Christopher Bogue on Shorter, better, faster, stronger.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

So Chris Bogue coaches people to create mercifully short video content for business. He’s the creator of ‘The Complete Guide to Selling on Video’, a digital course on video prospecting for sales. He’s also a sketch comedy writer, improv trainer and host of the podcast, ‘Chris Sells His Soul’. In his session today, Chris will focus on how to shorten the message and create an efficient workflow. Chris, take it away.

Chris Bogue    

Thank you. Can we get this view changed here? Excellent. Well, that’s enough chit chat, everybody. I know you’re all probably bored by this point, so let’s just get to what you really came here for. How do you get videos to actually drive more revenue into your pipeline, right?

I have discovered one trick that I share with every single sales team that I’ve ever coached on video, and I’ll be doing this for three years coming up soon. So let’s just jump right to it. I call it see you on Wednesday, right? So if you’re watching this at home, everybody take out a pen and paper. I don’t even care if you leave after this one tip because this is the most valuable thing I can teach you, right?

So if you are out there, if you are running a sales team, if you have SDRS who are compensated by the amount of qualified meetings that actually show up, video has got you covered. It’s a 10-minute script. What I do is I instruct every single SDR who’s out there making calls. Take a look at your calendar next week. Look at every single meeting that needs to show up, and you’re going to send them each a 15-second video, right?

So if I was talking to Subhanjan, that video would sound something like this: I’d say, “Hey Subhanjan, looking forward to chatting with you on Wednesday at 9 AM central. Just as a recap, I’m going to be asking you a bit about what you’ve been doing with Sensepark and a little bit of questions about your video prospecting processes over there. So I’ll see you at 9 AM.” That’s it. That’s literally the entire script. It’s 15 seconds long.

That has doubled my show rate. Like, every time I think I get too good at sales, when I think I can just let the automation do its trick and I stop sending videos like that, my show rate decreases. People come up with all sorts of excuses at the last minute, right? Something came up. They got busy. There was a family catastrophe at home. Whatever it is, there’s always some reason for them to put me off.

But if I spend just 15 seconds looking straight into the camera, talking about what they’re going to get and what time I expect to talk to them next week, that show rate doubles, right? So this is an important lesson I want to get you today. People ask me, “Why are you going to do a whole speech about making your videos shorter?” I’m telling you, it’s because your videos are too long.

I know this because I’ve spent the last three years focusing exclusively on video prospecting, and everybody’s videos are too long, including mine, right? You’ve seen a lot of brilliant video prospecting leaders here at this summit today. I’m going to tell you, they could probably make their videos shorter too, right? It sounds like a broken record, but if you absolutely, even if you’re terrible on video, even if you’re terrible at sales, you will see more success if you tighten your message.

So why do I focus so much on making a shorter message? Well, it’s because you have to start in the middle. So you’ll notice people don’t even know who I am yet, right? I haven’t explained to you what my name is. I haven’t explained to you why I got here. All I did was I just started with something that’s going to make you more money, right? So this is lesson number one.

If I’m going to impose a second lesson on you today, it’s this: start in the middle, right? So we’ve been taught all throughout our lives that the beginning of the story is where the exposition happens, where the intro happens, who is the story about? What is their life like? You know, what were the situations like beforehand? And then something exciting happens in the middle of the story.

You’ve got to rework your sense of structure if you want to do video correctly, and I’m sorry if this is terrifying to any of you out there, but not only do you have to start in the middle, but you only have 3 seconds. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? This doesn’t just go for video prospecting, by the way.

So I teach video prospecting for sales. I also teach video content creation for LinkedIn and social media. And yeah, 3 seconds is me being generous, right? Normally on something like TikTok, you’ve only got one and a half seconds to get the attention of your audience, and if you think that’s not fair, I want you to think a little bit about who your audience actually is, right?

Odds are, if you are reaching out to somebody who is important, if you’re selling something to somebody important, they do not have time to be sitting there talking to cold callers all day long. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. People get very upset at prospects ghosting them, prospects not taking meetings with them, prospects ignoring their cold calls, ignoring their cold emails.

And I’m telling you, these people are not lying to you when they say that they’re busy. You know the reason why they’re saying no to your 30-minute calendar invite is because they’ve done this before and they know that you’re probably going to take longer than 30 minutes, right?

