Video Selling Tips That Actually Work

Hey friends and fans, Billion Dollar Sales Coach, Mr. Revenue Ryan Dohrn here. How are you? I'm getting ready for the show, looking at your listener questions that got sent in. So we're going to have some of those today and hope that you're liking the new format here of us getting together each and every week. Be sure to go down in the comments down below or subscribe and then let us know in the comments what you think of this new show format. All right friends, here we go. Here comes your sales quick tip. of the week. One of the tools very often that we don't use the most, or we don't use often enough, is the video side of the sales business. Now, a lot of you know that I'm in the digital and marketing space and sell marketing solutions all across the country. Well, part of that is digital marketing solutions, and so we get a lot of reports. Some of you might have SEO reports, you might have website traffic reports, you might have programmatic delivery reports, and we do provide those to our customers. The problem is I've observed, maybe you have as well, based upon the questions and lack of feedback that I get from clients, I feel like they don't look at the reports. I also feel like they don't actually understand the reports. So one of the things that I like to do is take any type of report, because I know a lot of you, and I appreciate you, that aren't in the marketing side of the business like, like me, or event promotions and things. I think this is important for any type of report or follow-up or even a retention strategy that you could consider. Now, one of the tools I use for recording videos, and there's a lot of them, I use a tool called Loom, L-O-O-M, like Lima Oscar Oscar Mike dot com. And what I find is they're a very affordable and efficient way to get videos watched. Now, keep in mind, I'm a big fan of YouTube. A lot of you are watching me right now on YouTube, but I noticed that a lot of companies unfortunately are blocking YouTube. I've not noticed that with Loom. I've not noticed that with another tool you could use called Vidyard. And then the Wistia product has a soapbox tool. I've noticed that works pretty well. There's a lot of them that are out there, you know, please don't think that's the only ones. So what I do is I take the digital report or the report, I put it up on the screen. Choose a tool if you can like Loom where you can also see yourself. So when I'm doing a Loom video, You'll see the report, and then you'll see me in the lower left-hand or right-hand corner. And then what I do is I walk through that report on the video. Then I attach the report. When you're done, for example, with Loom or Vidyard, it's going to give you a link that you can place right inside of the email. And then the subject line is, uh, recording for you, or short recording for you. The body of the email is, hey, I've got this digital report, a lot of cool things to share. I recorded you a short— make sure you say that— a short video that explains the report. And what you're going to find is that you can watch that people are watching it. So Loom will give you back an indication that somebody watched it. And then you're also going to find that the more you do this, the better you get at presenting these reports as well. Now sometimes there's going to be little details or nuances in the reports where you may need to get some information or some advice from somebody else, maybe on the IT team or, or something like that. Make sure you either include them in the recording that video or you get that information in advance. Video, friends, I use video when I'm introducing myself to people, like from that initial first prospect when they— an inbound lead. I use Loom to introduce myself to folks. I use Loom when I'm recording my reporting. If I haven't heard back from somebody in a while, I will use Loom to record a video for them. Here's what I have found. Most people will watch a video before they'll actually read something. And so, friends, I just feel like it's a very good sales tool for us to use. So maybe 2 weeks ago, I had an opportunity to present to a very big national account that all of you would know, and I was nervous, to be honest. And at the end of our conversation, this person said, hey, I need to take this one level higher. And I'm like, oh shoot. And I said, hey, would it be helpful for me to record maybe just like a little 5-10 minute video that explains what we talked about today? And they were like, yeah, that would be awesome. Do you mind doing that? No, absolutely not. The video has been watched 19 times, friends. So that tells me that somebody's watching that video. This is, this is probably a deal that's going to get done, which for me is great. I mean, I love to get deals done and video is a part of that total process. All right, friends, if there's a tip that you'd like me to cover or a topic that you want me to cover in the quick tip section, just drop me an email, ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, now it's time for your prospecting tip of the month. Now, I know we