue. Welcome to the show.
Chris Bogue: Glad to be here.
Ricky Pearl: Did I pronounce that right Chris Bogue?
Chris Bogue: You did.
Ricky Pearl: You spend so much time with people on LinkedIn reading their names that sometimes you don't necessarily get to speak to them that often. So this is a real treat for me.
Chris Bogue: Yeah, no, I usually embarrass myself terribly when I use people's real names. So struggle is real Ricky
Ricky Pearl: The struggle is real.
Explain it like I'm five, what do you do?
Ricky Pearl: So now for the sake of our audience, explain it like I'm five. What do you do?
Chris Bogue: I teach business people how to get on video
Ricky Pearl: Wow. When people summarize it so simply, I'm like, they've thought about this. They've thought about this hard. You teach business people how to get on video. Why would they wanna do, get on video?
Chris Bogue: Because it's the next best thing to talking to somebody in person.
Ricky Pearl: Alright
Chris Bogue: Whether you're selling something, if you're a salesperson if you're a marketer, if you're a [00:01:00] storyteller, video allows you to use your vocal inflection, your body language all the wonderful nonverbal cues you use to communicate, meeting face to face.
Yeah, you have all of those in video. It gives you all these extra storytelling tools.
Ricky Pearl: So it's most data rich and feature rich, asynchronous communication method.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. It is. It is more powerful than we've known. We don't know what to do with it. We have so much power in this little device in our pocket. The business, like the B2B world, has not even begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with video. And neither have I, and I'm way ahead of the rest of 'em out there in the B2B world, and I have not even begun to explore the possibilities of video and what it can do for sales and marketing.
Ricky Pearl: I saw it come up recently in a report from a a sales consultancy called Scales, where they had the various channels of outbounds and the effectiveness of the various channels, and they did this research across a whole lot of companies. They had phone calls, LinkedIn, emails, and for the first time they had video as its own [00:02:00] channel as opposed to a tool that you would use via email or on LinkedIn.
They had its own channel being video, and it's probably the fastest growing of the channels?
Chris Bogue: Yes. And I exist because video is a big deal, but business schools don't know how to teach it. They don't teach you how to make little 30-second videos to drive pipeline for sales. They certainly don't teach you how to go on TikTok and make entertaining business content that'll reflect positively on your brand and drive you inbound leads.
This is a new frontier and it's very exciting to me.
How do you help business professionals overcome some of these barriers?
Ricky Pearl: It gets me sweating just you talking about getting on TikTok, like I'm a dinosaur when it comes to sales, right? Like I'm in the generation. I didn't grow up with TikTok. Having to make a 30-second video would be like a full day's worth of work for me. How do you help business professionals overcome some of these barriers?
Chris Bogue: How do I help them overcome some of the barriers? Okay. One, everything's less scary when you have a process.[00:03:00]
Ricky Pearl: Yeah.
Chris Bogue: Part of the reason why sales teams aren't adopting video is they want someone to tell them the correct way to do that. And we haven't put the level of scholarship into that we have for cold calling and cold emailing, great sales minds have spent generations figuring out how to do an effective sales presentation. The 30-second video thing, they have not really cracked the code for that yet, once you have a process, once you know how to get up on camera and you're used to saying it, and okay, this is what I tend to say in cold outreach, this is what I tend to say to a warm follow up.
This is how I ask for a referral. Once you get a couple of those little 30-second scripts internalized to the point where you can improvise around them, it's so much easier. Really the hardest part is getting started cuz people feel self-conscious.
Ricky Pearl: That's so interesting.
How you can use video, where you can use video within a sales cycle, do you wanna just repeat some of those?
Ricky Pearl: There's so much there I wanna unpack you mentioned a few of the different use cases straight off the bat of how you can use video, where you can use video within a sales cycle. Do you wanna just repeat some of those?
Chris Bogue: Yeah. And I also want you to remember that you you [00:04:00] don't look a day over 21 Ricky, but I know you're a little bit more of an old schooler, right? And you're not really who I'm thinking about when I'm building these processes. I've actually got my eye on Gen Z. This new workforce.
The people that are graduating college right now, they grew up on YouTube. They have a different experience with their screens and being on camera than I do. They're more comfortable at it than I am, if you ask a 22 year old person, go make a 30-second video, they know how to hold the phone.
They know where to put the lights. They already have these. What sales teams don't have is a way to adapt it to their existing processes. What sales teams do is they, get a program like Bomb or Loom or Vidyard and they send out a bunch of five minute product demos, in a cold email template and nobody watches it cause it's five minutes long.
It's not very engaging for the audience. The audience didn't ask for it,
Ricky Pearl: I think the platform makes the difference, whereas it's the content that makes the difference.
Chris Bogue: Right, and this is where I disagree with a lot of the solutions out there for video, including [00:05:00] Bombbomb and Vidyard and some of these companies that I love and I love the people who work there. But again, they're teaching people to go send a product demo where the screen is all your product solution and you're in this tiny little bubble in the corner of the screen, and what I actually coach people to do is just get out there for 30 seconds.
