Funny, Human, and Effective: Chris Bogue on Using Video to Sell Without Selling Out

Chris Bogue joins Chris Nelson on Human Marketing to unpack the real power of video in sales, content, and comedy.

From Second City improv to viral LinkedIn skits, Chris shares how he helps brands and sales pros connect through pattern-breaking video.

They dive into scripting with soul, the limitations of AI tools, and how to craft video DMs that actually get replies.

Plus, why human imperfections, not cinematic polish, are what drive connection in the feed.

Connect with Chris Bogue on LinkedIn

Chris' Free Pattern Breaker Course



Hosted by Chris Nelson, Founder of Human Video

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Video Podcast Remotely Developed, Produced, Edited & Distributed by Human Video

Learn more at Human Video's Website

• (00:01) - Meet Chris Bogue: From Improv Stages to Video Strategy
• (03:00) - Accidental LinkedIn Stardom & Video Prospecting Breakthrough
• (08:30) - Scaling with Courses: Selling on Video & The Pattern Breaker
• (13:05) - Serious People Still Laugh: Entertainment in B2B Content
• (19:00) - Inbox vs Feed: Why Your Sales Videos Shouldn’t Be Weird
• (22:44) - Is AI Ruining Video? Authenticity vs Perfection in the Feed
• (28:30) - Why Human Connection Beats Perfect Production Every Time
• (34:00) - Fighting ChatGPT: Creative Control in the Age of AI
• (39:00) - Crafting Better Scripts & The Power of Point of View
• (45:00) - The LinkedIn Video Shift: What Works (and What Doesn’t)
• (49:00) - Sending Great Video DMs: Tactics That Actually Work
• (55:30) - The Sales Funnel and Where Video Really Belongs

Creators and Guests

Host

Chris Nelson

Founder of Human Video

What is Human Marketing?

Chris Nelson, Founder of Human Video, chats weekly to global marketing leaders about how, in an age of AI, we can humanize B2B marketing.

Even in the B2B marketing world 'people buy from people' and including real authentic human content in your strategy has never been more important.

Topics discussed include, founder-led branding, thought leadership, social proof, humanizing your brand, marketing to the the 95% and how to get your audience to know, like and trust you.

Welcome to Human Marketing, a weekly podcast for B2B marketers, unpacking how brands can stay authentic, demonstrate authority, and build trust as AI floods or feeds with content. I'm Chris Nelson, founder of Human Video. We remotely produce podcasts and other video content, real humans and just the right amount of soul. I'm delighted to be joined today by Chris Bogue. Chris will be well known to many on LinkedIn and TikTok, offering video coaching for sales, video content strategy workshops, keynotes and hilarious videos. Welcome Chris.

Thanks for having me.

Chris, I've known you for a while on LinkedIn, myself, a senior stuff. As I say, people will know you for a lot of comic content, which is really refreshing. I guess on LinkedIn also, your main, I mentioned all the things you do there, but one of the main things I know you're from and where we first got connected was you have two online courses helping folks get better at selling on video and creating video content. And the most recent course was actually currently a free offering of the pattern breaker, and that's where I first got in touch with you. I took up the opportunity for the free course and as soon as I watched it, I immediately clicked on the right and bought your other course. I don't remember, it was such great stuff. Just as a starter, tell me a little bit about, I guess, how you got to this point, what led up to that We're telling a little bit before we started here about your background in improv and comedy and writing, but yeah, tell me a little bit about the Chris Bogue story, if you could.

