Episode 59: How Video Can Become Your Sales Team's Secret Weapon with Nick Capozzi

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales Teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. This is an episode that has been a long time coming. Picture this Australian man, American man, connecting how we all do these days virtually, but finding a bit of a bond pretty quickly over video. And I don't mean talking over video, but I mean over video creation, which Nick, who I'm about to introduce, is really good at. A couple of months later, we end up recruiting another Carlton football club fan. And Nick has the jersey at his house now signed by a couple of players to show that he is now fully legit. But from there I've actually received a lot of great advice from Nick. So he's a man that I really wanted to get on this podcast because I think what he has to say should be heard by lots of people. So Nick himself, he's an entrepreneur who has spent his career building and deploying lots of sales teams and marketing teams across the globe. Anything from luxury goods, which I learned very early on in the days, to tech and software, and now splice video. Nick's got a pretty unique background and he likes to push the boundaries and think quite differently. So for me, that ends up being a really fresh perspective on B2B and B2C sales processes in particular. So, Nick, very, very nice to have you here. Welcome.

It's so good to be here. And you know what I love about Australians, and I mean this sincerely, I find culturally they have a fresh perspective and I mean that genuinely. And I don't know if it's the isolation being the southern hemisphere, but there's such an independent way of thinking in my experience with Australians that I find is you could maybe throw in New Zealand and South Africa, like some English speaking southern hemisphere rugby nations, but there is Something to the way Australians think. And I always love having a good ch that.

Excellent. Well, before we get into that, please tell people listening about Splice Video. What is it? Why does it exist and why are you successful?

We exist because most companies aren't good at using the Internet to market themselves. And I think what's interesting is that. So B2B is. Or excuse me, Splice Video is a B2B creative video agency that serves the tech market. And I had this really unique backstory where, you know, it was a long story short, I studied radio and then I was in this really unique B2C luxury goods sale and quite by accuracy, accident, got into B2B tech. And what I realized very quickly coming from this luxury good B2C sale where they would so good at telling their backstories and so good at creating the imagery of these Swiss watch houses, for example. And then I land in B2B tech. And how do you make an efficiency tool sexy? Right? How do you get people excited about Gmail? So that's what we did. We started getting into brand storytelling using video, of course, for BB companies because they struggled at really pulling out their story. They would get stuck on features and benefits and not the pain points. Right. That their ideal customer has. So we took off quite by accident and we're really Busy because again, B2B companies aren't great at telling their own story.

Yeah, a great saying that I heard from actually Akeem Shannon, who I interviewed, he owns Flip Stick. So recently we spoke around storytelling and not everyone's necessarily good at storytelling, but everyone has stories to tell and I think that encapsulates that really nicely. So today we're going to talk about video, but before we do so, I think it's worth rewinding certainly to let's pick a time five years ago and having a look at how we've connected socially in very different ways since that mark of, say, five years ago. So what have you seen change in how we're actually connecting as individuals, as peers and as businesses over that journey?

So I think what's interesting is that when I say I was in luxury goods, I was actually in the cruise business because my territory was the Caribbean and it was such a multicultural crew. I remember one Royal Caribbean ship I was on, there was more than a hundred different nationalities represented in the crew. So we had this kind of global mindset. You know, I had less friends in Canada, where I grew up, and more friends in Johannesburg or, you know, Serbia, just because of I spent so long. That's where my people were and when Zoom happened, when the pandemic happened and we all jumped to Zoom, I think the rest of the world caught up to a way of thinking that I already had, was there are no borders anymore, at least in terms of doing business and building relationships and meeting new people. And I'll tell you, as a guy who, you know, genuinely made a lot of great friends internationally over all those years, some of the friends I've made in the last three, four years from LinkedIn, post pandemic, when everyone's just scrambling to figure out, you know, what we're all doing together, have really become some of my closest friends, truly. And, you know, if I can at 47, be making new friends because of the Internet, as weird as that sounds, you know, that tells me what are the business opportunities? What are the opportunities to engage people cross culturally, cross border. Growing up in Canada, that's very in our wheelhouse, but I think the rest of the world's just catching up to that opportunity.

Yeah. Wow. From people who have evolved in the era of dial up to now, everything that's come from that. I think that is a really nice point to say. Even I'm 41, you're 47. The way we're embracing tech and how we actually engage outside of the traditional certainly says that it's achievable for so many. And to quote Derek Zoolander, you've chosen to be really, really good at video. Why video? What made you jump into that?

