Documentary Sales Videos: Podcast Transcript

Sam

Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me.

Sam

Yes, Ryan. I was influenced heavily by you at the James Schramko conference in Sydney, Australia when I saw your presentation on documentary-based video style. I’ve been wondering for a while how I could get my clients who were all very successful authors, speakers and coaches who’ve been quite successful in spite of their aversion to the traditional internet marketing sales methods that a lot of people embarked on who might not have great products but are great salespeople.

I’ve been searching for a way to do sales videos, because I knew that sales videos were the best way to convert on the website. I much prefer them to the long copy sales pages.

The problem was I couldn’t get any of my clients to stand up in front of the camera and pitch their product. They just didn’t like to do that. When I saw your presentation and spoke to you afterwards about how to do a sales video when you told me about the documentary-style sales method, I decided that that was the best way to sell for my clients: not just interviewing them about their story, but more importantly interviewing the people they had impacted, which thankfully they had done with a lot of people, and getting those people to sell their courses for them and handle objections and really to give great pitches for the products that my clients were coming up with so they didn’t have to.

Sam

You look at a typical internet marketing sales video and the scripts that these people follow. There’s a couple of ways that I’ve seen it done. One is the PowerPoint slideshow where you sit there and flip through a bunch of slides and give your pitch. They weren’t comfortable doing that because it just looks very tacky and amateur to them which they knew that their audiences wouldn’t have responded well to.

The other method would be to get in front of the camera and to talk into the camera and say, “This is why you should buy this course,” and of course you have to handle price objections, you have to handle a lot of different things that people know are successful components in sales videos, but I think they suffer from what everyone suffers from when they get in front of the camera: talking into the camera is very intimidating, because I think the camera represents a very impersonal piece of technology that represents a vast world of people out there, and I think all but the newscasters and professional actors out there are very uncomfortable doing that.

Sam

Yes, Ryan. That was … When you came over and really showed me how to do this … You were the cameraman and you showed me how to do the interviews, and I learned a lot about the power of listening. First of all asking the right questions and then just letting someone go and talk. As they’re talking, show them that you’re there, you put your cell phone down, you listen, you nod, you ask follow-up questions which show that you’re listening. Usually, it wasn’t until a couple of follow-up questions that people really started to open up, so you’d ask them about a big race and they tell you about it, and then you’d ask them to describe a particular moment, and then they start to open up and then you’d ask them how that felt, and then you’d really get the emotion coming out.

Yes, you really get that genuine interaction and passion from people when they’re talking to someone who’s listening.

Sam

Yes. I really saw that in many instances, very emotional moments for both clients and people that they had impacted. You mentioned something interesting in there about features and benefits, and one of the things I found about interviewing was you can’t ignore the laws of sales and you still have to get to all those points, but there were much better ways to do it by asking clients questions related to features and benefits of their products, and then more importantly asking people who’d worked with them about their opinions of those features and benefits, and what people would gain by using these products. You definitely need all of that, but if you can do it in a much more authentic and real way, then you can really create a story-based documentary feel on a video that makes people feel like they’re watching the history channel or some other documentary rather than, “Okay. Here’s the sales video,” and when you get that sales video feeling, I think people automatically throw up their defences. “Okay. When is the pitch coming? When am I going to be asked for money and told about my deadlines.”

If you do it in this other way which is very story-based, then people keep their guard down and even if they don’t end up buying and they know it’s the sales video at the end, they appreciate the way that it was done in a sensible story-based quality production.

Sam

Yes. Really, the most powerful feature of any sales video, and even the traditional internet marketing sales video crowd will say how important testimonials are to the sales page or to the sales video, but typically you’d see a bunch of people at the end of a conference standing in front of a camera, and we’ve all been to these conferences where people say, “Look, if you have a testimonial, please go to the back and go say it.” It still has this manufactured feel to it these testimonials that you’ll see at the end of these videos. Not that people weren’t authentic or genuine when they’re giving them, but you know that that’s what was going on. The way I think you and I came up with doing these testimonial videos was much more authentic, I think, in that we spent half an hour to an hour talking to one person giving a testimonial. Before asking them about whether they’d endorse a product, we brought them through their whole journey, for example as a triathlete with the triathlon coach that we had, “Bring me through your whole journey. Tell me where you started, how things were before you introduced this product,” and then following this hero’s journey construct that’s very familiar with people in storytelling and movies, we would draw them through and put them into that journey.

By the time we asked them about the product, they were genuinely, emotionally passionate about it because it wasn’t manufactured, because they just relived that journey. By vocalising that journey which many of them had never done before, they realised, “Wow. I’ve had an amazing experience and journey that I didn’t even know about,” because until you’re forced to write or say something, a lot of times you don’t even understand the power of your own story until you’re forced to give it.

