Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, coauthor of Rehumanize Your Business, and host of The Customer Experience Podcast, Ethan has collected and shared video success stories in a variety of formats for a decade. He’s even sent 10,000 videos himself.
Prior to joining BombBomb, he spent a dozen years leading marketing teams inside local television stations in Chicago, Grand Rapids, and Colorado Springs. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and UCCS in communication, psychology, and marketing.
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Ready to become fearless? We can help you become fearless in 60 days so you accomplish more in your career Schedule A 15 min Call with Umar[Podcast Transcript Using Artificial Intelligence]
Umar Hameed 0:06
Are you ready to become awesomer? Hello everyone. This is Umar Hameed, your host and welcome to the No Limits Selling Podcast where industry leaders share their tips, strategies and advice on how to make you better stronger, faster. Get ready for another episode.
Umar Hameed 0:33
Hello everyone. I'm privileged today to have Ethan Beute here he's the Chief Evangelist at BombBomb which is like a kick-ass amazing name. Ethan, welcome to the program.
Ethan Beute 0:42
Thank you so much and I appreciate your excitement about the name.
Umar Hameed 0:46
So typically what I do is I do an audio podcast with no video but to honor the video gods today, we're doing a video recording that's also going to strip away the audio so it goes traditional path, but we'll also have the video super people can see your home office's. Brilliant and you have a very nice one by the way, and it looks like you got a bunch of books there in the background holding up a potted plant.
Umar Hameed 1:07
I do what's that? It is Yeah, it's a book I co authored with my friend and longtime team member Steve pass anally. It's called rehumanize your business and we got to a point I've been with BombBomb for almost a decade full time a couple of those years were working, you know part time doing project work with the two co-founders. And got to a point where we had grown the community and grown the philosophy and grown the practice enough that I just felt compelled to start writing a book, which I did and we ended up getting it published by Wiley and it's gone quite well.
Umar Hameed 1:36
Oh, excellent. And it's got a subheading to what's the subheading is really long but onpoint
Ethan Beute 1:41
Sure. It's a how personal videos, accelerate sales and improve customer experience. And so the the idea is, you know, all the times that you're clicking send on another message that's made of faceless digital communications commonly plain typed out text, the same black text on The same white screen that doesn't differentiate you doesn't build rapport and doesn't communicate nearly as well as when you jump on a video call like this, or in this case record and send a video message. And so it's how do you simple video messages recorded at your convenience sent to one or more people, and each person experiences you for a moment in person when it's convenient for them. And then of course, tracking and analytics closes the loop. So we talked about what this practice is all about why you might be interested in participating sometimes and I'm sure we'll get into it in the conversation, sometimes during your day to day or week to week no matter your role or function that you might use a video in place of going to the keyboard again and typing out another three-paragraph email and how you might do this and so there you know, BombBomb is part of it, but we're only one potential solution and there are a wide variety of ways to use video a little bit more often casual, unscripted, conversational videos in order to communicate with people more clearly and to build some human conduct.
Umar Hameed 3:00
Ethan, sometimes, video is such a powerful tool to communicate where it was like, You can't do that in text. At one point it was a novelty but now with COVID and everyone working from home, and using video conferencing, it's just become more mainstream to use video and to expect video.
Umar Hameed 3:20
Correct and to expect it not to be produced and written and scripted and lights and drones and green screens and all that other stuff that we used to think we needed for video. And so you're right, we are a lot more comfortable A, seeing ourselves on camera, which is the biggest hurdle and B, seeing other people in a casual setting.
Umar Hameed 3:39
And if I can't happen to walk by and I've got two of them, it enhances the conversation then detracts from it, which is kind of interesting because the human element, right?
Umar Hameed 3:49
Correct. I mean, that's what's so attractive. I think we're still in this pendulum swing back away from what Seth Godin called the television industrial complex, this era. Whereas in having a big budget and running a bunch of advertising was enough to generate sales, I think it's so refreshing now to be approached with something that's honest, conversational, some of these other softer sounding words transparent. You know, I think it's there's something very refreshing about seeing someone expressed expressing yourself as you are and seeing someone as they are.
Umar Hameed 4:24
Absolutely. And there's like so much information. So are you sitting or standing?
Ethan Beute 4:27
I'm standing.
Umar Hameed 4:28
Which I can tell when you walked up and there's a different level of energy. If we were having the same conversation, you sitting down, I don't think it would be as bright and animated and you just can't write that way. People can't receive that way. But I can just clearly tell there's more energy there. There's more passion. And that's why you're the chief evangelist. And I just like one of the minions you're like, [garbled] evangelist guy.