I always thought as a kid I was going to work in radio. Like at 8 years old, I thought I was going to be a hockey play by play commentator. I thought that was my future. And all through high school, that's what I did was to get into this one radio program. So I think I always had that media lens that I look through. And then, you know, when I got to cruise ships. So my first cruise ship was in 2000. And if you cruised in North America in 2000, you had three television stations on the in cabin television. One was CNN International, which Americans weren't watching. Second was ESPN De Portes, which was just soccer in Spanish, so the Americans weren't watching. And the last thing was this sizzle reel channel for these brands. So we were a media company working on the cruise ship and these brands paid for this product placement. But the thing was, the videos were terrible. So my second contract, I went down with a camcorder and I started filming all my own content. And I went from getting 150 people to my presentations to like A thousand. And what I did was I took advantage of the cultural norm for Americans or, you know, North Americans, which is, hey, I'm getting dressed or I'm getting out of the shop, let me turn the TV on. That's just very part of the culture. So there was no other channels except, you know, boring news or soccer. So they're like, oh, let me watch this guy. What's he talking about? And when I started doing that, my sales numbers went insane. So everyone was like, Nick, what are you doing different? And what I was doing was what we would call demand gen today. I was doing by, you know, creating demand with these videos. So I always saw that opportunity. The second thing I did was I had to build a personal brand because, you know, if you're going to cruise in the winter and you're coming from somewhere cold in North America, you're thinking, okay, if I'm thinking about the ship first, the port second, the food third. But if I am to think about a revenue department, it's going to be the cool ones, right? The casino or the spa and not the duty free shopping. So we had to use guerrilla marketing techniques all over the ship in the first 18 hours to drive as many people to these presentations as possible. And then they were in your wheelhouse and then you could work with them through the rest of the week. But, you know, we were not an interesting department. So we had to create awareness with video and with omnipresence. And the way that I replicate that now in tech is two ways. Whether I'm selling for splice video or almost every single outbound I have, I send out has a loom video of me with a customized message to the recipient, because it's faster for me to do that in a video than it is to type up the email. And then the other thing is, you know, when we first started this place, video, I'll never forget this, I had a conversion rate optimization CEO come to me and he said, nick, you can't help me. And I said, why? He said, because everyone in my space is on LinkedIn. And I said, that's interesting. I said, okay, give me your top 10 competitors. I'll never forget this. He gave me seven. And I did a loom video screen recording. And I went LinkedIn business page by LinkedIn business page of his competitors. No posts, no video, no post, no video, no post, no video. So what I realized was he was drinking his own algorithmic Kool Aid because of who he follows and who he connects to, who he's connected to. The algorithm thinks he needs to see everything in conversion optimization. The reality is very little there. And the more we dug into this, the more we were showing these people, like there was one gap in cyber security. We said, you can take over Cyber Security in six months as a daily news show on YouTube if you're consistent with content. So we kept finding these gaps because most businesses aren't great at using the Internet for marketing, or all they're doing is gatekeeping with, you know, paid ads, Google and stuff. But with cookies changing, at least in North America, that's changed a lot. So people are scrambling. And the reality is social media was always treated as let's give it to the intern. But the reality is, is that so many companies, and B2C is the example I take from this. They're building their funnel with social media, with organic social media. So long answer to your question. But, you know, I think there's so many ways from a sales or marketing perspective, to leverage video today in ways that people just aren't thinking about.

What I'm hearing come out loud and clear is a level of personalization is possible in video that it's not necessarily possible elsewhere. So we talk about loom videos, and I'm a big component of that as well, big proponent.

