Melissa Gaglione on Research & script writing to prep your video outreach.

Melissa Gaglione    

Thank you so much. So yes, we’ll dive right into this. There’s a lot to learn, a lot to cover in just a few minutes. I’m actually going to set my timer; this is a tool that I use very frequently, whether I am in the research phase, wanting to set a timer for how long it’s taking for me to research, or maybe setting my timer for how long it’s taking me to write a script or even for recording. I think we all know that whenever we send videos, there’s a lot of time that goes into it. So I like to leverage a timer all the time to keep me on track and so that way things are a little bit smoother. So let’s hop into it.

Wonderful background, exactly what we have here. I am currently an experienced mid-market and enterprise SaaS seller at Deal where I sell global payroll across the world. So that means that my buyers are in all different time zones, all different places. Often there are language barriers. And so I really need to be an agile and understanding seller to help accommodate all of these different people all over the world. So  the video was really powerful for that. I leverage video to help explain different pieces of the product. I leverage video to help book more meetings and bring more people in across the board. It just helps when not everyone can hop in on a call at, you know, 10:00 Eastern Time when I’m usually available. And so it helps to leverage video so people can watch it on their time.

When I first started video prospecting, I was focusing primarily just on cold video outreach. This was back when I was in SDR, and so when I first started as an SDR, I was losing. I was losing a lot. I wasn’t able to book the meetings that I wanted to book. Everyone else was doing it. They were making hundreds of cold calls during the day. They were sending hundreds of emails during the day. And when I just, you know, joined what they were doing, I wasn’t standing out. I wasn’t being strategic. I was just blasting everyone and, surprise, surprise, I wasn’t booking meetings. So I took the opportunity to craft a message and put it in a video. I sent it over LinkedIn, and that’s how I booked my very first meeting with the CEO of a very large furniture company in North America. At the time, I was selling chatbots and automation. So how to help you communicate with your customers on your website. And so that’s what I pitched to him. Once I booked that meeting, I realized that this is definitely the route I needed to go. Not only because, one, it was really fun for me to create that video, but it made a really strong relationship right off the bat. And I was able to bring in that buyer and really help progress that deal.

So on top of it, I was actually able to use all of my skills, which is exciting. It can be a little sad when you are an elementary school teacher and you get your master’s in elementary education and then you throw it all away. So it was really exciting to use my degrees both as an elementary school teacher as well as when I was an on-air news reporter for CBS because both of those tools and those skills I use every day in sales, especially when I am video prospecting. Of course, being a news reporter means that I’ve learned stage presence; I’ve learned how to tell a good story. I’ve learned how to edit, shoot film and really put it all together into a compelling video. And then elementary school teaching, I’ve learned, of course, how to really take information that’s super complex and break it down into something that’s really easy and digestible for the other person to receive, helping them understand.

And I think the number one thing when it comes to video is that all of our minds are changing the way that we are. You know, learning information is evolving more to video. We have a lot of visual learners out there. And so that’s really what video is going to accomplish. Many of our learners and the way that we ingest information isn’t just through reading anymore. So video’s really powerful, and it’s a way for us to not only communicate with the buyer but make it really easy for them to understand.

So to do that, you have to have a really good script. You have to be really tailored and really understand what message it is that you want to share with the buyer or the prospect. What is it that you want them to learn? And if you’re going in with a cold video, that means this is your chance to pitch in a strategic way to get them to buy in and say yes to your next meeting. But you need to come with a lot of research, and you need to prove why that person should now spend 30 minutes with you. And it’s a lot to prove. So let’s talk about how you can prove that. These are our objectives today: we’re going to research, we’re going to create, and we’re going to learn to book meetings and how you can scale this process.

So to get started, the way that I do videos is especially at this level. What I’m going to teach you today is very high level. You’re going after the C-Suite; you’re going after VP Plus. These are for your high-priority accounts. What I’m going to walk you through today takes time, which is why I have a timer. And for me, we want to be able to get you to do this in about 30 minutes so that way it’s really quick for you. Video can take time, but again, this is for your tier one accounts. So thinking about what are your top-priority accounts, your top ten, what is your ideal customer profile? Who are your current customers? You really want to be able to map out your accounts and know that if I’m going to spend 30 minutes making a video for someone, I need to make sure that if I were to bring them in on a call, they would be amazed by our product; they need our product. I can really help them because I’ve seen these challenges that they’re facing through my research phase. We want to know who we’re sending it to. I personally believe that videos are going for the C-Suite Plus, so I segmented it into three ways. Once you’ve identified your tier one accounts, it’s now who do you send a video to? So of course, my favorite is going to be the perfect person, someone who I’ve been able to identify is seeking my solution. They could have come inbound at one point. They could have stated in a podcast that they are looking at digital transformation for their customer service. They could have shared on LinkedIn that they’re looking to advance their operations with AI bots or they’ve experienced something really good.