When an SDR reaches out to me saying, “Hey, could I just get 15 minutes of your time?” I know that they’re going to send me a 30-minute calendar meeting, and that’s probably going to turn into a 40-minute meeting because they’re probably going to go long, right?

People are protective about their time for a good reason. And if you are contacting them as a salesperson, they know that they are walking into a trap every single moment they spend talking to you is good for them and bad for you because every second they get you, they’re one second closer to possibly convincing you to part with your money, right?

So first and foremost, I want you to remember that you need to have empathy for the people that you’re reaching out to, and I also want you to think about yourself.

The reason why I am telling you about the video and the reason why I’m telling you to keep it short is because I know that you’re not making a video. I know that the teams out there who are doing the best at video, the teams out there pledging to teach you about social selling and make you great on camera and teach you all these modern tricks to selling. I know they’re not making enough videos either.

How do I know? Well, a couple things. One, I literally wrote the guide to selling on video, right? So I’ve been selling the complete guide, selling on video for a year now. It is my baby. The only reason I created this course is that I was sick and tired of taking coaching clients who are saying, hey, please turn this into a course. Nobody else is teaching anything like this, right? So I’ve spent time working with salespeople, revising their scripts, sharpening their on-camera performance skills, working with them on targeting, making sure they are sending videos to the right people, helping them build certification processes, and I’ve also done a good deal of surveying my network.

So if you would kindly direct your eyes to the screen right now, this is a question I asked earlier this year: how many videos per week are sales reps on your team currently sending? 0. The overwhelming majority of teams out there are sending 0 custom videos per month. Now, you’ll notice 30% of the people there are sending one to five videos a month. I’m not sure if I believe them. Honestly, when you’re doing this, as much as I’ve been doing this, you’re surprised that people are even making five videos a month, right?

So I know that this is powerful. I would not have reorganized my entire life to do this. I know that my clients see ridiculous success when they implement video prospecting. It is so effective at setting meetings, at increasing show rates, at accelerating deal velocity for deals that are in the pipeline.

So what’s going on here if this is the promised land, right? If video is so magical and wonderful, if there are so many video prospecting coaches out there that we can fill an entire summit with them, and we’ve got all these advanced tools with AI and templates and calendar links, and why can’t we just go out there and make enough videos to hit our quotas?

Well, I’ve got a couple of theories. First off, I’m going to ask the audience. Do any of you actually answer cold calls? Just throw it in the chat there. If you answer cold calls, great. If you do not answer cold calls, great. I’m going to jump in here and I’m going to say I don’t answer cold calls. Whatever. So I threw that in there. Humor me, everybody. Just jump in here and share your answers with me.

But, of course, the answer is no. Nobody or nobody answers cold calls. The only reason why anybody answers cold calls is if they’re a sales professional themselves, which, admittedly, gives me a bit of an edge. I know if I call ahead of sales, that is a person who is doing business on their phone all day, they are requiring their team to make calls. I’ve got a chance to reach them, but they’re not going to pick up. And if anything, that’s going to get harder and harder as time goes on for a number of reasons, right?

Number one, obviously the phone providers are getting better at detecting who is spam and who is not spam, right? Try calling someone’s personal cell phone that you’re not authorized to call. Increasingly, the phones are going to identify you as an unsolicited caller. So that’s just happening. Two, take a look at who’s entering the workforce right now. Have you ever met a 20-year-old person? They don’t answer the phone, right? They would rather sit there on FaceTime with their phone pointing up at the ceiling while they talk than actually pick up the phone and have a phone conversation.

So I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but the people who answer phone calls are dying every day, and that number is not turning around, right? So that brings us to the next question, which is why do we still make cold calls? Because it works, right? It works to pull somebody into a situation where they have to respond to you. And this is the reason why sellers have not given up the phone yet. And this is why you as sales professionals should start thinking about video like it’s a phone call, right?

So anybody who’s ever gone through cold call training knows that it is not about what you say on the phone, it is about the questions you ask and the type of interaction you have. Your job is to control your tone of voice, your job is to ask them the right questions, and to move them through a progression, right? And video should be no different than that, right? My videos are usually about 45 seconds long. You know, we’re going to get through my video script in a second, but the first thing that I’m doing is establishing relevance with them, right?