We can definitely talk about that. But. And let's circle back to that, because what I think the answer is is that people are either they don't know what to talk about or they're intimidated to actually click record, and what do I look like? And how do I sound? I realized most of my job for my clients this year was just kind of making it easy for them to get in front of a camera as opposed to me thinking, well, wait, I'm used to this, right? Just flip the camera, just go. So I think the biggest barrier to entry is yourself. And, you know, you and I have talked about video and I say a couple key things. I say light yourself with natural lighting. So stand in your kitchen with your iPhone. If you have a bay window in your kitchen and look into your phone and have the sunlight coming in through your kitchen window and look how good you look, that's the best you're going to look. Natural lighting from a kitchen window is going to make you look as good as possible. So start with good lighting. If you feel you look good, you're going to be more comfortable. And then the other thing is, I think people, when it comes to video, they want to get everything out there. And what I always encourage people to do is just give little tidbits little actual insights. What are things I can do to stop this video and go and apply immediately. Right now that's where I got traction. And people I've worked with have using that similar model gotten traction. But back to the personalization, There is no question. I don't know, you know, in the rest of the world, but I think email is very quickly dying, at least from a sales. My emails, no matter, I get a new email address and I'm full of spam within three weeks, four weeks. So I think personalized video to the point where even in the subject line of an email, I'll put in brackets personal video. Now in B2B tech, you know, North America, people have been seeing that for two, three years. But so many businesses, people have never seen that if I was selling cars, I would be sending a personalized video to everyone who just left. Right. I think especially in business to consumer, there's so much more opportunity with video. We just see hip companies selling with social. But there's all these gaps where you can take over and be a massive influence. You know, giving actual insights or other tips and tricks that your buyer is ultimately looking for.

You hit on something really important for me that I communicate around when I'm talking to sales teams and that's that there is a huge untapped potential around video, video selling, video communications, whatever you want to call it in both I think the B2B and B2C space. And for me it actually comes back to people not being comfortable on video. So what happens is that sales teams, salespeople, sales leaders are encouraging all the traditional forms of contact over video because it's easier, it's more comfortable, which means that there's nowhere near the amount of video out in the market that it could be. So to your prospects, your customers, your partners, they're not seeing this very often. And it's not because they don't want to. It's not because people don't recognize how great video can be. It's because they're not comfortable, they don't understand how to do it and they're not practice in getting it out there. And for me, I think that will change in time. Certainly with businesses like splice video around, it will. Can I ask if we really simplify the complex here? What do you think are the key benefits from a sales relationship point of view for using video?

It's humanizing. So the first thing is if someone sends me a video and in bracket it says personal video, how do I not watch that? Truly, right. Like I think there's on a human level, when someone has gone to that much effort, even in a sales function, it's hard to not watching. So then they'll watch it. And because I did it with Loom, and I have no affiliation with Loom, it's just my favorite tool, it'll track how much of that video they watch. So do they watch the first 22% or did they watch the whole thing? Because that's gonna change my next step in the sequence. So that humanizing element, the second thing, this is a great story. I learned this actually from Zoe Hartsfield, who's a great influencer on LinkedIn and sales and marketing. And she used to work at a company called Bombbomb, which is a competitor for Loom and Vidyard. And what she did was she gave me this tip. She said, hey listen, if you're having trouble holding meetings, do a quick little video in between and see what results you get. So I did that. I was VP of sales for a company at that time. And what was happening, we were selling to doctors and they were coming in by Instagram through our funnel for this tech for doctors. And what was happening was it was attached to their personal emails cause it was on Instagram. So their work email was not getting the meeting hold. So our hold rate was 42%. So that means of 100 people booking a meeting, 42 showed up. What I did 48 hours in advance. Hey Dr. Ben, it's Nick from Blank. I'm super excited to talk to you at 9am Eastern on Thursday about our company. Just want to let you know if you have any questions in advance, just go ahead and let me know. I'll make sure we cover those. Otherwise I'll see you Thursday at 9am Our hold rate went from 42% to over 80%. We were doubling our bites at the Apple by this 12 second video that I did literally 48 hours in advance. Because once they saw that video, one, they remembered, two, I confirmed the time, but three, they saw me and then they were like, how do I know? Show this guy changed everything. And then finally what was also happening was maybe 10 or 15% of them anecdotally were replying with their questions, right? So now I went from this is a semi warm lead because they saw some videos on Instagram and now they're coming into our funnel to oh my God, this saved me, you know, 50% of my discovery time. And I can go in with all this new information and really tailor it to what they're looking to do so. Just one example. Oh, here's another great example. This is one of my favorites again because I use loom and I can track how many individual users I always send a proposal recap. So Ben, if I'm sending you a proposal, it's all there, beautiful on the PDF, but I'm gonna send a quick 45 second video. Hey Ben, I'm just including this video just to do a very high level of what we talked about and what's in this PDF. Boom, boom, boom. 60 seconds. Just to recap and if you have any questions, let me know. I once went viral inside a company. I had 40 individual users watch that recap video. So what happened now was I multi threaded with people I didn't know I needed to multi thread with because now all these people are watching this video and they're like, oh, this makes sense. Oh I get. So do we close that deal? Absolutely. But it just shows the power of nevermind, just the day to day incremental wins by video. But when something takes off, it really takes off and can change the whole dynamic of an entire deal.

