Doug Lehman on Leveraging Video for Customer Success: Collaborating with Existing Customers, Prospecting and Beyond

Doug Lehman   

Oh, it’s great to be here.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

To introduce him briefly, Doug is the founder of Lehman’s Terms. He has a true passion for leveraging sales and digital media content to grow business revenue and improve client retention. That specializes in the art of story selling. Working with sales professionals, service trainers, speakers, authors, and business owners producing personalized training videos, interviews, testimonials, and event video spotlights. Selected projects include Video Producer and Interview Correspondent for the outbound sales conference that’s a big one. Video content training specialist for performance solutions by design. Video media Producer for the sales experts channel that’s where we met and even videographer for the Cam Dream Foundation in layman’s terms, keeping its social, leveraging video for better sales conversations. During this session, Doug will explore video outreach strategies for better sales conversations across the entire buyer’s journey. Video best practices for improving customer success, client retention, and building on advocacy. How can we leverage video for post-sales engagement opportunities, creating user-generated video content? I’ll leave you to Doug. Enjoy his session. I’ll be back at the end of the presentation with questions. Over to you, Doug.

Doug Lehman    

Thank you, Subhanjan, and thank you for the kind words. I’m excited to really be here to present for the first video Prospecting Summit. There’s so many dynamic speakers to play in the sales, marketing, and video space there’s a lot to learn, and I’ve got a lot to cover in a short period of time. And Subhanjan alluded to earlier, we met through the sales experts channel a few years back, and I was tasked with doing video profile interviews with sales and service leaders, and that’s a form of user-generated content, video, social proof, and that’s one of the techniques and strategies that I’m going to share with you today. Got a strong passion for sales, video, and customer success. And I’ve done other projects like Subbajan alluded to the Outbound Conference, but enough about me, it’s really all about you, better yet, it’s all about leveraging the voice, better yet the video of the customer. 

As Subhanjan alluded to, I’m going to discuss the topic of leveraging video for customer success, going with video prospecting and beyond really working with your existing clients and customers. Now, some of the agenda highlights in this short presentation will be covering video messaging framework. Why video voice of the customer, video outreach tips, best practices for post city, post sales, video and future video concepts. Video messaging framework, whether it’s prospecting or working with your existing clients and customers, you’ve got to have a framework, you’ve got to have a strategy for your outreach for video messaging. In layman’s terms, I broke this down into the five CS of framework, you got to have the right content, the right context, the right channel, the right cadence, and the right call to action content specifically means the point of view and value from your customer’s perspective, it’s all about your customer. You’re competing for time and you’re competing for attention with them, you’ve got to deliver value and insight context. Who’s your audience when you’re doing video messaging is it a one to one personalization or is it 1 to a small group or a broadcast message? 

Scalability, time personalization, customization, those factors all come into play, know the context. Make sure that your video is understood and delivers insight. Are you on the right channel with your video message? Are they active on email or are they active on a social networking site like LinkedIn, that’s a great place to leverage where your clients are. Your message has to be seen and it has to be heard on the right channel. Cadence, I’ve sent you a video message via email, but I still want you to watch it and if you haven’t watched it or replied, call that individual on the phone and leverage voice text using a multiple touchpoint way ’cause your message needs to be seen and heard. And, of course, a call to action could be as simple as replying. Would you like to set up a meeting or what we sent in this video message? Is it of interest to you? Set a goal in mind with the Call to action the five CS are critical not to the matter at hand it’s all about the customer it’s all about the customer point of view. When I mentioned the 1st 5C of value. 

Here are some ideas focused on business impact: share some educational insight, answer a question, Offer to assist solve a problem. Serve up a purposeful story. Provide insight who, what, where, when and why it’s all about the customer and delivering that value i can’t say that enough. Now leveraging video with your existing customers, going beyond prospecting, it’s crucial today in business. I personally believe that your best sales force is your current clients and customers that can advocate on your behalf they are your best clients out there for referrals for repeat business. Talking to your clients, your partners and peers is a great way to generate more business. 

I got a couple statements, just at the top of my mind. When you think about working with existing clients and customers, is it easier to assess, access new clients or access your existing clients, shortening your sales cycle, lowering customer acquisition costs using your current customer base. It is powerful and it’s powerful for a number of reasons. 