It's you're talking straight to the camera and you're just trying to get another meeting on the books basically. Wherever the relationship is, you're just trying to bring it to the next step. So maybe you're ready to ask for a meeting. I find it's easier to make my case in a 30-second video than it is when I call someone out of the blue and they say, okay, you got 30 seconds.
Go. I can be more confident, I can be more doing everything at my own pace on video
Ricky Pearl: And our degrees with so much of that and I think video's incredibly useful. You can control a message. You're in your own environments. You're a lot calmer. You can be yourself. You don't have this metaphorical gun to your head, like when somebody picks up the phone on a cold call and it's live or die with every word that you say.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. Or you know what? I'll even say the opposite [00:06:00] is true, right? So let's say you have a great cold call. You have one of those cold calls where you ask for 30 seconds. It's 40 minutes later you and the prospect are getting along famously. I was always taught in sales, they go, it does not matter if you have the greatest presentation on Earth because the moment you hang up your phone, your prospect now has to go do the "sell-it". They gotta go talk to all the other decision makers and they say, Hey, this guy called me up and he is got the greatest solution in the world. Here's what we're gonna do. And they go, and their boss shoots them down. So what I do with the video is if I'm having a great conversation or know, I have a meeting and now we've gotta bring it to the next decision maker, I go, Hey, you know what, Ricky, who else would be involved in this decision?
When are you talking to that person next, get some information. I go why don't I make them a short intro video? You know, I can just summarize some of the things we talked about here and would you mind sending that on for me? We have our conversation, but now when I send that video out, I go, Hey Ricky, it was so great meeting you.
As a reminder, I know you're working on this. I know you just implemented Bomb. And what I do is [00:07:00] I help reps get to this point. So I'm really excited you're gonna be talking with Brian on Friday. Let me know if you're open to meet and I'll be reaching out, next Monday or whatever.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. That's brilliant. That's so clever. So I've had this stance for a while now where I've been very skeptical about video in cold outreach for various reasons, primarily being the delivery issues, but beyond delivery issues. I think it's brilliant, but I've had absolutely no qualms and I thought it's actually been a superpower.
In the middle funnel and the bottom end of the funnel with things like you just spoke about.
Chris Bogue: Yes, and so good for show rates. I always say if you have a sales team and you have a video solution, and you have SDRs who depend on people showing up to meetings to get compensated. You do so much work getting those meetings on the calendar, right? The cold calling, the cold emailing. If that meeting is coming up and that's your livelihood, send him a video.
Just send him a 30-second video. Hey Ricky, I'm so looking forward to speaking with you. On Monday [00:08:00] afternoon, we're gonna be talking about X and Y and Z. So here's a question I want you to keep in mind. I'll see you at 3PM.
Ricky Pearl: It's great that because it's the same message that you'd send over email, but now because you're putting a human face to it, they can pick up without emotion. They can also start relating to you as a human as opposed to a product or just a thing trying to sell to them. It creates a little bit of empathy.
They can see that you're excited to meet them and now they don't wanna disappoint you, even if that's subconsciously. I think that's a brilliant use case. There's so many of these brilliant use cases. What are some of the other, so helping multi thread you've brought up to increase your show rates.
Do you send it over LinkedIn? Do you send it over email? Do you send it on a CD and post it to them? Like how are you actually using it in prospect?
Ricky Pearl: Let's, could we talk a little bit about how you use it in prospecting and what you've quite practical, right? Do you send it over LinkedIn? Do you send it over email? Do you send it on a CD and post it to them? Like how are you actually using it in prospect?
Chris Bogue: Typically I use it in LinkedIn. I prefer LinkedIn just because I'm sure I'm not gonna go to a spam filter,
Ricky Pearl: Yeah, you overcome that delivery issue.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. I have a classification system I recommend my [00:09:00] clients use and I classify my leads as either green, yellow, or red. So if it's, That means there's a greater than 50 50 chance that this person's gonna close.
Or if I'm an SDR, it's greater than 50% chance I'm gonna get a meeting out of them. If they're green, the question is like, why are they not closed yet? For I run my own business. So if they're green, that means they've already expressed that they're okay. Like with the idea of paying me for my services.
So if they're green, it's greater than a coin flip chance. Gotta get 'em in the pipeline, right? Gotta get them closed. Yellow is 50-50. Yellow is I don't know. They fit my icp, they have the right job title, they have decision making power. I've not gathered any clues as to which way they're gonna go.
Literal coin flip, right? Red are people who have turned me down. They've they've said no, they've rejected me somehow. So I tell, when I'm coaching people, I'm like, I don't send videos to red leads. I just don't, and I always tell my clients, I'm like, I never ever want you to put the effort into creating a video that does not get watched.