just were talking about prospecting a little bit in the first segment here of the show, but one of the things that I like to do is make sure that I'm varying my send times. Now, I know that might seem obvious, and if you're a follower of mine, you've heard me talk about it quite a bit, but a lot of people don't do that. Typically Most salespeople send emails at times that are good for them, regardless of if the time is good for their customer. So let's just say as an example that you are trying to sell a software service to a restaurant owner. Well, there's a lot of times not to send that email, and I would say probably between 10 AM and 2 PM, that's when their day is going to be crazy busy. So maybe you send it early in the morning, or maybe you send it way, way, way, way, way, way late at night, just as an example. Now, you probably remember from a previous tip, I say to folks all the time, if you're not using send later or delayed delivery 30, 40 times a day, friends, I'm just assuming that you're probably sending emails at times that are good for you and not necessarily for your customers. So just don't forget, you do need to vary your send times. Now, if you want to increase your chances of a response, Look back at past responses from a particular individual. Did those responses come in like at a nine o'clock in the morning? Was it three in the afternoon? Was it all over the place? Because you're going to find with me, I tend to respond that ten, eleven o'clock hour quite a bit after four quite a bit. But during the day, I'm doing so much with customers, I don't have time and I'm not going to pay attention to it. So if you send me an email at noon, I'm not checking my email over lunch. You know, I'm actually going and having a chance to eat. Some lunch. So just think about varying your, your send times, friends, and really be watching. If you're working with a good CRM, you're actually gonna be able to ask that CRM through some of their AI tools, hey, when do I get the best responses to emails? Really use that type of data to your advantage. All right, now it's time for your sales tech tip of the month. And as you know, friends, I'm a big, huge technology guy. I love it. So one of the tools I've been using, I've been using Claude AI a lot more. I'm a Mac person, so I just installed the app. I imagine there's an app for Windows as well. But we were talking about digital reporting today. Any type of report that comes out in text should be turned into a more graphical report. So I like to use Claude and I'll pop my text in. I could even have an Excel file, like if a report came as an Excel file, I could import that into Claude. And then sometimes what I'll do is I'll go online to Google or whatever And I'll find a report that I really like. I'll look for it like sample reports, sample executive reports. I'll find something like, yeah, I think that looks really pretty. I'll take that and I'll also give that to Claude, drag it across and say, here's a sample report that I really, really like. The big primary instruction though that I'm going to be giving the bot is that I want to create a corporate report. I want to take the text that is here and represent it in graphs. And pictures, and I just wanna make it look really, really polished because a lot of the reports that we get or the data we get, it's just data, so it's pretty darn boring. I recently received a report from one of my partners and it was good. It was about 19 pages, but it was a lot of text. There were graphs, but they were kind of hard to read. So I loaded that into Claude and said, hey, polish this up, make it easier to read. This is kind of all jumbled. Make it be able to be read by a 10th grader, you know, something like that. And what it gave back to me was just phenomenal. I mean, it was really, really nice. Now, not too long ago, we had our Niche Media Conference down in Orlando. Ton of fun. If you weren't there, join us next year in Atlanta or this fall in New Orleans. And I had an attendee data survey. So we survey all of our customers, our attendees, the final day while they're at lunch. And so I loaded that data into Claude and said, make this a beautiful report. For me. Then this is kind of a tip, make another one of these for future potential sponsors. And so it did another report using the attendee data for future sponsors. But now one of the things that's important though, when you're using Claude and asking it to analyze these reports, ask it, what do you think are the big takeaways? What do you think that I'm missing? What are some other revenue opportunities that you potentially could suggest to me? Just, I really find like Claude is really good at deep dive analyzing. Now Is it slower than ChatGPT? I think the answer is yes, no. It appears yes, that it is slower. But then when you see the results that you get, I feel like it's no, it's not slow. It's just doing good things. You know, friends, just don't forget that you're only gonna get so far with the free versions, the unpaid versions of all of these AI models. And they do different things. Let me— they do a lot