You’d be surprised how much is out there; you just have to kind of go looking for it. But anytime that I can find the words of a prospect saying, “I need X” or “this is a challenge I’m looking to solve this year” or “my company’s focused on XYZ,” and if it aligns with my solution, then I’m going to leverage that in my video for credibility.

The next is high engagement and interest. So these are the prospects that are already engaged in your outreach. Maybe they’ve been in a sequence, and they’re opening every email, maybe they forwarded your email and sent it to a bunch of different people. This is your time to then make a video based on the engagement you see; they’re interested in what you’re sending them. They just need that little push to say yes to that meeting. So let’s leverage a video.

And finally, re-engaging in multi-threading. So has this prospect already engaged with you? Are you currently engaged with your organization? You need to get the economic buyer in on a call, or maybe you need to get a different department to come in. This is your time to leverage video to explain how you’re currently working with Sell and how you want to bring another person into the call.

Let’s get into the research here. So of course, the background is being a news reporter, so that meant that I spent a lot of time researching. It’s one of my favorite things, but that’s also why I have a timer because I could get really in on the research, and sometimes it’s hard for me to peel myself back.

To start your research, I suggest creating a folder so that way you can start saving your images, your videos, documents, articles, whatever it is that you’re finding about that account. Again, you’re trying to solve or find. If this is an account that has a problem, what can you solve for them, and if your solution aligns with it.

In that doc, you’re storing all of your research, your prospecting plan, your script, and then you’re creating a hypothesis. So what have you been able to find so far? Maybe you read, “Now, what I saw today is global payroll.” So maybe I see on Glassdoor a company website that shows company reviews by their employers. Maybe I read on Glassdoor that their global payroll managers are overworked. Maybe they’re hiring a lot of global payroll managers. Maybe they have just opened up an entity in Italy, which is a really complex place to run payroll; there’s a lot of compliance challenges there. All of that I’m saving into my articles, and I’m starting to identify and create a hypothesis here.

I’m looking at the research and I’m saying, “Well, it seems like this company has expanded into Italy, but they haven’t hired any full-time employees yet. I’m wondering if they’re having difficulty creating payroll in Italy because I know it’s a complex place, so maybe that’s how I’ll start it off.”

When you’re researching, you’re going to start to identify your go-to places. When I was selling chat, something that was really important to me was going on SimilarWeb and being able to identify how much volume a company has on their website. Because the more volume on their website means, most likely, the more inquiries they’re getting, the more questions they might be receiving. I also would call up their customer support to see how long it took for them to answer; the length of time, if it took them 15 minutes to get someone on the phone, we could have been using a bot to handle that conversation. So all of these things, whatever it is that you’re selling, you start to learn your go-to places, and it just gets faster and faster and faster.

Then once you find evidence, you’re going to start to identify at the account level who really cares about this and who’s responsible for solving it. You’re really looking for a change-maker. Again, this is a very research-driven approach, so you want to make sure you’re doing this for your top-tier accounts. By using this framework and doing this research, I’ve been able to break into some of the largest brands: Abercrombie and Fitch, Big Lots, Blue Nile, The Diamond Company. All of those I booked meetings with C-Suite executives just through sending a video. I didn’t blast them with a million emails or LinkedIn messages. I was hyper-strategic.

If you want to prospect a little bit more, you can start to build out your list of your target prospects. You can create these booleans on LinkedIn where you’re essentially just putting in keywords to try to find things. You’re doing research on Google, searching podcasts, articles, videos with some sort of pain that you solve. An example is putting the prospect’s name and then what it is that you solve for to see if anything comes up that could be a challenge that you solve for. Maybe you’re going on YouTube and pulling the transcripts through Command F; you can even use some ChatGPT plugins there to be able to pull the transcripts from the video itself and then search within there, maybe asking it to identify what the challenges are that the prospect has mentioned. There’s so much you can do.

As you’re doing this research and identifying who you’re going to send these videos to, you’re taking screenshots, grabbing quotes, and storing all of this in your documents so you’re saving it all. Once you’ve identified your hypothesis and all the research that’s going to help gain credibility, it’s time for you to start putting it together into a script. So this is my script-writing process; it’s the same every time. Once you start identifying the challenges that you solve for, where you seek the information to identify those challenges for a company (that’s Glassdoor, maybe Rep view, maybe SimilarWeb, lots of places you can find information, maybe it’s Crunchbase), then you’re identifying the type of person who would typically buy your solution. Who can you find that you can present this information to because you know that they care about it? Especially since you saw on their LinkedIn that they have spearheaded initiatives in the past or maybe they saw a podcast or an article or anything like that.