I’m letting them know that this video is about them. And just like I’m doing here in the beginning of the talk, I don’t waste time explaining who I am. I don’t waste time talking about my company. That’s going to come later once I’ve established relevance, right? That first three seconds of the video is always going to be the most important, and that goes online too. And I’ll show you why that is the case, right? So if you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m a little bit of a nerd, right? I was a nerdy kid growing up. I was a kid who liked silly songs. I’m a sketch comedian. I do a lot of sketch comedy here on LinkedIn. So I’ve got a lot of nerdy icons that I’ve loved that were formative in my life.

Growing up, one of them was ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. Right? So ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. Does anybody know Weird Al? Has anybody ever heard a song from Weird Al? He is a goofy curly-haired man who plays the accordion and specializes in silly parodies of pop songs. So I love the guy. Think he’s a genius.

I’m scrolling through my news feed and I see a video pop up that says good news for Weird Al and there’s Weird Al’s smiling picture. You know what I do? I smile and I say good for Weird Al. Maybe I even click the heart button and then I skip right past it without watching it. What’s going on there? What’s going on there? What’s going on is even if the audience likes you, even if the audience wants your message, even if you are the audience’s childhood icon who formed their conception of comedy and professionalism, they’re probably just going to click on something else, right?

Think about the favorite actors and actresses and movies and musicians you have every day. You are not reading about them every day, and that’s why you need to adjust your expectations when you’re making videos, right? I see too many sellers out there saying people only watch 10% of my video. They didn’t respond, it didn’t lead to anything. That other person must not be interested and I’m here to tell you, even if they like you, even if they want to buy your solution, assume that they’re not going to pay full attention the first time. Assume they’re going to get distracted partway through, and you’re going to have to reach out to them afterwards. And this is also the important part of keeping it short, right? It’s not even because the other person doesn’t have enough time to listen to you. It’s because you only have a few hours in the day to work on this stuff, and you need to be able to bang it out quickly.

Nothing kills a sale worse than a sales rep who sits around thinking, planning, and strategizing for three hours a day and never takes action. The reason why I preach short storytelling is so you can get it done and move on to the next task. So I say take an inch before you take a mile. Nowadays, I can get people to pay me thousands of dollars. I can get people to show up and listen to me for hours. People will download my recordings, people will buy my courses. None of this happened until I learned to speak in 45-second increments.

If you’re the type of person who feels like you talk and talk and talk, and nobody listens to you, maybe you just need to learn how to say it shorter. So I’m here, and we’re reaching the end of our session soon. I want to get to any questions that you have, especially questions from Simona here who says that she can play accordion. God bless you, we need more folks like you.

But this is my simple script. So again, when I am making video prospecting videos, when I am reaching out to people that I want to get into my pipeline, this is the script. It starts with observing the truth. I establish relevance, and then I end by telling them how to respond. So, as we said at the beginning here, we’re going to start in the middle. For me, that’s observing the truth. So where can you find the truth? Pretty much anywhere. I see sellers reaching out all the time trying to tell me about where I went to college, being like, “Go Redbirds. I went to Illinois State.” Hey, I live in Chicago, Go Cubs. I’m not a good sports fan. I don’t actually know what the sports teams are doing right now. And it’s a shame, ’cause that person probably went through a lot of work preparing for how they could do their personalization at scale.

When I need to observe the truth, what I look for is I go find the company I’m trying to sell into and I check their social media. I check their social media, I check their content, I check LinkedIn, I check out a webinar. Marketing exists to be noticed. Also, anybody out there who uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator, this is a great place to observe the truth. In my sense, I’m often going to be focusing on the truth that lies in their tech stack. I’m a video prospecting coach. I can actually go into LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and I can see, are they using Vidyard? Are they using BOM BOM? Are they using Sense Spark? Are they using Loom? Sometimes if I’m really lucky, I can find their sales reps posting memes on LinkedIn about how people only watch 10% of their video. Hey, that’s great. That’s where I start with my video.