But if you've got these [00:10:00] accounts and they're important, and especially if you're in an SDR role or an AE role, and you really feel you've got that one shot for the first impression, yeah. You put your VIPs down on a list and you do, I say start with five at a time, the average sales rep should be able to create and send five video.
In about an hour. Hour or two, I say 5 to 10 videos in an hour or two. It shouldn't take you longer than that. And when you've got the list in front of you and you know their name, you know their company, you know their job title, you don't really have to say much because you're not selling your solution.
You're selling the conversation, and it's just, Hey, Ricky, I see you out there. I know you're working on this. I always say, get 'em on their goals. Their values are an elephant in the room problem. So I see you're doing this. I know you're striving towards this. I see your sales reps are saying this, and I wanna have a conversation with you because that's my specialty.
I help sales teams get these videos out faster and quicker and more effectively. So if you're interested in having that conversation, respond to this message with anything. That's my CTA. I go very soft CTA, especially if it's [00:11:00] cold outreach. I go respond to this message with anything. If you wanna make it easy, if you send me a thumbs up emoji, I'll send you some available times so you can choose one that's good for you.
And if it's not something you're interested in, please just let me know too. I don't take it personally, I'll just mark that you're not interested for now. But no matter what, thanks for watching the video and I hope to talk to you soon. 45 seconds maximum.
Ricky Pearl: Brilliant. Now I want to get onto some hairy topics around around video, and I'd love your opinion on it.
Chris Bogue: Let's do it.
Some biases and reluctance to get on video
Ricky Pearl: Let's talk about some of the reasons why people don't like video, right? As centers, and these are theories that I have, I'm a very fortunate individual where I fall into that middle aged, white male category, who comes from a place that has opportunity live in Australia. Do you feel like people who maybe don't meet the brief, have accents, maybe have some slight speech impediments, maybe don't look what society might call aesthetically pleasing, those sorts of things, do you think that there's some biases there and reluctance for them [00:12:00] to get on video?
Chris Bogue: I, I would say that self consciousness about one's appearance is the largest barrier to getting on video regularly. For everybody, including me. When you are putting your appearance out there for public consumption, it is extremely natural to worry about how you look. But that's not what your audience is thinking about.
Do you go out there and look at the top hundred, creators on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok. They're all ages, all races, all ethnicities, all body types. The thing your audience most cares about is if you are saying something that is relevant to them
Ricky Pearl: That's powerful.
Chris Bogue: Yeah.
How do you find companies can help their team members?
Ricky Pearl: And I believe it to be true. I've just, I can't say that it's factual because I'm also not in the category of people that might be discriminated against. Now, how do you find companies can help their comp their team members? Because as a sales leader, I could be like, oh, great, I want my team on video, but now I've gotta convince 10 other people to get on video.
Chris Bogue: So most of [00:13:00] the teams I'm talking to have already spent substantial money adopting one of these video solutions, right? So if you had to actually make a financial case, you show them how much money they're spending and show them how few videos are actually getting made. They really should be putting more thought into this.
And I would say to any sales leader out there, you would never accept an SDR. Who makes five phone calls and says you know what? I tried five calls. It didn't work. I guess the phone doesn't work. You would tell them to go try more, or you would help them make better cold calls, but some of these sales leaders make five videos and get no results, and they give up. Because they just don't know how to do it. As far as the data goes, I was actually very inspired to go down this road because of a political study I saw. I don't talk about politics. I don't, my business has nothing to do with politics.
I don't talk about politics on LinkedIn, but I was obsessed with this study because they were studying the 2020 election in the United States and they were very interesting election. They were trying to figure out what changes a person's mind. So they were [00:14:00] studying swing voters, people who voted for one party in 2016 and then voted for the opposite party in 20,
in 2020. So very small percentage of the electorate, but very important to the outcome. And they found it did not matter if that person was voting for Joe Biden or if they were voting for Donald Trump. The ads that were full of celebrities, the ads that had too many special effects that looked like something out of a Hollywood movie voters overwhelmingly did not trust the information in those ads.
And they found that the most effective ads for changing somebody's mind was a person talking straight to the camera, a regular person and again, did not matter the party.
Ricky Pearl: It makes sense.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. And you, again, you, I say this generation is different, but it's not even just this generation. People don't trust the media.
People don't trust politicians. People don't trust institutions.
Ricky Pearl: Or trust its salespeople.
Chris Bogue: No, but they trust the people they interact with every day.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah.
Chris Bogue: That's on social media I always say we're competing for one screen here. I have all these business people who tell me you know what? My, the people I'm selling to, they're not video people.
They're not, they don't like entertainment. They sell [00:15:00] serious financial products. And I'm like, gang, this is, we are all on one device here. Your sale, your SDRs are competing with Netflix and Disney Plus and Hulu, and also with your prospects, friends and family, their kids are FaceTiming them while your team is emailing them.