Umar Hameed 4:53
Yeah, well, I did a series I did a guest series on Sangram Vajre's Flip My Funnel Podcast, interview four chief evangelists about why they were doing what they were doing. One of them was from Amazon, a gentleman named David litski. Guy Kawasaki, who's the arguably the original chief of Ant and now at Canva, Dan Steinman at Gainsight and Sangram Vajre, a co founder and chief evangelist at at Gainsight are at Terminus rather. And so in the course of that conversation, that set of conversations, it became very, very clear that it was something that we needed to do as pioneers in this personal video messaging space.
Umar Hameed 5:35
Right.
Ethan Beute 5:35
That evangelism is something that needs to be paired hand in hand with anything that is innovative. If you if your company is innovating, you need to be evangelizing whether or not you have one person with that title isn't necessary, but it's, you know, something you might consider, but if you were innovating you must be evangelizing
Umar Hameed 5:54
Absolutely. And finding the right person that becomes the voice and the the image of the company because it's a noisy landscape out there and you need to stand out and you also need to clearly communicate what you want to do so let's kind of dig into BombBomb and one of the things that a lot of salespeople find challenging is getting through the noise and getting an appointment because nothing happens till you land that appointment. And that is a difficult thing to do. So walk me through how BombBomb strategy they could use our listeners and viewers to land more appointments.
Umar Hameed 6:31
Sure. So I'll start with the idea that what's the main reason you want the appointment? I'll ask that as a question.
Umar Hameed 6:37
Absolutely. So I want to have an appointment so I can have a conversation with someone to communicate so kind of what we're playing with but more importantly to understand what they're doing. And so we can figure out if there's a bridge to build.
Umar Hameed 6:53
Right. And so, typically your you would do that in person if your market supported that if you were working regionally, nationally internationally might be doing that I would highly recommend doing it by video call, whether it's Google Meet, or whether it's Zoom or some other Microsoft Teams video meeting when you can't be there in person, in my opinion, and experience is far better than even a phone call. And so my point in asking that is to say, you want to get face to face with someone.
Umar Hameed 7:40
Yes.
Ethan Beute 7:22
You want to build trust and rapport and relationship you want that given taken. So when you think about all the touches that lead up to an appointment, all of them are faceless. So why not get face to face with someone earlier and more often in the process? And so what I would say is when you look at all the touch points, and hopefully they're prescribing that you're following some method that you can see the results of and tweak and iterate and improve on in order to increase the rate of appointments in general, but then also how quickly you can get to the appointment specifically. But But specific to your question. We've seen that when people use a video message in common firming a set appointment, that it increases the show rate. And we've seen that when people use video in advance of requesting the appointment that they can set more appointments. For example, one of our clients is a top 50 franchise right when they released the franchise 500 their top 50 franchise their franchise sales team was using BombBomb. And they found that when they were able to use videos, in order to confirm the appointment, they increased the hold rate in particular by 28% to 20%, which was almost 28 percentage points. And the reason that happens is that video allows you to communicate the value of the opponent. That's the biggest thing, especially on show rate and even on the set rate, too, is like why would I set this appointment?
Umar Hameed 8:03
Right.
Ethan Beute 8:05
Do I feel comfortable enough with you? Am I clear enough on the opportunity? Do I feel that there's sufficient warmth and competence from you as the salesperson to invest my precious time with you? Is this the right time am I uncomfortable exploring this even if I'm not sure that this is the right time to make the commitment to your product or service or even to explore it. And so this idea of feeling like I know you before I meet you dramatically increases the chances that I will set and hold the appointment. The idea that I feel like I know you before I meet you, and there's a higher level of trust and competence because I've virtually met you in advance the meeting starts the conversation in a different place, in terms of competing against other people to get an appointment. This idea that you're using video in this way today in 2020, is differentiating in and of itself. But ultimately, my vision as the off co author of rehumanize, your business and Chief Evangelist of BombBomb, I want video messages to be as common as picking up the phone or typing out an email. You don't use either one of those or text messaging or sending a LinkedIn message. You don't do any of those 100% of the time, it's just in the set. And so when this type of communication becomes more common, then you become your own best differentiator as you already are today. But the act of what I want to draw out there's the act of using video alone is differentiating enough to stand out in A, in the inbox or in the LinkedIn message box, but then B,, to stand out against competitors as well.
Umar Hameed 10:15
Okay, so walk me through one of your clients or BombBomb itself, I assume you your own dog food? What is a process of landing an appointment? But what are those steps? And which steps have video? And what are you really saying because you can do a video message and it can suck.
Ethan Beute 10:29
Absolutely.
Umar Hameed 10:30
So what's good messaging.