I think you've hit two of the most topical areas around selling at the moment that teams are challenging to work through. One is how do you get to the explosion of decision makers that are involved in deals or projects? The number of decision makers involved has doubled since pre Covid times. How do you also then get out to those decision makers? So we now have more decision makers who are needing more touch points before they make a decision. That has also doubled. So pre Covid we're talking two to three decision makers and five to six touch points. Fifteen or so touch points in total. Post Covid we're talking five to seven decision makers and 11 to 13 touch points. So we're talking 50 a three times growth in how often you need to be getting out to people. So the use of video, the example around the doctor's surgery, what that's doing is that's building a relationship quickly. So it's actually starting the relationship before you get in the door. The second area, your needs analysis work, is becoming easier to cut through and to get a real answer, a real need, a real problem, a real opportunity because you're using video to give the other side time to think about their considered answer and time to trust you. And the third one, the cross threading piece diaries are closely watched these days. People don't let you in different. I've got a great guerrilla marketing tactic that I use at trade shows, but certainly in the general Day to day business world, it's hard to get diary time. So everything you're doing there through the cross threading pre is if that video can just get out to the five or six decision makers. I forget going viral.

I'll even say hey, this 20 second video explains why. So not only like I wasn't even getting the press play, I was like I only 26 seconds of your time and I'll update you on all this but what I used to do for the multi threading or I still do, I would do either a stock Persona based video or I'll still customize it and I'll say hey Ben, I noticed you're the CFO@Ben.com. you know I've been talking to HR but these are the top three things that CFOs when procuring are our tech usually ask. I'm just going to send this to you, just it's 26 seconds. Just give you a highlight of like the three most common questions might be helpful.

Absolutely, it's always helpful.

So you know again it depends on where you are as a seasoned seller in your company too, right? Do I actually know how to read where I'm at in the process? Like I'll tell you this now that I've been in tech for three, three and a half years, I feel like at 47 I never sold properly before because they're so process driven which is amazing because you can bring that process to other businesses. You know we're talking about the top 1% of businesses use process like tech. However, that also creates an opportunity for if everyone is zigging, how to zag, right? And how to be different and you know, I'll tell you there's hyper personalization of an email works. I have a friend of mine, he made, I'm gonna tell you how much he made but he made a lot of money last year and, and all he did was send 10 emails a day. But they were beautiful, right? Hey Ben, you know I'm reaching out. I had to reach out because I saw this article linked where you said this and it got me thinking this and then I thought what about that? The open rates insane. The reply rates insane. Now this doesn't work for every company, right? Listen, there's lots of people that you know it's a volume game or when hyper personalization, if I'm trying to get in touch with one person, if it's an account based strategy or whatever it is, the more personalized you get, the better it is. And it doesn't take long. Google someone's name, right? Google someone's name and their company and then click news. Oh, Ben, I saw you had an article in Forbes. Ben, I saw you on this podcast. I had to listen. So, and again, listen, this is interesting. Let's take a quick side note because I'm originally Canadian and authenticity is very important to me. And you know, when I was on cruise ships, how could I connect with the cruise guests? Because I was there selling something, right? They're headed to the buffet. How do I slow them down? Right? So I would find interesting things about what they were wearing or something about them and I would just start a conversation, right? Genuine things, right? Like if they were wearing, you know, I'm a Carlton fan now in the AFL because you sent me that jersey. But if they were wearing a Sydney Swans jumper, okay, I can't say, wow, that's a beautiful jumper. I can't say that. But I could make a joke, a little tongue in cheek joke about, oh, it was great last year when my club beat your club, right? But finding those connection points, that was table stakes on cruise ships because again, there were so many other departments vying for your attention, plus the fact they were on vacation. You really had to get in front of people, but in clever, creative ways and was always hyper personalization. And what's so interesting now is I look back at all these things we do, these processes in tech, we did them on cruise ships, we just called them different things. So it's just interesting watching, you know, that continue to evolve.