Know, so
Ricky Pearl: You can be, you can be a serious lawyer, be in a kind of industry that doesn't typically, use video as part of their daily sales or marketing motions. But I can tell you that lawyers still watching TikTok when he is on the toilet.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. Yeah. And people forget cuz I do a lot of funny content on LinkedIn and I do a lot of really high production video on there. And sometimes people don't realize that when I discovered I was good on video, I was not doing comedy. I was on a three year comedy dry spell. And I was selling education technology to universities, I had a quoted a hit.
I wasn't going out there and making jokes on video. I had to sell the PhDs, so I was turning on the video and I was talking about critical thinking. I was talking about their pedagogy. I, I was talking about trends [00:16:00] that I knew other professors in their discipline were talking about.
And it's I don't have a PhD. I was nobody. But all of a sudden I showed up on their phone talking about the things they cared about, and they would take a meeting with me and they'd be like, how long have you been teaching for? And I'm like, oh, I'm not a college professor. But they didn't know.
They didn't know.
Ricky Pearl: I do know about pedagogy.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. Again, and and that's the sales thing. You're a sales guy, so you know, you want the prospect to do most of the talking, I never said, oh, I'm gonna teach you this new pedagogy. I said, why don't you teach me about critical thinking? What you know, is it important?
What role does critical thinking play in your class? And I'd go, oh yeah, critical thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'd go, okay can you tell me about the assignments that practice your students critical thinking? Silence. They just sit there cause they don't have a good answer, and then you play that.
You come in there and go, yeah, of course you've got 500 students. Of course you're not practicing critical thinking. Here's how we do critical thinking with 500 students.
Ricky Pearl: So what you're covering now is interesting to me and it's an important distinction that video is not a sales methodology, like the methodology that you've just described. You were being [00:17:00] provocative, you were doing provocative selling, and maybe leading towards a consultative sell. And video doesn't change that. Video is just a means of communication where you have a great likelihood of influencing the person you're communicating with or them understanding or appreciating your message and it doesn't change the fact that you need to be a great seller, that you need to know to use video to get into multi-threading.
What I think you bringing is just this education and this awareness around how you can use video effectively and where it may even be more effective than text, email, or a phone call, and just giving people some structure to that.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. And this, you know it, I think sales leaders get afraid cuz they think they have to throw out everything they're doing. And I really just use it as like an accelerant. And you think about like, when I was doing that sale, I mean we constantly were changing through new marketing people.
It was new marketing templates all the time. We were in the spam folder. Stuff was sloppy. The personalization was always breaking. And these are people who had been telling my company no for [00:18:00] several years. I had to be pitching people cuz your counts didn't change that much. These were people who had very recently.
Said, no thanks, and I had to hit my quota anyway and I found being able to humanize even sometimes I would be horrified by some of these marketing emails that would go out and, I can't unsend them because my marketing team did that, and that's my name and my picture in the signature.
So I would just bury it with my own marketing email. I would write to that professor directly, or that department head directly or whatever, whoever I was trying to sell to at the time.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah. You ma you're making me feel nauseous with that old disconnect between marketing and selling, where marketing was controlling this message that the sellers had to deliver and that, and they didn't agree on the message. You're embarrassed of what marketing sent sending out, and marketing thinks sellers don't understand the product or its value or its audience. I,
Chris Bogue: And so then I could send, then I could make a video though, and I would do that. And again I'm a funny guy, so I like playing with the really human moments in there, but I would just send a video being like, Hey, Dr. Pearl.[00:19:00] I'm the guy that sent you a bunch of emails last quarter.
I might have gone a little overboard. And for that I apologize, but here's why I did that. Here's why I'm interested in speaking with you specifically. I've been working with Dr. Davis. We've been doing blah, blah, blah, and you just use it to cut through the awkwardness. And if it would go to a spam filter, I would call them.
Cuz remember I'm an old sales guy too. I am not afraid to pick up the phone. I just don't wanna do it inefficiently, but I always say if you send an email and it's got a video in it and they don't watch the video, your job is to get them to watch it. So I would call, maybe I would need to leave a voicemail, maybe I'd get 'em, but I'd be like, Hey Dr. Pearl, I just sent an email over it, had the subject line. I did record a video for you cuz I had something I wanted to talk to you about and I wanted to make sure it didn't get sent to your spam filter. So keep an eye out for that. Let me know if you have any thoughts and I'll be reaching out next week.
Ricky Pearl: Creates intrigue. I wanna know what was in that bloody video.
Chris Bogue: I experimented with a bunch of things. It's funny too because I, I was doing my stuff. But I was [00:20:00] also, I try to get inception, like on the, on when I'm doing sales. So we were, I was selling into a new campus. Where our competitors had a very strong advantage.
They had a university-wide agreement where students could adopt their solution for free, whereas students would need to spend $25 to adopt the solution I was
Ricky Pearl: So very strong incumbents.