Now it’s time for you to write this script. So in these four sentences, it’s going to be faster and faster. Eventually, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have kind of the same script, and you’re just going to be tweaking it a little bit. You’re just going to be inputting the different company, the slightly different challenge, and maybe the different evidence that you have. So it’s going to get faster and faster and faster.

Sentence one in your script writing is going to be leading with the problem and the hypothesis. In the news, it was really important that the very first thing that I said was what is happening and why should the viewer care? Everyone’s busy. People are, you know, they’re scrolling on their phones, their dog is barking, they’re trying to hop on another meeting, they have a million things coming at them at once. So the first sentence needs to hook them so that way they continue to watch the rest. And let’s be honest here, your videos need to be short, 60 to 90 seconds, nothing longer. So it’s got to be concise. What is happening to the company and why should they care? If the global payroll example that I had before is what is happening to that company, I see that they’re expanding into Italy, why should they care? Italy’s compliance is high risk, and they need to be very cautious about their payroll provider there.

Sentence two is why that? Why are you reaching out to that very specific person? So what research and evidence do you have at this point? I’m talking about how now Italy is a tier one challenge, a place of compliance; maybe I’m pulling in statistics about the number of companies that have seen these compliance issues, these compliance challenges. While I’m pairing that with how I was able to identify on Glassdoor that their payroll managers are also at capacity and they need help, so they probably can’t also manage another location plus the complexities of compliance there.

Sentence 3 is going to be the cost of inaction or the greater impact. So what would happen if they solved this problem? And then what would happen if they don’t? You can choose if you want to go with the cost of inaction or the greater impact; it’s truly up to you. Some people can merge these together; however, you do want to be mindful of your time commitments and how long this video is. Truthfully, whatever you think is most compelling, follow your gut. But what would happen if they did solve this problem and they did have a compliance payroll? Well, then their employees would be paid on time. Their employees would be happier because they’re not having to worry about their payroll experience. They would be able to retain more employees in these locations because they are not being hit with compliance law challenges or their paychecks aren’t being held against them.

So just a few examples there, and then Sentence four is going to be the solution to the problem. So how have you helped others? You want to use examples of who solved this problem and some similar problems and really what was the result here? So once you put all of this together, you’re just answering these questions, you’re writing it out, and then you’re going to end with a call to action. I like to do a soft CTA, which is essentially not putting a hard time commitment because again they’re watching this on their own time. So are you open to meeting in the near future to discuss this, or are you open to learning about how X companies solve this with my company today? Very open-ended, that’s my vibe. I’m not a hard CTA person where I say, are you available next Thursday at 3 pm? I don’t know when they’re going to watch this, so a softer CTA for me. We have about a minute left before we hop into questions. We went through a couple of slides here; there is a lot when it comes to script writing. I do think that it’s important that when you are recording your story that you are using a teleprompter. There is an app called Teleprompter that you can download, or you can use the script that you have and put it at the top. It’s just a little bit easier to read the words than it is for you to memorize everything. When I was a reporter, the way that we used to memorize information was understanding what are the three points I’m trying to say. So the hook, my 3 points, and then wrapping it up. Very similar here if you want to memorize it but I do recommend writing out your script, putting it on a teleprompter, and then reading it out.

Alrighty, I think it’s time we can go into questions because my timer is up. Alrighty so we have a question here that says, Number of seconds, Videos, versus leads. Let me see here.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Yeah, so basically the question is, do you have any sense whether there is any correlation between the leads with the length of the video? Like a shorter video will have fewer leads and a longer video will have more leads and vice versa or whatever. Is there any correlation at all?