Ethan Beute 10:32
So I'm gonna start right there because you introducing introduced something very, very important. We have a lot more competitors in our space than we did say three years ago. And that's really good that validates the concept and it's going to promote the growth of the category in general. And again, my passion is that this becomes more common because it's, I know it's a more satisfying and effective way to work. But a lot of people are selling it as magic essentially. So to your point. You can't just take an email that isn't working for you right now or a voicemail script that isn't working for you particularly well right now turn it into a video and expect it to triple your results even though some people will put that on a homepage or put that in a marketing email or something people are selling magic. If your targeting sucks, if your messaging sucks if your product or service sucks, if your online reputation sucks, if your salesperson sucks, video is not going to make those things better, right? In some cases, it can even amplify it especially in the case that the person lacks confidence or more importantly, lacks conviction or sincerity. If you don't believe in your product or service, do not use video because that will come through very, very well. If on the other hand, like most competent successful salespeople, you do believe in your product or service you have a strong skill set video is going to be a really, really winning play for you. So to address your question, of course, we're doing inbound and outbound lead generation,
Umar Hameed 11:54
Right.
Ethan Beute 11:54
You know, a lot of standard inbound opportunities through content and advertising and retail Getting in those types of things. And some of that is self serve. So we have like a partly a self serve model, but certainly for our larger team accounts, we're doing a variety of tactics. But we have a an SDR team, a sales development team that is outrebounding actively to people who have either a expressed some interest in our website and they're on our target list of companies that we would really like to be in conversation with.
Umar Hameed 12:23
Right.
Ethan Beute 12:24
Or they're companies that we have no relationship that we're trying to reach out and figure out the structure of, and...
Umar Hameed 12:30
[Garbled] someone they don't know that you want to go after. So you find who would be the right person in that company for you guys to sell to?
Umar Hameed 12:37
Um, there are three main people that we would like to talk to, but I'll speak to two in particular, one would be a manager, director, VP of sales. Yes. Particularly inside sales teams. We were of great value to an outside sales team, but obviously outside sales is a little bit crippled right now with regard to the ability to get out and get in front of people because of the pandemic.
Umar Hameed 13:00
They're like in house salespeople now.
Umar Hameed 13:02
Right. And then the other person would be the, the manager, director, VP, SVP of customer success, right? which is essentially post sales, but continued sales, it's still a...
Umar Hameed 13:14
Right.
Ethan Beute 13:14
...sales role and that's why you're seeing a lot more CRMs entire revenue cycle. And so those two seats in particular, especially on the account management, customer success, client management side of it, to retain, expand and continue to grow revenue on post sale. And both of those if you were in a relationship based business, right, if you're, if you're Amazon, outside of some of their divisions, perhaps like the higher level divisions where you're building like large partnerships, for you and me as we interact with Amazon, it's purely transactional. We have customer reviews, there's no human, you can't actually pick up the phone. I've successfully gotten someone from humans out on the phone and it's helpful, but you know, if you're selling something with a 30 to you know, 180 day sales cycle, if you trust and rapport matter if there are often multiple decision makers in the process, no matter where you are in the sales team, you're going to want to employ video periodically in order to communicate more clearly and build trust more effectively. And so what we're doing, of course, we're mixing outbound calls, LinkedIn connection requests and legitimate LinkedIn relationship building some sales nav, you can drop bom, bom videos into LinkedIn messages, by the way, which, you know, again, you're not going to do it all the time if you have...
Umar Hameed 14:31
Pause you there for a second. LinkedIn relationship building. So dig deeper into that.
Ethan Beute 14:36
Sure. So as you and I, are you active on LinkedIn?
Umar Hameed 14:41
I am.
Ethan Beute 14:42
Good. Yeah, me too,.
Umar Hameed 14:43
Like a geriatric 65 year old but anyway, go on.
Umar Hameed 14:46
Yeah. So the cool thing about it is that there are a lot of people who are operating very transactionally in that environment. So if you can take one extra step and create a legitimate conversation, so anytime time someone accepts my LinkedIn request or I accept someone else's, I will immediately create a conversation. And most of the time, I will take the time to record a little 32nd video, I've also intermittently used a what I call an evergreen video are a generic video that you record once and use over and over again, so that I can still use video even when I don't have time to make it truly, truly personal. So personal video is almost always more effective than an evergreen video or a mass video, video recorded for 500 or 5000 people. But you don't always have time for you got to balance that give and take and so you have to weigh the volume versus the value I guess. And so something I do here would be a sample script for a LinkedIn video, "Hey, my name is Ethan. I just wanted to put a face with name. I'm really excited to be connected here. Thanks so much for reaching out to connect. A couple things. I'm really interested in that I spend a lot of time working And posting about our using video messages like this one. And, and I also host the customer experience podcast, I'm talking about how to create more alignment and intention across sales, marketing and customer success teams to better serve customers. So those are things that I'd love to communicate about, I'll keep an eye out for you my LinkedIn feed again, just wanted to put a face with the name. Wish you a great rest of your day. Take care," right? so that was evergreen, I didn't say the person's name, I didn't say the day of the week, anything like that. So I could use that with all of my new LinkedIn connection requests.