Chris Bogue: So I went, I actually looked through that company and I found their I found their video content. I was looking up their company and yeah, the sales rep who was managing that territory was total Chad, right?
Total frat guy, perfect jawline, perfectly touched, short, shirt, ironed jeans. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna show up, not looking like this guy. And I put on a sweater. My background was a little messier. I showed up on camera looking more like a college.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah.
Chris Bogue: And I experimented too. I had a very talented account manager who I was working with, and I shot some videos with her too because I feel like customer successes are often the unsung heroes in [00:21:00] B2B.
They're people with high emotional intelligence. They work themselves to the bone keeping their customers happy and getting renewals
Ricky Pearl: All of the value in SaaS is in the expand. So customer success is, in my mind, one of the fastest growing and most relevant areas within sales.
Chris Bogue: Yes. And I had, she was very just studious. She was very just on the ball. She had a very good on camera personality. And it was funny because I, we would send these sequences out and there's a type of professor. That comes to the United States, but they originally from, China or they were, from a different country and they come to the United States and the first thing they do is they change their name because people mispronounce their name.
Yeah. They westernize it. These were the people that would never ever open my emails. But my account manager. She spoke Mandarin, and she just looked different from me. She had a different look to her and so I got 30 seconds of video of her. She wasn't doing the personalized ones, but it was her just being like, Hey, my name's Grace.
I work with all the professors here at the University of Southern California personally. And I wanted to introduce myself to you. [00:22:00] So I made a template with her introducing herself and the work she does with our professors, and I sent it out and all of a sudden those professors that would never set demos with me started setting demos.
Why? Because the speaker resonated with them
Ricky Pearl: listen, I'm involved in a climate charity, and one of the core tenets of what we do and why we exist is that the message is now very clear. There's universal agreements on the issues, but people still aren't understanding the message and or adopting it. And the biggest problem is the messenger, not the message.
So very often it is who they are hearing the message from makes the difference, and I completely appreciate how you use that to your advantage from people within your team.
How do they get their team started? How do they create this universal language?
Ricky Pearl: So if we get a bit practical now. Somebody's listening to this. They are a sales leader. They've got a small team of five, team of 10. How do they get their team started? How do they create this universal language? How do they create a process where everyone understands this is what's expected from [00:23:00] them, but also this is how they are now enabled to use video effectively?
Chris Bogue: Yeah I would treat it as a team sport. What I don't recommend is everybody goes off and does their own thing and hopes for the best, oftentimes these teams that adopt these video solutions, There are a handful of reps who adopt it and do well with it. And then there's a handful of them that don't, so I recommend companies, and if a company pays for my full package, you wanna build a certification process, right?
Much like. AEs can't run demos until they've been demo certified. I say, don't be having your SDRs send videos out until they can pass your certification process and prove that they can speak in the company voice and they can keep it shorter than a minute.
Ricky Pearl: Ooh, I love that.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. But I say, treat it like a team sport and first of all, take a look at like, when are you not?
So Friday afternoon, perfect example. Maybe you're not as, maybe you're not hitting his, the phones as hard. That's a perfect time.
Ricky Pearl: Sorry, carry on. I was gonna say Friday afternoon's the perfect time to [00:24:00] call cause everyone else is busy making videos.
Chris Bogue: Yeah no, they're never making videos. They don't do that. Again, if your team doesn't typically do the output then anyway, then you gotta set a goal.
I say you put an hour or two on the calendar and you say, okay, we're gon the first hour, we're gonna make your list of 10 and then we're just gonna shoot ' em. And I always say, I've worked with a lot of people who are nervous on camera. I always say it's better to have the footage than to not have the footage.
If you record, 10 takes back to back. Of you being like, Hey, Ricky, Hey Mary, You got a 10 minute file and you got all these pitches on there. You could decide not to send it if you don't want to,
Ricky Pearl: We get practice making it.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. And again, five in an hour, 10 in an hour.
You have to have a goal. You have to have a list and tell yourself, okay, when I get through these people, I'm done and I'm gonna send it out. Cuz you could always improve from.
Do companies decide this is where we're gonna use video and how are we gonna use video?
Ricky Pearl: Do companies usually start with saying, we want to use video at this stage within the sales cycle, for example, we are gonna use it before the demo, as a little bit of, giving over some information so that we can keep our demos shorter so that they've [00:25:00] seen the actual product and we can just discuss more of their practical use case?
Is there, do companies decide this is where we're gonna use video and how are we gonna use video? Or is it more they often just say, Hey, we wanna start doing video, and then look at bringing it in everywhere?
Chris Bogue: Yeah, they're always just winging it. They're always like, oh, we're just gonna start. We're just figuring it out. We're gonna, do we still gotta do a lot on the phones and everything too. And again, it drives me nuts because I've done sales for long enough. Or it's okay, you would know that's a bad idea if you were doing cold calling.
If your boss was like, how many calls are you gonna make a week? And you're like, eh, we don't really understand phones, so who knows? We're just mess around and hope for the best. That's not a formula for success,
What does your course cover?