Sam

You know, I like to … I don’t know if you’ve read the book “Flow” by Mihaly … I can’t pronounce his last name, but one of the interesting points that people make and in this world of expanding technology, we very rarely get in the state of flow where because of text messages, and emails, and all these interruptions on our lives, most people don’t ever get to concentrate deeply on one task. I noticed in an interview, it usually takes you according to the psychology studies five to 10 minutes of uninterrupted time on any task to get into flow where you’re really kind of in the zone and you’re moving into that. If you’ve ever done a task that requires deep concentration like writing or something you know how that feels, and many people don’t spend any part of a day in flow, maybe when they go for a run or get out and are forced to get away from everything, they get to that point. In an interview, you really find that people usually would not warm up until about 10 minutes into the interview. That’s when things started to come out, and you could almost ask the same question twice once at the beginning and once in the middle which we did many times to get a completely different answer.

Sam

Yes. It’s really, really powerful to see it. One of the things that I think I noticed from the last two weeks of interviews was they are absolutely exhausting, and giving them, being on the receiving end as the interviewee, or, like I was, doing both, both sides are exhausted after an interview, and you’re just sitting there talking. What ends up happening is, when you really just sit down and get in touch with these emotional memories, people really pour themselves into it and I remember a couple of times how tired people would remark they were at the end of these interviews, they’d really just laid it all out there and then me giving three or four interviews a day, I was exhausted by the end of the day.

Sam

Terry Laughlin is a very interesting person. He’s been a swimming coach for 42 years, and was recently featured on the ‘4-Hour Body and the 4-Hour Chef’ which were ‘New York Times’ bestselling books by Timothy Ferriss.

Timothy Ferriss made this bet with a friend that he could learn how to swim and swim a mile in open water in the ocean. He was going to lose his bet with a friend, and Tim Ferriss is very famous for mastering complex skills very quickly, but he was not having any success in swimming. He used Terry Laughlin’s “Total Immersion” book and DVD to teach himself how to swim and became a huge fan, featured Terry Laughlin in a chapter in his book, and then in a follow-up, a big chapter on ‘Meta-Learning’ and ‘The 4-Hour Chef’.

‘Total Immersion’ swimming has been around for a long time, but has recently become more famous due to the exposure that’s gotten from Timothy Ferriss. They’ve had a hard time capitalising on this through their web presence so I became the marketing consultant for ‘Total Immersion’ for the last six months, and we’ve rebuilt their website and we’re rebuilding their online presence to help them create an online university. This online university is going to be launched in mid to late September as it stands right now.

Terry was probably the most resistant of any of my clients to this idea of selling himself, so I came up with … even emails where I would draft sales emails and then we’d go back and forth repeatedly on the tone of the emails was a very laborious process, so I really had to come up with a better way to work with him, get the sales part done and do it in a way that sat well with him for his own personal brand which he was not going to sacrifice to sell his product, and then, more importantly, to connect with his audience whose typical clients have a very high level of education, usually a couple of advanced degrees.

We went to visit Terry in New Paltz, New York and we interviewed a cancer survivor, a lady that he’s been teaching for 10 years who refused to give up swimming in the midst of two battles with cancer, one with breast cancer and one with leukaemia. She even had a very painful port installed in her chest which allowed her to continue swimming. It was the drip that fed her arsenic, which she used to treat her cancer.

She was one subject. We had a very emotional interview with her about how swimming was her illness-free zone and her meetings with Terry were almost as important to her as any meetings with doctors every week.

Then, we interviewed Paul Laurie, who’s a 96-year-old self-taught swimmer who’s used ‘Total Immersion’ to refine his swimming technique and is an avid swimmer as a way of keeping himself healthy and I guess the fountain of youth.

Then we interviewed … Then we drove across from New York on our way down south towards Texas. We met up with Jim Thomas, who’s the former dean of the Penn State business school which is the, I think the first or second best business school in the United States. He’s an avid triathlete in his late 50s, who’s used ‘Total Immersion’ to teach himself how to swim at a late age.

Then we met with Susan Atkinson in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who is the head of Coaching Development for the ‘Total Immersion’ swim coaches around the world, and develops their coaching curriculum and education.

Then finally, we met with Jeff Bauer in Texas who’s a top triathlon coach, also another one of my clients, and he also gave us a testimonial on how ‘Total Immersion’ has helped a lot of his triathletes overcome their initial challenges in swimming.