One, being able to access your clients, you can reduce customer acquisition costs, some of the benefits increase customer loyalty, improve the concept of upselling and crossing with your existing client base. I want you to think about video as your lead actor and text and audio as a supporting cast working with your customers there’s several benefits working with your current client base beyond prospecting. So in this presentation, we’re going to get to the actual topic here: wholesalers, video engagement, user-generated content, serviceability, videos, status update videos are the three main areas that I want to focus on. And it’s all about leveraging from customer experience, having that great customer experience, building on customer loyalty and then position your clients as advocates. These three types of video content, user-generated content, testimonials, case studies, product reviews, serviceability, videos to build on that customer SAT and customer loyalty and of course status update videos leveraging video as a communication tool of choice across the entire customer journey and buyer cycle video stories and artificial intelligence I want to kind of close with this section right here. There’s a lot of programs out there with AI, artificial intelligence, and let’s take a look at that from the standpoint Real recognizes real, real authentic video testimonies are powerful. If you’re gaming the system with deep, fake videos and artificial intelligence, I’ll be very leery of that. I love artificial intelligence from a standpoint of video and editing production. Captions using tools for captions in text to support the video. Doing your Social Research prior to engaging with your customers. Before you even engage in a video, you’ve got to do your customer research. Artificial intelligence tools, large language learning models like chat GPT are great resources to do customer research. I like to use the phrase social watching, social watching from the standpoint of before I engage with a customer to send a video or a message outreach campaign, I’m going to look at their website, their white paper obviously but I’m also going to see if they’ve been on a video podcast and they’ve been on a podcast getting that other Intel. I call social watching the plan, your story that leverages a common ground point of view when it comes to AI and sales or AI and video testimonials for that matter. Automation, speculation, customization, and personalization are all factors that you’ve got to take into account. And if you’re not leveraging video for prospecting or that area, you’re just putting a bag over your head and you’re being blind to the sight of how powerful video is. And it’s really powerful working with that untapped resource of your current clients and customers. 

I’m Doug putting it to you in layman’s terms, I’m just really passionate about working if your existing clients and customers, I know I covered a lot in a short amount of time, but if we leverage voice better yet the video of your customer to improve those sales conversation, it does wonders and leveraging those five CS of being on the right content, the right context, on the right channel with the right call to action, with the right cadence all goes into play. 

Thank you and I look forward to your questions and if I can help in any way let me know.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Doug, that was awesome, such a great start to the event and there was so much you packed in I’m really I’m still sort of absorbing all that you covered. There is a Q & A and a channel where you can post your questions there. You can also post it in the chat. There is also a discover more button on the bottom right hand if you click on that, you will be linked to some material that Doug is sharing with us today for you. So do that. While you guys think of some questions, I will share one. This is something which has come so we have got multiple questions as people signed up, Dough so this is one of those. Let me just share that with you. This is from Steve Lahm. He asks what are the most effective strategies to incorporate videos for growing product awareness and driving leads?

Doug Lehman    

I think the first step of any type of effective strategy is to talk to your customers to incorporate what they want for growing product awareness. I look at videos, touch points across the entire awareness phase from the decision phase you can talk about the funnel, but standpoint incorporate videos anywhere. There’s a touch point where video makes sense and I’m all in on video, but there’s areas where video doesn’t make sense. So whether it’s the phone email, but generate the awareness points, you know effective strategies, growing product awareness, educational videos are great because it educates the customer about your products, your awareness NEWS UPDATE videos, essentially some of the post video updates that I talked about anything where you got to communicate through video that grows awareness i don’t know if I answered a specific product or question if you’ve got more on that, I could address that, but you’ve got different touch points across the buyer’s journey.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

Okay, here is another one, this is from Eric, who is here with us.

Doug Lehman    

I think video chat bots are and the question is great presentation thank you. Did you mention video chat bots? I really didn’t get into that but I think AI video chat bots are all about customer success. I do like the fact that if you get your question answered with a chat bot efficiently because you’re looking for efficiency. I still like the dialogue of a face to face call or at least an audio call for customer support. At least that’s my interaction with a chatbot. If a chatbot can handle what I need quickly, I get it. I do think that they are great tools and we’re going to see more and more of that.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Ok.

Doug Lehman   

And as far as the tool goes, I’m I, I, you know that’s something that I can come back with you on that there’s a few out there, but no the chatbots are where a lot of things are headed sorry.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Okay, actually Eric corrected, he says that he was referring to live video chat bots, the one-on-one customer support member kind of thing. Would you like to not respond to that at all? We are out of time though. Yeah, I think, I think we’ll come back to this. Sorry Doug and sorry Eric, we will try and come back to this thank you everybody and thank you start, Doug. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful day and we will continue this dialogue.

Doug Lehman  

Absolutely thank you all.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Thank you. Bye, we’ll be coming up with the next session in a minute or two.

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