So first and foremost, I observe the truth. “Hey there Subhanjan, I’m reaching out because I know your team is using Vidyard, and I saw one of your reps make a meme about how they only get prospects to watch 10% of the video.” So I start with my truth. From there, I move on to establishing relevance. I say, “Hey, this actually is very unsurprising to me because I’m a video prospecting coach. I used to work with Vidyard. Now I’m a partner with Sense Spark, and I want to tell you that this is the most common thing that sales teams face. Early on, there’s no process, there’s no guidelines, everybody’s working in 50 million directions. So yeah, normally, 10% watch rates are very common. The reason why I want to reach out to you is because I focus on increasing those watch rates, and most of my clients see either 0% watch rates or 100% watch rates. My skill is actually getting people to watch the entire video, and I’m reaching out because I’ve found that when teams don’t have a process in place, they tend to waste a lot of time. They spin their wheels. They can’t make as many videos as they want, the videos they make aren’t effective, and it’s a huge loss to morale and a huge waste of time and money, and you end up losing deals that you otherwise could win.”

Then I close out by telling them how to respond. So I say, “Hey, if you are open to responding, or say sorry, so I say, ‘Hey, if you’re open to having a conversation with me about this, just respond with anything. If you send me a thumbs up emoji, I will send you my calendar so you can pick a time that’s good for you. And if you’re not interested in talking, let me know too. I don’t take it personally, but it doesn’t have to be a phone call. You can even just DM me back. But let me know if you’re interested in learning more, and I look forward to chatting with you soon.” And then after that, the most important part, I follow up afterward. So I know we’ve just flown through this presentation here, but we only get 20 minutes today. And hey, I’d be a real hypocrite if I was talking about how to do things short and I went over my time. So I am here to answer your questions if you are kind enough to ask me any questions. And if you would like to check out the complete guide to selling on video, it is my in-depth course on video prospecting. You can get at crispo.io, or you can scan the QR code you see on the screen. So TLDR, make it short. Simona says that I crack her up. I’m glad to hear that, Simona. It’s a lot easier to be funny if you only need to be second. So yeah, this is a period of time again, I know we’ve only got 20-minute segments here, but is there any question you have about how to write shorter videos or trends that I’ve noticed again….

Subhanjan Sarkar   

Yeah, I’ll kick start. Maybe we can go. Yeah, this is good. Thanks. Chris, this was great. I think I must say power-packed, a lot of energy there as the last session. I think bringing, you brought a lot of energy into it. I have a couple of questions before we have something from the audience, cold calling, which we don’t. I mean, I also said I don’t pick up. Some people said sometimes anyway. So, cold calling versus video outreach, which is also cold. What’s the difference?

Chris Bogue    

The difference is a cold call isn’t cold if you’ve already sent them a video, right? So if I call you and I say, “Hey, Subhanjan, I’m Chris Bogue, can I have 17 seconds to tell you why I called you? Want to roll the dice or do you want to hang up?” I’m some stranger who’s interrupting you, right? If I call you and I say, “Hey, Subhanjan, I’m Chris Bogue. I’m the guy that sent you a video two days ago. Can I just ask you what you thought about that real quick?” I’ve built relevance, right? Even if they didn’t watch the video, they saw it come through. They saw that I took the time to turn on the camera and reach out to them. And, you know, this is a video prospecting summit so I focused on video here. My clients cold call too, you know? And my whole thing about video is it does not replace the phone, it does not replace email. It should be working together with phone and email, you know? So I send that video before I make the call because I know that person is more likely to take the call if they’ve first received the video.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Fair enough. Do you see any particular difference in success in engagement depending upon where in the journey the customer is? For instance, do you see it at the beginning, middle, and, I mean, in a simplified manner? Or do you see it, for instance, for simpler products vis A vis more complex products? Do you see vis A vis software products or industrial products? Do you have any sense of where this is actually working?