Those were five different testimonials we received for ‘Total Immersion’, all of which were amazing stories. Then finally, when we interviewed Terry himself, he had probably the best interview that I gave and received because he just had 42 years’ worth of amazing stories from coaching as a 21-year-old brand new swim coach, then going on to coach at West Point, a division one school and then starting ‘Total Immersion’ and his journey through, really, his evolution as a swimming coach from competitive swimming to lifestyle swimming, and then using swimming as a metaphor for learning and wellness in life. We can see the evolution of a swim coach through the many stages of really human development; what different phases we are in life, the ambitious achieving phase, when we’re younger and then the higher level, more Zen-like consciousness that many people achieve later in life. It’s just an amazing journey through his story and those that he’s affected.

Sam

Yes. You know, Ryan, you really hit on a point there which is the docu-drama. I was in graduate school at NYU, and I was at a dinner party and a fellow West Point graduate of mine who’s a little bit older than me said one of the greatest things that he’d ever heard that really challenged him was if you die tomorrow, would you have enough to put in a 30-minute documentary on your life, and would anyone watch it?

I think what I found and I’ve always been inspired by that quote or that challenge is, all of these experts that I’m working for really do have lives like that. For whatever reason, they don’t have their 30-minute documentaries on their lives but they really deserve it. To give this to them as a marketing consultant was really a pleasure and they really enjoyed and were inspired by the project of telling their story and really getting it out there in a way that, “You’re right. Anyone would want to view it,” regardless of whether they want to buy the product, they would just be interested in the stories, and the way you make something saleable or viewable is precisely to just tell a great story and I think a lot of times, we get wrapped up in sales: what’s the formula and what are the triggers, and what are the little tricks I need to use to get people to buy and really tell a good story, and allow people to imagine themselves living that story with you, and more importantly insert their own story into it so that you can be impacting them. That’s really what it’s all about.

Sam

Yes. I actually learned this technique of marketing using storytelling from Andre Chaperon who wrote ‘Autoresponder Madness’. His email marketing training was just launched by Mindvalley, and it’s really the most brilliant course, I think, I’ve ever bought online and it’s actually very affordable compared to a lot of them out there.

He makes the point by using emails, he just tells great stories about people that you can identify with and he loops these stories between different emails, so he’ll start part of the story and then he’ll pick it up again the next email, and then he’ll close it out maybe a few emails down the road. What happens with his email sequences is people just get hooked on them.

What we’ve decided to do is take his concept related to email marketing by storytelling, and just transform it into documentary-based videos. We’re going to take these stories that we’ve heard and we’re going to spread them out over a series of videos which will be inserted in the emails, and when people watch them, they’re just going to die if they haven’t seen the one before, and of course they can go back and watch it, and then they should be waiting to see the next one, because they can’t wait to hear how the story ends. I’m really excited to finish editing these because the stories we have just have some great drama in them, and making that process come alive is going to be the fun part.

Sam

Andre Chaperon wrote this series called ‘Autoresponder Madness’ which is really teaching marketers how to take someone who’s signed up on your email list and engage them in a way that they appreciate, and that allows you to build a deep rapport with them.

What I found in my email marketing is people typically will read emails that are short and to the point, but more importantly they love to click on videos from email, and I found that when you send out a series of videos to people, as long as these videos are good and educational and engaging, people will consistently open them and watch them.

The real trick is to keep the videos between five to 10 minutes in length because that’s enough time where someone … if you send an hour video over email, they’re probably not going to want to watch it. You want to tell the story that the entire story of these people is obviously more than five to 10 minutes. When someone signs up on your list, you give them a series of short videos that might be educational and then you’d launch into this documentary-style storytelling which can happen at any time in the sequence, and you’re going to send out, say, if their story takes 40 minutes to tell on film with all the different ways that you weave it together. Send them out in four different videos, in four different emails with very short, interesting titles, and then when they open the email, a teaser which gets them to want to watch the video, and then when they open up the video, the concept is to tell them what they missed in the last video: “Last time on ‘Lost’”, and then go into the story, and then show them at the end, and this is how we’re going to edit it, what they’re going to see in the next video: “Next time on ‘Lost’, this is what you’ll see.”

We’re actually planning on doing a little bit of a musical trailer effect at the beginning and the end, maybe a voiceover and just giving the exact same quality and feel in an email as you’d get on a soap opera or television channel.

Sam

That’s how the documentary style should work in the emails, is just make it a lot more interesting than a standard set of autoresponder emails.

Sam

That’s the really interesting part of what Andre Chaperon teaches in ‘Autoresponder Madness’ is by telling stories, you can insert hints or triggers of things that are coming, so you would start to talk about in this four-part email what’s coming next, so the hero’s journey of the expert would show their great, spectacular beginnings, some of the trials that they’ve had, and then hint towards what’s coming in the future because just like all of us, they have their own struggles and their own things that they need to put out there. You tell the story in a way that makes people want to see what’s next because the story doesn’t end with the present, it’s going to continue into the future.