of things that are similar, but they also do different things. Like, I think Perplexity and ChatGPT are much better at deep dive research. I think Claude is better at writing and doing workflow type tasks like combining spreadsheets and things like that. But you're gonna find, friends, an AI large language model, an LLM that you like better, and just wrap your arms around it and teach it and help it become your little digital doppelganger. You know, I think that would be a really cool thing for you to do. All right. How about your retention idea of the week? Some of you heard me talk about my friend Diana over at sugarwish.com. Sugarwish.com. It's a great website, an awesome service. What it allows you to do is send a simple link to one of your customers, and then based upon the budget that you set, they can shop inside the Sugar Wish store. They can order tea, they can order coffee. You can set what you want them to be able to see and access— dog treats, popcorn, cookies, you name it. And it's fantastic whether you want to send 10 cookies, or you want to send 200 cookies. There's all kinds of different options for you at sugarwish.com, and I highly recommend them. I've used the service many, many, many times and have actually received it as a gift as well. So you can go in, you can set your budget. They're also going to help you with a customized little card that will go with the mailing as well. Trust me, friends, I got one of the big, big, big ones from somebody once, and it was so cool. Those cookies lasted for weeks. Well, actually days on our counter. That's how much fun it was. All right, friends, that is your retention idea of the week using companies like sugarwish.com to gift at the right times. All right, tell me this is your favorite time of the show each week where we're answering your listener questions and send those in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, this next listener question comes from Dexter out in Oklahoma City. Hey Ryan, I love the show. I am getting ghosted a lot. The sales calls are going really well and then nothing. Any advice would be appreciated. So Dexter, friend, I think the first thing that I would ask myself is you said your sales calls are going great and then nothing. So what you might want to do is just, just take a quick step back and go, okay, so if the sales calls were going great, then you probably wouldn't be getting ghosted, right? So take just a step back and go, okay, what can I do? Because it's very humbling when you humble yourself Which is hard for me. Humble yourself, Dexter, and then ask yourself, okay, what perhaps am I doing? Rather than blaming the client, what perhaps am I doing on the sales call? Okay, so here's a few things that I do on sales calls. Some people refer to them as a soft close, and that's just you testing the waters for if the buyer is going to respond. Personally, I like the 1 to 10 soft close. So the 1 to 10 soft close would be So Dexter, after presenting these ideas to you, having some great conversation together, on a scale of 1 to 10, how interested are you? 1, you're not interested at all, and that's fine. 10, you're so interested you're ready to give me cash today. Kind of where are you at? And then typically what they'll do, it's pretty common for them to say 5. Now if they say 7, you're good. If they say 2, Uh-oh. If they say 5, it means they don't know what to say. So then you guide them. Dexter, you say, you say you're a 5. Great, that's awesome. So 5 usually means somebody's on the fence. So there's some work that I need to do, questions I need to answer for you, because I either want to get you to a 6 or a 7, or I want to answer your questions, and then maybe you decide that we're not a good fit together. And if that's the case, no problem. Now, friends, I just did something That most sales trainers would totally disagree with. If the answer is no, tell me no. I don't want to chase you around or get ghosted. If you're not interested, just tell me you're not interested. I'm a big boy. I'm not going to cry. You know, and a lot of people, they don't want to say no to you because you're nice, or they don't want to say no to you for fear that you're going to try to sell them further. So I love that 1 to 10 close, kind of gauge where they are. So You said you're a 5. A 5 would mean you're kind of on the fence and I have some work to do. So what questions can I answer for you, or what other proof can I provide to you that this would potentially be a good solution for your company to solve these 3 problems? And I list out the problems that they told me about and that the software should potentially solve those problems. I want to try to push them to a 6 or 7 or an 8. Okay, so that's the first step. Having a soft close and testing the waters. Okay, the second step is agreeing on a follow-up time and meeting. So I try to actually not let people get away with more than, say, 48 to 72 hours. Like, if someone says next week, let's meet next week, I'll say a lot transpires in a week, a lot. So you get busy, I get busy, it's hard to reconnect after a week. So if