Chris Bogue    

Yeah, so there are a lot of situations where you do not want the video to be your first touchpoint. So deliverability is the thing you have to think about, especially when you’re going completely cold, right? I have found if you’re working on a data list from Apollo and you know you’re going to be sending videos out there, I would actually probably recommend doing video as the second step as opposed to the first. Your job as a seller with email is to make it into the primary inbox, right? And oftentimes that’s going to mean not sending them ten different links in an email. Oftentimes that’s going to mean sending a plain text email as your first communication. So often times what I’m doing is I am having a very soft first touchpoint. Once you have cleared the bar, once you have made it into the primary inbox, Google can be like, “Okay, well, this person belongs here.” And then I can send a 45-second video after that saying, “Hey, something you mentioned got me thinking, so I figured I’d make a quick video for you.” And then that video is about one thing, but I had to clear the bar of getting into your inbox first. And LinkedIn is similar in this realm, right? So I’m not sending these videos in my connection requests. Probably the first thing that I’m going to do on LinkedIn if we connect together is I’m going to notice you first. I’m going to leave that, I’m going to click the like button on something you posted. I’m going to comment in response to something you said with a thoughtful response. Then I’m going to send that connection request right after we’ve got a little bit of momentum, and I’m going to say, “Hey, thanks, welcome to the network, you know, glad to have you here.” Usually, I only send that video once they have done something to respond to me. So oftentimes that first step is low commitment. It’s friendly, it’s cordial, it’s not asking for a 30-minute calendar meeting, most importantly. And then, yeah, I’ll send the video after that, and I’ll say, “Hey, here’s something I’d like you to think about.” And then I go through that same framework of observation, relevance, and instructions like, “Hey, I know that your team adopted Vidyard recently. You know, and I’m reaching out because here’s what usually happens to teams that start with Vidyard. Typically, they don’t have a process, everybody’s winging it, 10% watch rates are the norm. People get burnt out because there’s not easy instructions to follow, they don’t have a guideline for what it works, and they end up just not using it, you know? And that’s why I want to chat with you a little bit about what I’ve been doing. You know, this is what I specialize in; I’ve got some very interesting results here that I’d love to share with you, even if it’s just through DMS, just respond to this if you’d be open to knowing more, you know, or I have different call to actions that I ask for and we can explore that too if you have any questions about that. But yeah, I find you kind of got to get in. And to me, video is always about taking the relationship to the next step. Video kind of formalizes the relationship. So if I’m cold emailing, I can send lots of cold emails in a short amount of time. If I’m sending DMS on LinkedIn, I can send a lot of DMS in a short amount of time. Even at my fastest, I can send about 5 to 10 custom videos in an hour or two. And I’m the world record holder, by the way, for most Vidyards filmed, captioned, and sent in one day. I broke that record in 2021. 

As far as I know, nobody’s broken it yet, but I sent, and I created, and sent, and captioned 104 custom videos in one day. So yeah, 5 to 10, I think is pretty reasonable. And I only go after the people who I already have a little bit of momentum with. You know, so the system I teach my clients is that my leads are either green, yellow, or red. Yellow is 50/50, right? That’s a coin flip. No idea they fit my ICP. They’ve got the right job title, they’ve got the right size company, they’ve got the right problem. But I have no information about how they feel about me, right? Green leads are people who are more than 50% likely to respond, right? These are people who are already talking to me. These are people who have expressed interest in paying me, or they’ve talked about how they’ve been getting interested in putting together more of a serious process for video. And then red leads are people who are less than 50% likely to respond to me. So these are people who ignore me, these are people who ghost my meetings, these are people who don’t answer my calls. I send my videos to green and yellow leads, right? So that person is leaning towards, if I have a signal that they might respond to me, they get a video. If it’s a coin flip, and they’ve got the right job title, but I don’t know which way they’re leaning, I send them a video. If they’re red, I’m probably going to put them in more automated communications, right? I’m going to add them to a sequence. I’m going to do low touch, you know, low customization, things that don’t require a lot of my time. 