Ricky Pearl: Can I ask you now, your course what does it cover? Does it cover how to implement video for a company, or is it more for an individual contributor on how to make use videos effectively?
Chris Bogue: It's for both. So I've done both sides of the coin. I've done video as a founder, owner of his own company, and I've also done video as a sales rep. So I set expectations throughout the [00:26:00] course. The course is about two and a half hours. It's over six modules. It's 40 something lessons, it moves fast, but I break it down into sections.
So there's on camera performance. Is a whole module, right? Where do you put the lights? How far away should you be sitting, where should you look as you speak? How do you get that conversational tone? That's a module. The sales strategy is a whole another module okay. It's a game more of who should get a video in the first place, and there's a number of ways to do that.
A downloadable lists and everything for how you can actually build your list and figure out your plan of attack. When there's the script writing, I advise people to write in bullet points because they allow you to stay on message while also allowing you to improvise. So there's a whole module, what do you say, verse in cold outreach versus a referral versus, a renewal versus a quote ver, there's all these different stages in the pipeline.
You should get your little template for each of those. And then there's the editing and the outbound. So all my videos have captions, the captions. I do substantially better in all my video output because I have captions on there. Most [00:27:00] people don't caption their stuff, so I show you, Hey here's how I do it, here's how I edit it in a really efficient way.
Here's how I manage my data so I don't run outta data. And then it ends with, how do you send them out on LinkedIn versus how you send them out on Gmail, and by the end of the course, even if you have no sales experience whatsoever, you will have a process. You will have 25 videos shot, filmed, edited, captioned, and delivered to your prospects.
Ricky Pearl: I mean that just seems like. Brilliant. But of course it's brilliant because you've identified this problem and you've put a whole lot of concentrated thoughts towards how do I solve this problem for companies. How do I help them implement this? How do I help people become effective with videos? And that's incredible. So it takes it from zero to zero to hero.
What does a course like this cost?
Ricky Pearl: If you don't mind me asking, I'm sure it's not confidential. What does a course like this cost?
Chris Bogue: 250 US dollars.
Ricky Pearl: It's my own podcast. I dunno if I'm allowed to swear, fuck off. So $250 you can, I pay, geez, okay. I'll pay more than that for I'll waste more than that on a very often trying to implement different marketing [00:28:00] strategies and so two 50 per person and they get to learn all of this and essentially you just upgrade your teams. Efficiencies and the outcomes that you're gonna get from your sales team, essentially.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. Yeah. So you've got everything you need to build that process. You've watched me, I do it in real time with you. I have this very show, don't tell kind of style. And it's funny, I even put sketch comedy in there because I'm a sketch comedian and I know hard it is to get someone to complete a course.
So every module ends with a comedy sketch that pulls you into the next lesson. I actually use that to pull the student into each lesson you get done with the on camera. We go, okay, now we're doing the sales part, and here's why you need that. And
Ricky Pearl: And it's great professional development for the team makes that probably just in its value and increasing retention for your team members them feeling oh, wow, I've actually learned a new skill here that will help me.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's not anybody can do it. If you start talking to your camera, It was like a filmmaker friend told me this when I started out, but I started making videos. I sent it to a lot of people I know who do [00:29:00] professional content and filmmakers, and he is like Chris. It's this trick where if you wanna make someone look smart on camera, have their face nice and big on the screen, and if you wanna make them look stupid, just have them sit really far away from the camera and look small.
Ricky Pearl: Wow. Okay so I'm not doing a great job here. I'm too far from the camera. I better get this course. Even when you're talking about like, how do you film it and add captions, I'm thinking like, I know how I do it, but I just wanna know what the best way is. How to send it then on LinkedIn versus how to sending it on in an email.
It's oh, I know how I would do it, but I just wanna know what the best way is. Am I like wasting a hell of a lot of time yet? Cause I've spent a lot of my time making videos. Every proposal that I send out has an embedded video for, the too long, didn't read, has a massive fuck off proposal.
But he has a video of me explaining. And so like I use video and I've always used video further in the funnel. I haven't used it much higher up in the funnel, but or like very type of funnel. But I just wanna know if I'm doing it right. To me, it's worth it just for that sake. I, if I'm spending 10 hours a month doing something, but $250, you're just gonna show me the way I'm sold.
Chris Bogue: [00:30:00] Thank you. Yeah, you can pick it up at chrisbogue.io. And this is again I'm all just about solving the problem and I see there's a whole world emerging, of people who are just selling, looks different than it used to, and I always say it's like, yeah, and I, on in some ways, sometimes it feels like what I'm doing is quite new, but also sometimes it feels like we're just going back to a bygone time when you could walk up to someone and shake their hand and introduce yourself.
