20 Jul July 26, 2019 – Grace Under Pressure Lisa Wentz, BombBomb Stephen Pacinelli and College Projects Susan Tatsui-D’Arcy
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Lisa Wentz – Expert Public Speaking Coach and Author of Grace Under Pressure: A Masterclass in Public Speaking
Humor in a presentation has to be authentic from you. Not meaning
you have to write the joke, but they have to be authentically coming from you. Don’t try to mimic somebody else’s sense of humor or delivery.
Lisa Wentz prepares speaker to influence, educate and motivate their audiences. She has spent the past decade dedicating her life to helping professional and amateur public speakers overcome blocks, develop their voices and craft their delivery. Lisa founded the San Francisco Voice Center in 2008 and has since coached public speaking clients from thirty-seven countries.
Many of her clients are executives from fortune 500 companies, founders and non-profit speakers. She has been featured as a public speaking expert in the Wall Street Journal, TIME and the L.A. Daily Journal, among other publications. She holds a Master’s degree in Voice and Speech Pedagogy and is certified in the Alexander Technique, provides training essentials for preparing executives, TED speakers, and experts from all fields for public speaking. She has taught master classes in drama conservatories at the American Conservatory Theatre, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Marin Shakespeare and several conservatories in London.
Stephen Pacinelli – Chief Marketing Officer at BombBomb and Co-Author of Rehumanize Your Business: How Personal Videos Accelerate Sales and Improve Customer Experience – Read interview highlights here
When you send someone a video and it is about them, or they can
see their LinkedIn page on screen behind you, their alarms do not go off, oh, ‘This is a marketing video.’ You are now getting face to face with that person instantaneously. Fantastic for outreach and outbound.
Stephen Pacinelli is Chief Marketing Officer at BombBomb. Steve is an advocate of personal video for its benefits to sales teams, and has delivered presentations to more than 1,000 audiences. Rehumanizing Your Business asserts that people are the most powerful communication tool. Despite the ubiquitous nature of text, interpersonal communication over millennia affirms that we yearn to be viewed as approachable and invested, and feel valued and respected. Personal video meets these inherently human needs. When we communicate face-to-face, success improves and satisfaction increases—and our social relationships become sources of meaning and joy.
Susan Tatsui-D’Arcy – Founder/CEO of Merit Academy and Author of Beat the College Admissions Game with ProjectMerit
Colleges want kids to graduate and go out and do something exciting and wonderful. The way applicants can demonstrate that is by spending the years from 8th grade to 12th grade doing one project.
Susan Tatsui-D’Arcy is the founder and CEO of Merit Academy, an accredited private school that focuses on individual and project-based learning. Initially the founder and director of a day camp and a children’s ski club, Susan found her path when she became a mother. She set up a preschool for her first daughter in an educationally-rich environment that set the foundation for her two daughters to learn to read by age three. Disappointed with the offerings of local schools in Santa Cruz, Calif., she started an elementary school for accelerated students, a project that expanded to 12th grade as her daughters grew. They went on to Stanford University /Stanford Medical School and to Claremont McKenna College/Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She was chosen the 2019 California Mother of the Year by American Mothers, Inc and has written books such as Beat the College Admissions Game with ProjectMerit, The Millennial’s Guide to Free Child Care in Your Home, and The 21st Century Mother’s Guide to Managing Time and Taking Control of Your Life!
Highlights from Stephen’s Interview
Video has been a hot topic for the past 7 to 10 years, but this is a different style of video. Because when we think of video in a marketing context, we think of high polish. We think of commercials, we think of DSL and green screens and drones and all of those things. But the videos that we talked about in the book are in service of marketing. The videos that we talked about in the book are in service of better communication, because someone decided 25 years ago that our most important business communication was going to be relegated to the text on someone’s screen or the text on someone’s phone, and that’s when email became really popular. And we all just started removing the messenger from the message. So the type of video that we talked about in the book, and what we’re big proponents of, and what I’ve used for the past nine years, are short form video messaging to improve conversation, not marketing videos.
We’ve been using things like email for quite some time. I’m pretty sure every single listener of the show has sent someone an email and failed to get a response. And most of our email is flooded with messages that came from a robot, that aren’t personalized, that aren’t written directly for us. And we became really good as human beings at kind of filtering those messages out, and figuring out what’s important to us. This is asynchronous communication, it is a video that is sent to someone for them to consume at their own time, when you don’t have the relationship yet to do a live zoom chat, or something like that.
Someone’s not going to hop on a zoom and have a synchronous conversation with you, but you need to start building trust and rapport, and text on the screen isn’t going to do it, because when someone can’t see or hear you, they can’t make a determination on how trustworthy you are, and that comes from plenty of brain training. This would be the solution to get you face to face. Because if you were in front of more people more often, you would do more business, and that person can consume messages. Video increases that reply and that response rate.
There was an interesting study done by a gentleman who’s going to Harvard, and he was doing a report on video communication. He found that not only did the recipient increase positive feelings for the sender when they received the video, but the sender also increased their feelings to the recipient just by opening up and being viewed, so it enhances the relationship.
We haven’t tracked the speed in which someone responds, we have the data somewhere in there, but I don’t have it off the top of my head. But you will get an increase in the amount of responses. This works especially well, as any entrepreneur out there knows, that you need to be proactive with your outbound strategy. You need to reach out to people, and a lot of them are probably implementing some sort of cold outreach or outbound. By sending videos and by personalizing those videos to the recipient, you’re going to receive a massive increase in the amount of people that actually respond to you. Now, we can’t help you. If your messaging wasn’t on point, we can’t help you with a positive response. But you’re more likely to get a response.