Melissa Gaglione    

I think that the longer this cold video outreach is, the less likely you’re going to hear from them. To me, 60 to 90 seconds is fair. You’ll be able to get everything that you need to say; anything beyond that script, I don’t think it’s fully necessary. So you’ll see a drop-off if it’s too long; you just will. Or they might get frustrated or annoyed if you’re taking too long to get to the punch, then they’re not gonna watch the full thing. And then you’ve wasted time and you’ve evoked a different type of emotion. Truthfully, video evokes emotions, right? That was the purpose in reporting; you want the viewer to feel something. You want them to feel that they need to donate to that charity. You want them to feel that they need to, you know, feel empowered by whatever it may be happening. And so in this example, if it’s too long or if you’re not getting to the point or if you’re just kind of on this monologue and you’re ranting a little bit, the other person on the other end is going to feel annoyed that you’re wasting your time. So be fair with the amount of time that you’re, you know, allocating for the video. I think it’s really important to also state the time commitment. So either that being in your email, in your message. I also like to edit it and put it on top so that way it says a ninety-second video about X. So that way the prospect knows what they’re opting into and they’re not just clicking and they realize, “Oh my God, this is a 5-minute video”; like they’re just going to exit out right away.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Right. So do you have a sense of where video is working better? Is it for cold outreach, or is it to post the initial connect when you are sort of trying to build the relationship?

Melissa Gaglione    

So I mean, I use it throughout my sales cycle, so I use it in the very beginning, of course, but I find it really powerful throughout the sales cycle. I think that when you’re going in cold with video, this is how you get your tier one accounts; this is how you get C-suites; this is how you get, as Brandon Fluharty talks a lot about, your diamond account hunting. These are the accounts that you’re going after that you think are going to probably bring in the majority of your quota accounts. I don’t know what everyone’s quota is, but you’re thinking if I were to get this meeting, I know they’re going to spend, you know, X amount. This is a company that I can really bring in. I think that when you’re leveraging video later in the sales process, it is going to continue to build that relationship. It really helps if you are demoing a product and you need to share a little bit more, of course. But when it comes to building the relationship, it’s going to be powerful no matter what. In the beginning, I feel if I send it cold and then they join me on a meeting after, they’re like, “Oh, Melissa, like they’re,” it’s already warmed up; they’re already feeling more comfortable with me. There’s a little bit of trust there. I did a lot of the research upfront, so they feel they know that I’m there to really guide them throughout this process. And it’s a little bit more of a warmer lead, and the relationship is already deeper. If we’ve started with video, then I’m going to continue to use video throughout our process unless they explicitly said, “Melissa, we’re not interested in the videos”; like thanks so like we’ll keep going.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

So typically how many videos are you able to do? I mean obviously a lot of work goes into the research. That’s the key; that’s really what your session is also about that you need to do the research, need to. I mean, why do you say that it gets easier because you have a format and so on and so forth; you get used to it. In your case, how many videos are you able to make in a day? Or do you do it like that, or are you doing it like once a week? How does it work for you?

Melissa Gaglione    

So I tell people, starting off, if you’re gonna go this route of cold video outreach, do one a week, that’s it. Like choose one tier one account; there’s only so many tiers, and you know, just focus on one a week until you start to build your stamina; you start getting faster with it. Things start clicking. You start seeing results as well. You don’t want to put everything into it upfront because if you don’t see results in a few weeks, then you’re going to be mad at yourself, and you’re going to be burned down; you’re going to say video doesn’t work, and if that’s not true, it does work. You just need to refine your process as you go and identify what works best for you. For me, I send videos all day long every day. I can’t tell you how many I send; dozens like it’s pretty ridiculous to be honest but I also send videos even internally. So even if I need to get my boss to sign off on a specific price or something, I’m sending him a quick pitch video as to why we need to do something special for that client. I’m also sending videos to my clients about: okay, you can’t figure out how we would do time tracking. Let me send you a quick one-minute video on how you’ll be able to do that with our platform.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Got it, got it. Wonderful, wonderful. Any thoughts about whether, you know we had two sessions about using AI tools to mass produce videos with like you make one and then you sort of customize certain points and send it out. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Melissa Gaglione   

I do. I think it can be totally done, right, 100 %. I think you just have to be smart with it. And so if you are going to go the route of scalability, then you’re probably not going to send that directly to your tier one accounts. You might be looking at Tier 2, Tier 3, or even lower-level people at those accounts if you’re going to do video at scale. I do feel they still need to be personalized and they do need to be relevant. So whatever type of video tool you’re using to scale it does matter. So that could be if you’re just taking pieces of it, maybe you’re personalizing the first piece and you’re talking about why them, you know, why they should care in the evidence. And then maybe the last piece of that script, which is, you know, a relevant customer story, the art of the possible like what would happen if they make that change in the CTA. That piece can be fully replicated from each time you’re doing it. So you can only do the 1st two to customize and then the latter half fully be from, you know, already created videos that you’re just plugging and playing in.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Right. Melissa, thank you so much this is great before I let you go and play one expert speak over here. We have reached out to other you know, experts, so friends who have some thoughts. So if you for a moment stop sharing, I will quickly play one video and we will end our session.

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