I'm just really doing a little bit more sophisticated version of what they did before companies had security that would stop, stop you from walking into the building. I always say it's like LinkedIn is a playground for me. I've got all these leaders of industry, I've got CEOs, I've got heads of sales enablement, and, I can control the way I'm introduced.
I have so much control over my first and last impression. And again, to me, this is such a game changer. And I don't even think, I think it's gonna be a little while before B2B really catches on to what's possible here, and that's why I'm always just trying [00:31:00] to show them,
Ricky Pearl: I think it's speeding up quickly, and you're on the right end. You're on the right end of this change. A quick little tidbit. Let's just do two quick things, if you don't mind. One for our customers maybe they can get a little bit of gold without having to download the course.
Do you ever send native video? Like use YouTube, I mean use LinkedIn to record your video directly on LinkedIn, or you're always recording externally and transferring it on?
Ricky Pearl: Do you ever send native video? Like use YouTube, I mean use LinkedIn to record your video directly on LinkedIn, or you're always recording externally and transferring it on?
Chris Bogue: Yeah, I always record it externally. If you're a sales leader, I would recommend using a program like Bombbomb or Vidyard cuz then you can track. It's a lot easier when you can track your results, when you can see if they're watching the full thing. If I send a video and someone watches it two or three times, I know I'm up here.
I know I can make that cold call cuz they're thinking about me. If that video gets opened 10 plus times, I can assume. They probably just shared it in a Slack channel or in, an email with the rest of their team. So I can say, okay, it looks like the team is discussing this, and you can get a lot of insight as to, and again if you see it [00:32:00] 0%. Maybe you've got to do some extra work. Maybe you've gotta pick up the phone, maybe you gotta go reach out and make sure that person picks up the phone. But again, now it's not, Hey sorry to bother you. You weren't expecting this call. Can I have 17 seconds? It's, Hey Ricky, I dunno if you got a chance to see, I sent you a video yesterday and I wanna see what you thought of that.
Ricky Pearl: Still falls into that classic outbound strategy of using all of your channels to point to the other channel. Like when you phone them, you can reference the email or when you send them an email you can say, Hey, try to call. And it creates a sense of familiarity even though the first touch wasn't actually a touch. It great that you can do that as well with video.
Do marketers take your course or is this purely for sales people?
Ricky Pearl: Tell me quickly, do marketers take your course or is this purely for sales people?
Chris Bogue: This one's purely for sales people, so I am releasing a marketing course. Next year it's gonna be a companion piece to this cuz good content marketing does make sales easier. So I am gonna be releasing a companion course called Scene Partner. So that is gonna be a course where I teach improv. I have a very improvisational style to content creation because I was a [00:33:00] comedian in Chicago Second City for a long time.
And yeah, that's gonna be, actually, that's gonna be a fun course because you can take it and you're gonna be able to film, 30 days worth of video content. But there's gonna be suggestions throughout it. It's gonna be like an improv exercise thing where, you know, five options appear on the screen and you can choose one, and that's your idea generator.
So I'm actually creating it so you can take the course multiple times and create multiple months worth of different content. So that is the next project that's gonna be, working hand in hand with the sales course. Cuz a lot of people are going their own way. They're building their operating system, they're building their yacht for their yacht, whatever it is. Whatever their, their sass company or whatever.
Does your course go into that social selling?
Ricky Pearl: Does your course go into that social selling? Because a lot of, we are seeing some of that where sellers are starting to create content for LinkedIn around their product. So is that the second course that you're talking about?
Chris Bogue: Yeah, and I touch a bit on social selling in this one too, so I don't really go into the content creation. But I do [00:34:00] recommend using. Content to get in front of your decision makers. So I say I, I practice something that I call consent based selling. And what that means is if I wanna sell to a head of sales first I look at what their content team is doing.
Because content exists to be interacted with. So if I wanna start selling to a company first, I figure out who's posting content, who's doing social, who's doing LinkedIn, who's putting stuff out there. I start leaving content comments. I start getting into the conversation that's already happening. Then I connect with those people, I say, Hey, I appreciate our interaction in the comments.
Hope we can. Once I'm in there, then yeah, I can start going after sales leadership and now it's not, Hey, here's my pitch slap. It's, Hey Ricky, I've been following your marketing team. I really respect the way you're all striving towards X and Y and Z. Hope we can connect. At that point I'm looking for the buying signals I'm looking for, if, we're having good interactions there, but now when I send that video, it's not, Hey, I'm some schmuck, it's, Hey, I've been following. I've been watching the content you're putting out there. I've been watching what your [00:35:00] sales team has been saying out there, and here's why I think it would be a good idea for you and I to meet.
But again, it's yeah you don't have to be creating content to do that. You have to keep an eye on what does this business want people to think? How do they want to be perceived? Cause that's all marketing is, they're paying to be perceived a certain way. So if you go in there and perceive them the way they wanna be perceived, that's a good first impression. I think that's always a solid first touch point, however you wanna that.