we could get together in the next couple days, I think we'll be able to get some decisions made and You're either going to kick me out the door or we're going to get going together, whatever the circumstance is, right? So that is the second step. And then the third is getting out your phone or getting that thing on the calendar, getting that meeting on the calendar. Not enough people do this. While I have the customer on the phone, I want to get that meeting on their calendar. Did you see it? All right, did you accept it? Can you see the link where we're going to meet? And then I make those meetings really short, like 10 or 15 minutes. And that is it. So Dexter, I mean, it could be that there's some pricing considerations. I think some of the trolls and snipes out there would say you're not meeting with the right person. I just think that's kind of an easy way out. You know, when people say, well, you always should meet with the decision maker. Yeah, you think? But sometimes you're meeting with a liaison. That's their job is to meet with salespeople like all of us. So you're not always going to meet with the CEO. So just take a step back, Dexter. Take a deep breath. Look at the sales call, maybe record it or something like that, and then ask yourself, what am I doing on the sales calls that might be stopping me or might be perpetuating the behavior of ghosting? So Dexter, I hope that helps. Friends, keep your questions coming. ryan@ryandorn.com. We either answer your questions on the podcast, on the YouTube channel, or I'll send you a video reply myself. If you didn't get a reply from me, we did not receive it. I promise we take great pride All right, friends, your final segment of the show this week is what we like to call Sales Brain Work. Friends, I was doing some research online and was trying to figure out what I could do to kind of force my brain to hyperfocus. And what I did is I came across an idea where you set a time limit for everything that you do. So what I did is I went and I bought a little stand here for my, my phone. Oh, nice. And then I'd set my phone right next to me. And then what I do is when I've got a task, then I take the phone and I set a timer on the phone. And then I set the phone right there near me, you know, so that I can see the timer. And so it just kind of, here for effect, I'll put it right there. And so that just kind of runs in the background. So let's go ahead and let's fire up the phone here. And for those of you that are watching on the channel, you can see. And then I'm gonna set a timer and I'm gonna say, say for 25 minutes or whatever it is, okay? So that timer is ticking, ticking down. So as the timer ticks down, what my brain naturally does— what's sitting right here in front of me— my brain naturally goes into hyperdrive mode. It's— they call it bomb brain. It's like it's a countdown clock ticking down, the bomb's gonna go. And what it does is it really focuses you in. Now the other thing that I do is I use music as a way to motivate me. So while I normally might listen to, you know, country music or something that's like soft listening music, I might put on some metal music or some fast '80s rock music to also perpetuate and get my brain kind of going fast. It really just depends upon what drives you forward. I mean, you might like to listen to jazz or classical music or whatever the circumstance is, but this, friends, really needs to sit kind of right in front of you so that your brain can always say, okay, I got 24 minutes left, I got 23 minutes left, 22 minutes left, and get your brain to cycle like that. Now, you can't do that all day. It's going to tire you out. But there's a lot of websites and a lot of experts that say you can increase your productivity by as much as 150% just by setting time limits, right? And so I don't know if that's the case, but if I could even get my time management to increase by 25%, I think that would be a huge, huge win. So just remember, friends, you got to take care of your mental state because I know that I went through a lot of years where I was unmedicated. And running just on adrenaline, and it's going to backfire. It did on me. I'll never forget it. Palm Springs, California. My body just shut down, ended up in the emergency room, and I don't want that to happen to all of you. So just make sure you always are thinking, what can I do, friends, to get my brain right? All right, friends, that is the show for this week. I sure hope you like this new format of us getting together each week. Please make sure you subscribe and then get down in the comments below and let me know what you think of things. And we'd be sure to alter the show just for all of you. Thanks so much. So many thousands of you watching the show each week. I sure do appreciate it and hope that it's helpful to all of you. All right. Love to train your sales teams. Uh, love to come to your national sales meetings and get everybody pumped up. Reach out to me over at ryandohrn.com. All right. Stick around. Stay close to more great sales advice coming up here on our next video. All right. See you next week.