I find that B2B companies tend to do this backward. So they make their videos for those tough to reach leads, the leads that are ghosting them, the leads that aren’t answering their calls, and those people don’t respond. And then the gettable opportunities, they don’t send the videos for, you know? That’s why I started with the example of doing the calendar reminders for the upcoming meetings. I talked to sales professionals who are like, “Why would I ever do that? Google sends an automated reminder 24 hours before. I wish I could stop doing these, right?” But the data doesn’t lie, right? If I get on camera for 15 seconds and pop in and say, “Hey, looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday, here’s what we’re going to chat about, please let me know if you cannot make it.” They show up, right? So why wouldn’t I do it? And whenever anybody tells me their SDRs or their AEs don’t have time to get on video, I’m like, “How many meetings is your SDR setting?” You know, if they’re setting one per day, they’ve got five on the calendar next week. You know, let’s say they’re ambitious and they’re sending, they’re setting three meetings a day. That’s 15 meetings. You could knock that out in an hour. You know, if you’re just doing 15 seconds, literally, you pull up your calendar on one screen, you go one by one and say, “Hey, John, looking forward to chatting with you Monday. Here’s what I’m going to be talking to you about. See you there at 9 AM. Who’s next? Rebecca, okay, hey, Rebecca, looking forward to chatting with you on Monday at 2. Here’s what we’re going to be talking about.” I talk to these sales reps, and what they’re doing is they’re trying to make an Oscar-winning film. You know, they’re trying to like, I don’t know, it’s 5 minutes long, they’ve got all these visuals, they’re doing crazy comedy bits hanging from the ceiling, and I’m like, look, I’m a freaking comedian, you know, you look at what I do on LinkedIn, I do all sorts of crazy things on LinkedIn. If you watch my prospecting videos, they are me talking for 15 seconds straight to the camera with words on the screen because I am not treating it like a one-person presentation. I’m treating it like a two-person conversation. You know that other person is the main character here. I am the supporting character. And yeah, it’s not an Oscar-winning film. It’s like I’m popping into their office for 15 seconds, you know, and when you change that mindset, when you stop thinking like, “How can I get everybody with the most airtight sales case possible?” and start thinking about if I had to pop into their office and talk to them for 15 seconds, just enough to get a response, what would that look like? You write a completely different video, which again, there’s a reason why I came here and gave an entire 20-minute talk on why you should make your videos short.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, 15 seconds is typically from my television days, I can say that it’s like 30 to 40 words. And if you are able to do that right and if you’re having very specific tasks, it’s challenging to start with because making anything concise is difficult. We are all verbose, like what I’m being now, but it can possibly be done much pithier, much simpler, I guess.

Chris Bogue    

Yeah, and you know what’s the crazy part is usually all it takes for people to realize that is to watch their own video. When I sit down, and this is the most painful part of my coaching, everybody says, one, they hate the most and two, that it was the most helpful thing they did. We just sit down and watch their video together, and we get done. I don’t say anything. I go, “Subhanjan, what did you think of that? What was your impression of that as an audience member?” And usually, they say to me, I said thank you four times and I go, “Yeah, you could have said that once and still got the same point across.” You know, but we get so wrapped up in thinking about the other person; we don’t actually take the time to watch it. Sellers are like, “Oh, I don’t want to watch myself,” and it’s like, hey, if you watched yourself, you might realize that something needs to be improved.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

Do you have any comparative data between using video in the second stage and text or any other email or LinkedIn outreach? I mean, do you also use video inside LinkedIn for the continued conversation because that you can only do from the mobile, I am told.

Chris Bogue    

Yeah, or you can use a program like Sensepark or Vidyard or, you know, there’s a reason why I’m a Sensepark partner. There’s a reason why I advise sales teams to, and like Sensepark is great because they have templates, you know, you can have different templates where you have different calls to action built in. So I have some templates where the video ends with a link to set a meeting with me. I’ve got templates where it ends with a link to a case study that I’ve done, you know, there are ones where it ends with a link to a compilation of my videos or a link to my website. You know, like, there’s a lot of interesting bells and whistles that a lot of companies have built out there. But yeah, it’s like that’s kind of the other thing, too, it’s like, I bring up that first example of the Meeting preview because I’ve still never met any team that does it, and to me, it’s the most stupidly easy thing I can do to increase my show rates. And yeah, something I’d like the audience to think about is like, I don’t think any of these video companies out there have even begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with video for B2B sales, right, and that includes all the speakers you’re going to see , including me. You know, you’ve got some very fantastic speakers here. Melissa Gaglione, she’s also a Sensepark advisor. Yeah, I had her on my program; she blew my mind with like, she treats it like a news package, right, she used to be a news reporter. And yeah, she is an AE, she is on a fact-finding mission. And she builds this whole case for her prospect, you know? Now that is a completely different style than what I teach. You know, I teach speed, I teach, hey, you know, you got a team of 20 SDRS. How do you get them doing at least five a day, you know? But yeah, there are all sorts of use cases that I have not even imagined yet because this is pretty much a science in its infancy. It’s not like calling and emailing and running a presentation that they’ve been studying for decades.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Sure. So the last question, this is the one I had actually asked so this was from Art Fromm where he had sent this question in. So the final question to you is for this bit do you see this generative AI-based tools like today we had Hippo video, we had GanAI, you know come and talk about where generative AI can take this piece. I mean, the shorter piece, which is customization like showing up for the meeting, it can be a straightforward thing. You create once, and then it can sort of spew out videos on its own. You don’t even have to do anything because you’re literally telling. ‘hey Melissa Wednesday 9AM’ so that’s all that those are the only three variables and the rest is the same. Do you see that impacting? Well, not impacting as in replacing SDRS, but taking over a lot of these and thereby making life simpler.