Cut me off, if I start going too long, because I can go for a while on this particular topic. There’s a shiny authenticity at the high end all the way to showing your bed. And the shiny authenticity version is this, the shinier that something is, the less authentic it feels. We become accustomed to this through all the commercials that we’ve been watching for decades and decades and decades. So in this style of video if–and this is a one-to-one video meant for an individual person, not to be consumed by a mass audience, not a video on your website, not a video promoting your product. This is a video for the advancement of a relationship to build rapport trust, to handle emotion. So the background of that can be totally different. You do not want to have a blurred out background from the SLR camera, because that instantly screams marketing. That’s not what you want. My background in my office, which is a picture in the book; we have a drawing of it. I love photography and videography, and I have all these old cameras on the shelf in the background. Then I have three little wooden boards that say ‘explore,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘be brave,’ and then I have a drawing of my kids. It makes a fantastic backdrop when I send videos to people, and the reason why is, even before they play that video, they have a lot of rich and detailed information about me. I’m giving them an opportunity to make a connection with who I am as a person, which may connect with who they are. We have plenty of customers that have their kids’ drawings in the background, that have trophies for golf or for baseball, or have their alma mater, all these things that tell a story that is lost in text-based communication. That only works if it’s visual. One great strategy is, in your office, have a nice background in your office. But there’s so many other things that you can do to make yourself stand out, because attention is the currency of sales.
If you’re not getting attention, you don’t have sales. So how can you get attention? Could it be a background in your office? Yeah, but I want you to go beyond that. Can you record videos outside? Can you have other people in your video?
The other thing that you can do, is not worry about your background and start your video with a screen recording, and pick something that is relevant to your recipient. I’m just about to do another class, a training class here tomorrow. And I was looking for thumbnail examples for four videos here. There are so many great ones where the salesperson or the entrepreneur send a video to someone else, and they did a video of what was on their screen, which happened to be either the recipient’s LinkedIn profile, or be the recipient’s website or their competitor’s website.
That is attention. When you send someone a video and it is about them, or their LinkedIn page is up on the screen, and they can see that it’s about them, 1, none of the alarms go off that says this is a marketing video. “This video was created just for me. There I am on the screen.” You are now getting that play, and you are getting face-to-face with that person instantaneously. Fantastic for outreach and outbound. I know I’m going on this topic and I could go longer but I want to make sure we have time to go over other things.
I’m going to give you two different frameworks that actually work whether using a video or you’re typing out an email, but they work especially well because it allows you to actually show–and I don’t know if you want to do this–but you can show the chicken gizzard at the same time. We have two frameworks that we like to teach. People are about to use video for the first time, and they need a bit of help, because they might be nervous about what to say on camera, and how to say it, and how long the video should be. The first one is fairly simple. And a lot of times we teach for inbound leads, but we’ll talk about outbound here, like you just mentioned to the 51 people in a second. The first one is empathy, a value call to action. So if you’re about to record a video for someone, how can you empathize with where they are, and what their problems are? How can you provide value to them? What is the point of value that you offer? And then what would you like them to do next? Get on the phone, reply with an email, etc. and you sort of did that in your off the cuff pitch. And value value, value.
And then there’s a simple outbound one as well, and this one, I think, would fall more in line with trying to get after those 51 decision makers for chicken gizzards. And that is thinking about your pattern disrupt. We talked about that already. People were used to deleting emails that are marketing emails, how can you disrupt their pattern? What problem do you solve? That was the element that your pitch did not have, it started off with the product, right? You want to start off with the problem. Why are other chicken gizzards, inferior and you lead with that rather than leading with the product, because it speaks directly to the recipient. So you go from pattern disrupt to problem three, why your solution works, which leads us right to the result that they’re going to paint a picture of what the future would look like. What’s the result? What’s the happiness that will occur as they decide to work with you? And then five, the CTA, what do they need to do to achieve that? Do they need to call you, do they need the email, etc?
BombBomb’s product is a video communication platform. It allows you to send video communication through email, you can also text it and use it in social media formats, and then track what’s going on with opens, clicks, and most important, plays. People been tracking email opens and clicks for a while, and that’s great. It’s a great message metric. But if you really want true engagement, if someone watches your entire video, that means a heck of a lot more than someone just opening your email. We provide that service that allows you to do that. It’s simple, quick, and easy, works where you do in Gmail or in Outlook, and we do have a web app for the laptop or desktop, or even a mobile app for your Android or your iPhone that allows you to record, send, and track the URL.
Yeah, so the URL for BombBomb is simple. It’s BombBomb.com. The book you can access at all major retailers, it’s published by Wiley and it’s called Rehumanize Your Business. You can go to Amazon, I think Amazon has a special on it right now, depending on when you are buying it. It goes through four different segments: why video is so important, when you should be using video in your business, how to use video in your business, and then improving results of video. You don’t need to be a BombBomb customer. It’s about better communication through that digital channel.
BombBomb’s cost ranges depending on what package you want. We are working on a new one that’ll be out here in a couple months as well. But you can get signed up for as little as $39 as an equivalent of an annual fee, up to $69 a month, so not expensive.