Ricky Pearl: That's really smart and I'd be excited to see your second course when you do get into some of that content creation, cuz content is a challenge for me, as it is for so many people who are selling online. Obviously the services Pointer sells is quite unique in that every single one of our reps sells a different product for a different company and different prospects. Some of our customers are on LinkedIn or their customers are on LinkedIn, some aren't. But I'd love to upskill the team on a technique like this so that no matter what they're trying to sell, they understand how to use video, how to engage with video, where they can use video, [00:36:00] and how they can increase their likelihood of positive outcomes.
Cause at the end of the day, that's all we trying to do. I see sales reps every day. 70% of them are failing, but I can promise you only 10% of them are failing because they aren't putting in the effort. All the rest of them are trying their bloody hardest to succeed and just their tool, their knife isn't sharp enough to cut through.
Chris Bogue: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl: Learning how to do video is definitely one way to hone that edge and let them get to where they want to go.
Chris Bogue: Yeah. And so many of the techniques are rather simple. I, I did this because unlike most sellers, I've done some TV work, I did a bit little bit of work on national TV, and I also did some web series and I've just had a lot of experience in front of the camera.
And a lot of what the course is about is I see a lot of sales trainers, they teach you to be big and presentational. It's almost like they're in front of the live room with 500 people and they're trying to project. To the cheap seats, so everyone can hear them. And I'm like, gang, this microphone is really good.
If you just speak to them like they're sitting across the [00:37:00] table from you drinking coffee,
Ricky Pearl: Yeah,
Chris Bogue: Like they, they are, they literally are, they're at home in their pajama pants right now.
Ricky Pearl: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And you can do all of those things and you just need some, an expert to teach you how, if I'm standing here and I'm talking loud how it sounds, and if I get up really close and talk to you like this, it creates a completely different experience for you. Whereas I could be saying the same thing, but I've just changed some slight inflections, some different techniques, and all of a sudden I'm in impacting you different emotionally in different ways
Chris Bogue: Yeah, yeah. And again, and people overthink it. They overthink it.
Ricky Pearl: I've got so much to learn from you. This is something that you're an expert on and I am not, and that's what I like.
I like finding people that are significantly better than me at something and learning that something from them. And if I could be half as good as you on video, I would be better off as a seller. My team would be better off. So it's been a real pleasure. Learning from you for this hour at least to learn where some of my gaps are and you've stirred up a lot of thoughts around how we can use video better and [00:38:00] formalize it as part of our process to say, this is something we can do to ensure a higher show rate as an SDR. And this is something we can do after a discovery call to try multi thread before a demo. And this is something we could do after a demo to consolidate the value proposition, to enable them for internal selling as they're gonna go through their buying committee, et cetera. And I love that thought. I genuinely love it and it's something that's I need to implement. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this would benefit from too.
Last tip for SDRs
Chris Bogue: Thank you. I wanna leave your audience with one last tip, one last pointer, especially if you're an SDR.
Use your calendar. Again, there's people overthink this. If you're worried about your show rates, if you have to get next week's meetings on there. The easiest way to do videos is you just pull up your calendar and say, literally, who needs to show up next week?
And you just do it one by one. You can make 'em 15 seconds long. Hey Danny, I know we're meeting on Tuesday. I'm gonna see you at three P. Whatever it is. Again, I didn't have to go through and think of a bunch of things I pulled up next week's calendar, you spend five minutes [00:39:00] just firing 'em off real quick again, SDRs, 2, 3, 4 extra meetings, converting each week that's a huge deal. And you could do it in five minutes. You just gotta get a little bit more focused on who you're sending them to, but it does not have to be a crazy complicated thing. It's probably a lot simpler than you realize.
Ricky Pearl: That's a hot tip, something people could implement today to be better off. Chris I've thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you for coming on and hopefully I'll get to chat you again soon, certainly about your next course when that comes out.
If people wanna get hold of you, where do they find you?
Ricky Pearl: If people wanna get hold of you, where do they find you?
Chris Bogue: You can go to chrisbogue.io, that's the best place to buy my course. You can also find me on LinkedIn. So if you just look up Chris Bogue I'm content creator. I put content about video and sales all the time. A lot of it is funny. So you can go check me out and ring my bell. You can also find me on TikTok @chrissellshissoul and on Twitter @chrissellssoul.
Ricky Pearl: So we've only got YouTube shorts missing.
Chris Bogue: I am on YouTube. Yeah, I'm on YouTube. I'm on like everywhere. You can find me on [00:40:00] YouTube. I do YouTube shorts. I do longer YouTube videos.
Ricky Pearl: chrisbogues.io, that's where we wanna go. And LinkedIn, TikTok, wherever else they can find you. And, Fantastic. Hopefully people get hold of you and I've learned a lot Chris, been fantastic having you on and we'll chat again soon.
Chris Bogue: Thanks a lot, Ricky. Great. Great being here.
Ricky Pearl: Cheers mate.
Chris Bogue: Thanks.