Chris Bogue    

It’s probably not the answer you’re looking for, but I’m going to say yes and no, right? So I hate to rain on everybody’s parade here, but the AI will not save you, right? And I say this as somebody, again, I’m an advisor for SenseSpark. We have a fantastic new AI voice cloning program that does the same thing, right, where you can record one video. And using the magic of AI, generative voice cloning, you can change that opening so you’re putting different people’s names in there. It’s cool, it’s cool, and there are uses where I do that, right? I’ve got a video out there that I’m doing right now. I’m surveying everybody who’s purchased my course, everybody who’s paid for some of my cohorts and some of these smaller things that I’m sending a video, and yeah, that video starts with me saying, hey, I say the person’s name. The reason why you’re receiving this video is that you purchased my services last year, and I wanted to see if you’d be willing to give me your feedback, right? Pretty slick use for that. Like that works because I have a pool full of people that are all in the same situation, and I don’t need a drastic amount of customization to make a convincing case to each of them, right? I would say the risk with AI is if you’re automating a badly made, badly scripted video, it’s still going to be bad. And the hardest thing about teaching video and the reason why I, as a comedian, decided to do this, and the reason why I do a lot of very hands-on coaching, a lot of my exercises as a coach about getting people confident, getting people natural, getting people finding the best version of themselves on camera is because, like, it’s really not about saying the person’s name. 

You know, the difference between what I’m doing and what most sellers are doing on video is I have a different relationship with the camera. You know, I never take my eyes off the camera; I’m always looking square into the lens because I know the goal is to simulate human conversation. And I am not talking to my prospects like they’re holding a prize. Like, I want them to give me their time; I’m so desperate for it. I talk to them like they’re my friend. And that’s where the starting in the middle comes in; I’m not like, hey, I’m Chris Bogue, let me tell you how this and that happens. I come in and I’m like, ‘Joseph. I had to reach out because I noticed one thing, and I’m dying to tell you this, you know?’. And it’s like, I’m already skipping that beginning part, and I’m acting like we’re friends and I’m acting like I belong in their inbox. And I can act like that because I know that the first line that I have scripted is relevant to something real about their company. And all those steps combined mean that if I want to do some voice cloning and send that off to a few dozen people who are all in the same stage of the pipeline, the video still has a high chance of success. 

So I’m not going to say I don’t use these tools; I’m not going to say there’s no value in these tools. I will say that a lot of people try these AI-based tools and get disappointed because they never got to the point where they were able to make a good video in the 1st place. And if you clone a mediocre video, you’re still going to get mediocre results.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Wonderful, Chris, thank you so much; this was great, and I appreciate your taking the time and coming and sharing your thoughts with us. And if there is anything people ask post-event, I will sort of send them to you, and you can see if you can answer some of them. I will connect you with whoever wants to get connected with you. And anyway, I think most of them can reach you on LinkedIn; that’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Chris Bogue    

I’m a chatty Kathy; come chat with me about video prospecting. Be sure to ring the bell so you get all my updates, and yeah, if you want the course, it is not only 2 and a half hours of in-depth instruction for how to do video prospecting for every stage, your pipeline. It’s also got original sketch comedy in there like I’ve I have this thing is entertaining. I’ve made it so it pulls you from module to module. It is an immersive experience. I spent way too much time making this because, again, sometimes to make something short you have to put in a little extra work, but it’s worth it.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Thank you, thank you so much; we will come back to wrap this up. This was the last session. Word of thanks. We’ll be back in like a minute. Chris, thank you again.

Chris Bogue    

Bye, bye. Glad to be here.

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