So, Nick, we love the creative on this podcast, but there's one thing on this podcast that we love even more and that's real world, practical and chunky advice. So if you had to pick your top five things that you could suggest to people to get them forward, moving along that journey towards becoming really, really good at video, what would they be?

So I'm going to make this easy for your audience, Ben. I'm going to put all five into one exercise that you can do in 90 minutes on a Saturday morning to see if you like this. So the first thing is I'm going to say, Ben, what do you want to talk about? You want to talk about X. So that's step one, just having an idea of what you want to talk about. And to be clear, when it comes to making video, you don't have to be an expert. If you're a new salesperson who's never sold, if you're coming from working at, you know, Hungry Jacks, if you're Working Hungry Jacks. And you have your first sales job. Someone wants to read the story of you learning how to sell because there's a million other people new to sales across the globe. So wherever you are, there's an audience for you. But step one, what do you want to talk about? So, Ben, if I asked you, could you talk about footy for 30 minutes? Is that something you could talk about?

You could be confident the answers are yes. Yes.

Okay, so the step two is I'm going to say talk about that for 30 minutes, put on a timer, open up a Word document and click dictate. Just talk into the screen, but talk for 30 minutes about footy. And then what I want you to do is I want you to take that list. Step three, I want you to take that list and start finding some short, unique, interesting thoughts. Because when you do this exercise, you're going to say, you know what? In every training, I always say this. Okay, so let's take that 15 to 45. Second thought. And now we're going to put it on a teleprompter app, which is step four. I have no affiliation, but I love bigvu. B I G V U T V. There's a free version, I think. I pay $9 a month without the watermark. And on my laptop, I'm now going to take those actionable insights, those little ideas from step three. I'm going to take them, put them into the web version, and then I'm going to push that to my phone. It's very easy to do this. So I'm four steps in. What do I want to talk about? How to actually get it into a document and start finding those little actual insights, those little nuggets of gold. Now we are pulling them out and we're putting them into Big View. Actually, this is six steps. Sorry. The next step is going to be now actually getting in front of the camera with Big View. And the beautiful thing about Big View is when you look at the camera, the way that it's placed on the screen, the words, your eyes don't look like they're moving. So now all you do is just talk out that actual insight. Hey, you know, Ben, every time that I cook salmon, I always cook it in a cast iron skillet because the iron gives me a uniform heat. Crispiest salmon skin you've ever had. So I'll take the filet, olive oil and salt, both sides, skin side down, first for three minutes, flip for three minutes, take it off for three minutes, let it rest. Best salmon you've ever had. That's an 18 second actual insight. That's a video. That's one tip on how to cook salmon. So now we've got that in Big View, I'm going to record and I'm going to say that exact thing and then I'm just going to export it as a video and it's done. It's that simple. So step one, what do you want to talk about? Step two, dictated into a Word document. Step three, start finding those actual insights. You're going to have eight pages, a single space copy from a 30 minute brain ideation. The next step is put it on Big View, record it and then export it and you've got a video that is ready to go. The best tip I can give someone, I already gave it to Kitchen window natural lighting and then frame yourself. So what you want ideally is kind of your torso and shoulders. You want to have a little, you know, maybe 5 to 10% of the screen on either side from your shoulders and then just from naval up and then the same type of distance above your head. You really want to crowd that screen. You want people are standing at the, you want to be in the screen. And it's okay to use body language and talk, but having that teleprompter as a North Star is going to make you comfortable with dictating the text and then eventually you won't need that anymore. But it's that easy if you did that consistently for an hour a week. Once you got into a rhythm, you're gonna have, you know, two to three to four videos a week. You can drop across social and position yourself as a subject matter expert, which you already are. You're just highlighting it to the world.

Love it. So there's a little bit of beginner stuff in there around framing, sound, lighting, excellent to get you started. Then there's a little bit more around how you actually go about pulling that content out that you already have the stories that are there to tell and making it a little bit easier for you to actually. Fantastic. I love it. Thank you, Nick. It's been a great session. Please everyone check out Splice video. Where else can they find out more about Nick Capotzi?

You know what, just on LinkedIn, if you're listening to this, connect with me and say ozzy, Ozzy. Oi, oi, oi. And I will accept your invitation to connect.

Excellent. And say you're a Carlton fan and you go even a level further. Fantastic. Thank you Nick. Great session for everyone out there. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favorite social media channel. We're Stronger Sales team teams on most of them. And if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger Sales team.