Umar Hameed 16:31
Yes.
Ethan Beute 16:32
On the other hand, I could also hit someone's profile, learn one or two things about them that I think are interesting, or that we have in common or whatever, and then make it truly, truly personal. Hey, Renee, it's Ethan. I saw that you're, you know, in Chicago, I lived in Chicago for a few years. I think it's the greatest American city and I'd love to connect with you about blah, blah, blah.
Umar Hameed 16:53
That's brilliant. Because what's interesting is soon as you mentioned that Chicago link, then you're part of my tribe, and it shouldn't make a difference, but it makes a huge difference. And also warmer towards you, there's a connection and so excellent.
Ethan Beute 17:08
Something that provokes them to reply back. Hey, I noticed you started your career in marketing but now you're a VP of sales. How did you make that transition from marketing to sales, right? So that also creates this conversation shows your level of interest. Yeah.
Umar Hameed 17:21
Brilliant. This is how you get appointments. But losing a customer is the saddest thing in the world. So how do you retain those relationships over the long haul? How do you use video to do that?
Umar Hameed 17:32
I think the most important thing about retaining an opportunity retaining business is setting and managing expectations up front, right, you obviously need that alignment from sales to customer success or sales is selling something that can actually be delivered and that that's customer success or customer service is prepared to onboard and manage that successfully. I think that's the single most important thing.
Umar Hameed 17:55
Right.
Ethan Beute 17:55
Think about that from a video perspective. any opportunity you have to Improve the clarity and quality of communication to break down detail or complexity. Video allows you to speak through something or with screen recording, walk and talk show and tell through it. So making sure that people know what they're getting and that they're on boarded successfully into it is a big deal. But specific to your question, let's go to something really, really interesting. One of my favorite use cases for video is to manage emotion and tone and we were talking about it a little bit at the beginning, right?Somewhere where you might add an emoticon or all cap and...
Umar Hameed 18:29
Right.
Ethan Beute 18:29
...some exclamation points to show the energy or to show the enthusiasm or excitement. So this ability to manage emotion and tone, both positive and negative, right? And so in order to retain business into into build relationship, you want to stay in front of people over time and so in force those positive emotions with video, congratulations, good job. You just hit a milestone. Hey, I just noticed that right? look for opportunities to send triggers to your account management team, to proactively reach out to people to protect On the back, encourage them whatever. In addition, though, you can manage negative emotions, bad news, apologies, these things are so much better done in video, we've all seen kind of the fake apology from a man or an athlete or a celebrity, you know immediately that there's no sincerity there, they're saying all the right words. And so when you type out a message, especially one of apology or sharing bad news, when you type that out, you're giving away complete control over to the other person as to how they want to read it. And if you're in a bad situation, they're probably upset at some level. And so they might not be open to your actual apology. However, when you can reach them with a video message asynchronously, right? you record it when it's convenient for you and they open it up when it's convenient for them. You're not putting them in this weird position like maybe on the phone where they have to reply immediately. Bad news is cognitively more compelling and so it takes more time to process so by sending it you let them deal with it on their own time, but you can emotionally walk them in through sincerity to your actual breaking of the bad news or making the apology or whatever. And in this opportunity to recover from a bad situation is really where we build great relationships. I know that you can think of a couple of examples where a company or even a friend or a family member, like really let you down, but the way they recovered took you to a higher place a deeper part of your relationship stronger...
Umar Hameed 20:22
Absolutely.
Ethan Beute 20:22
...than ever before. So look for video to manage emotion and tone on the negative and on the positive side.
Umar Hameed 20:28
Brilliant. I think video is finally coming into the forefront as it should have all along and people are feeling comfortable, and you guys are helping make that happen. Ethan, thanks so much for the conversation today. I really appreciate it.
Ethan Beute 20:41
Sure. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. And I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Umar Hameed 20:45
Brilliant.
Umar Hameed 20:47
If you enjoyed this episode, please go to iTunes and leave a five-star rating. And if you're looking for more tools, go to my website at nolimitsselling.com. I've got a free mind training course there, that's going to teach you some insights from the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and that is the fastest way to get better results.