The purpose of these four documentary-based emails is really to lead people to the logical conclusion which is the product and what’s next. Then the fifth video in the sequence of these documentary-style videos actually becomes a sales video, so people get used to watching your first four videos and really get engaged with the story, by the time you send out the sales video in the exact same style using stories and testimonials, the sales video will be different in that it’s talking about the course, the story behind the course, why it is, what the features are going to be, what the benefits are going to be, what people will become when they go through it, and then a bunch of testimonials that attest to what this author, coach or course has done for people who’ve taken it, so it’s different in that it’s not as much story-based, but it’s still the exact same style.

The intended effect is, by the time you get to the sales video, you almost are like, “Okay. How can I be a part of this?” so people are anticipating this, they know it’s coming, and then you just give them a very good, well-done sales video that’s about 10 to 13 minutes long and you put in some good music. Usually orchestral music is what we’re going to be using to underscore the tension and the emotions that people should feel while watching the video especially towards the end with the call to action.

Using the combination of testimonials, rolling testimonials that build in their intensity, music that builds with it, and then a strong visual call to action at the end, that’s how we’re going to drive people to sales at the end of these videos. The logical conclusion of this entire series is the future, and the future of this expert’s journey is their product and joining them in their community at their next stage, and then people can actually join and become part of the story, and everyone in life just wants to be part of the reality show. You’re just inviting them to become part of it.

Sam

It’s interesting. I’ve actually gravitated myself towards experts, not necessarily by design, but that’s who I’ve been able to bond with because I myself have a very strong interest in the expert niche. I would say that really who would benefit from this is someone who has a great information-based product, so someone who’s selling ideas, whether they have a book which they could turn into a course, or whether they have a course already online which they might not be selling as well, or something that really benefits from the personality of the person selling.

I don’t think this would work as well, although it could for a physical product, especially if the inventor behind that physical product has a compelling reason why they came up with it. I think it would work for any niche, but I think it would work best for experts who are selling information that has an impact on people in whatever field that they’re in, whether it’s fitness like the triathlon and running coaches that I work for, or personal development, or leadership, sales training, or any of those different niches where you’re selling information-based products versus physical products.

Again, I do think it would work well for the physical products, and really any product that has a story behind it, but I think it would work best for the information industry.

Sam

Yes, Ryan. That would be great. I’d love to come back and maybe talk through one as a case study or maybe a couple depending on how these go over. That would be awesome to come back and talk about results and lessons learned, because as I’ve got four of these to edit for clients, over the next few months we’ll be releasing all of them, and as I do each one of them I’m sure I’ll learn lessons and come back and refine them to just make this process work better and better.

Sam

I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is just the power of film done properly. There are a lot of courses out there right now coming out about how easy it is to do a video and you can do this with your iPhone and anyone can do it. I think I would say the opposite which is if you really want to do this right, you need to invest in doing it properly. If your brand is a high-end brand, if you consider yourself not just some fly-by-night person that’s looking to make a quick buck, you really need to make the investment in quality.

I saw the difference that your video quality made in everything, the quality of the sound, the quality of the video, the quality of interviews which you taught me how to become a good interviewer, the editing process, the choice of music … Now I’m working with audio engineers and I’m talking to composers to maybe custom-compose music for this versus using stock. There’s so many steps in the process that I just did not have any clue about, and that you taught me …

You basically taught me how to be a director over the last few weeks and I know I’m not nearly as good as you at it, but I now know what I need to know and need to study up on, and that I will always look for people like you who really understand film from a film school type perspective to do projects like this, because if you want to do this, you need to do a video right and I think if you do it right with all of these different quality elements in place, you just absolutely transform your business.

I can’t wait to put these out and see the effect that they have on my clients’ businesses, but film if done right I think changes everything.

Sam

Yes. I have a website, “Prism-communications.com”. It’s actually … don’t pay much attention to the video up there because I did it about a year and a half ago. I can’t wait to replace it with a documentary-style video that you and I shot. That would be the best place to … probably just email me Sam@prism-communications.com because I’m in the midst of revamping my website and redoing the video for the homepage now that I’ve picked up this new method of videos.

I’d love to hear from people especially in the video world about just ideas in this area and also if people need any advice, I’d love to shoot back some thoughts on email to them.

Sam

I’ve got a lot of editing ahead of me. You’ve taught me how to edit which is dangerous.

Sam

I know. I know. That’s a big lesson.

Sam

Okay. Thanks, Ryan.