Thank you. Yeah, so my name is Chris Bogue. I've been coaching people on video. I've been using video prospecting for sales for about five or six years now. That was a total accident. Everything you see me doing on LinkedIn, I put a lot of content on LinkedIn. Total accident did not ever anticipate being a LinkedIn content creator. It was really one of those right place, right time kind of things. I was in sales, I was selling to universities. COVID happened originally. The three best ways to reach my prospects were call their office, visit them on campus or visit them at an educational conference. So none of those were available to me anymore. All my trips were cancelled, everybody left the office, still had a quoted a hit. I started getting on video and I started just sending super short super direct open videos to the people I was reaching out to.
And I've had some experience on camera. I've done a little bit of TV work and then I've also done a lot of stuff on stage, so I didn't really know anything in terms of video production. I just started talking to the camera, just started talking directly to my prospects and I quickly realised that I could get a meeting with basically anybody I wanted and people who had been ignoring my company's cold emails and cold calls for years were suddenly open to speaking with me. And at the time, I had no brand, I had no formal training for LinkedIn. I did not know anything about video. I did not know how to do thumbnails or subtitles or j and l cuts or text on screen or any of that. All that stuff was completely foreign to me, but I was pretty good at being able to just look at the camera and speak for about 45 seconds and it turns out that's really all you need.
And I jumped full on into video prospecting because I just realised this is a really powerful form of communication that has not been studied. The way phone calls and emails and running a sales presentation, people have been writing books, people have been studying that stuff for a long time. For some reason there's basically no research on video prospecting aside from the video companies themselves. And I started serving my network and I found out that even companies that were paying for these video prospecting tools were sending on average fewer than five videos per month per rep. And I was like, how could that be?
We are in this fantastic future where everybody has this amazing HD video camera in their pocket. We all have video, the ability to make great video. Why is nobody making video? Why is nobody in sales doing this? And I found it's either because you have writer's block or stage fright. Either you don't know what to say or you are nervous to say it. And when people do make a video, it ends up being long. It ends up being like a five minute unsolicited demo. They just kind of send you their demo and it's them talking through the website and I'm like, no, actually, if you just go talk to someone and you treat the video instead of your opportunity to show them a demo, if you use it as an opportunity to establish a human connection, it's so powerful and you can get on people's radar.
So simply, and I was doing sales coaching and sales training and sales consulting, and then I started getting inquiries about video content because my content is oftentimes just weird as hell. I play multiple characters. I'm always trying to do visually weird things that just kind of break the pattern and catch people off guard. And it's because I was doing sketch comedy for a long time. I was a sketch comedian, I was an improv national champion. I spent a lot of time writing and directing shows at Chicago's Second City, which is a theatre that's been around since the 1950s. I've done a lot of workshops, I've done a lot of group improv training. I've written a lot of shows that I was not in. A lot of times I would be up in the booth. I tend to think I have a very good sense of being able to write for other people and help other people look good.
And yeah, I started just doing weird stuff on LinkedIn and people were like, I want to do that too. I'm like, good. That's what I'm trying to do here. When you're in comedy, everybody thinks it looks so easy, and so I'm trying to be like, yeah, go ahead. Just turn on your camera and go boo boo boo. And then they discover that it's not quite as easy as that and then maybe they'll get the course or something. But that's how I started doing stuff on LinkedIn. It was just kind of the right moment for me because I've spent a lot of time playing to small rooms. It's one thing to get a standing ovation when you've got a packed house and you are the headliner. When you're the opener and there's fewer than 10 people in the audience and they're not laughing, you have to do a good show anyway, so I'm used to playing to small audiences. I'm used to working a room where you have to make people feel like they're part of something and they just saw something that was cool and that they were a part of it, their feedback, their suggestions, their whatever. If you're doing crowd work, it determined kind of the outcome of the show. And so I just started doing that on LinkedIn. I started doing interactive stuff where I started pulling the audience in and it ended up being a lot of fun. And now I do about as much content coaching as I do sales coaching.

Okay, amazing. Yeah, it was a lot in there. I assume then that led to the creation of the courses to help more people and to scale that in terms of beyond the one-to-one started with the complete guide to selling on video. Is that right?

That's the first

Course, yeah.

What happens? So I tell people, don't make a course unless somebody asks you to
Because they're hard to make one. I was having clients who were telling me like, Hey, could you turn this into a course because it's dense? We would do either a one-time coaching session or we would do monthly coaching where they're working with me once a week and there's just a lot to video. You think about sales traditionally it's if it's email, it's like, okay, you're focusing on the words. Maybe you're teaching them how to do a presentation. So there's a slide deck in there. Video is your words, and it's how you show up and it's text on screen and it's thumbnails. And then there's a lot of theory behind how do you get the person to click, how do you get the person to watch, how do you follow up with them? What should people be doing for editing? There's all these questions, and also there's a lot of LinkedIn theory in there too.
There's a lot of how do you find the people that are right for you? How do you get them into your network without seeming like a creep? How do you ask for a sales meeting in a way that's actually going to get a response and maybe a conversation? There's just a lot there. And people, I move very fast, very, my mind goes super fast and it can be super helpful because there's a lot of tasks to do associated with video. But yeah, people were asking me like, Hey, is there any way you could release this in some sort of format where I can go through it slowly and that's how the complete guide to selling on video

Is and keep going through it or go back on something you weren't quite sure of or come back to it a few months later or something specific, maybe you're needing to focus on the latest course. Then the one that I found first about breaking the pattern. Can you tell me a little bit about the thought behind that? What led to creating second course and what's that all about?

Yeah, so my newest course is called the Pattern Breaker. And yeah, again, it is that same kind of idea where it's like there's a lot of people who I know the sales stuff is super valuable and I just know I've been a sales guy all my life where it's like they're not going to call you. You got to go out there and ask them. You got to go ask a lot of people. And the video allows you to be understood. It allows you to communicate in a way that conveys respect. You can show up as something more professional and respectful and more welcoming, more friendly than 99.9% of what they get in their inbox. But people don't really have a lot of patience for that, and they just see the feed and they want to go out there and start doing stuff in the feed.
And yeah, it's this thing where we all can't help but look at our engagement and if making video content, if you're making any sort of content out there, you think all the time about the number of comments you get and the number of views you get and all that stuff. And it changes a lot. And the algorithm in many ways is outside of our control, but I'm always able to have a fairly decent audience out there because again, I'm always going straight to the audience. I'm always crowdsourcing from the audience. I am always looking to the conversations that are happening right now in order to figure out how can my positioning come in here? How can I do something that's going to reach my people? And again, it's like I try to make these courses full of the lessons that I don't see other people talking about. A lot of the things that I learned was one, either on stage or two, I learned from a lot of talkers and YouTubers who basically invented the whole kind of creator influencer genre. And I get a lot more advice from them than I do from LinkedIn influencers who always steer me wrong, always.

I can imagine as, I mean, do you get people saying This isn't serious enough, this content, this isn't TikTok on LinkedIn. Why are you creating this sort of content? Is there any?

Not really. It's funny, people usually when I have something really odd and out there and funny, it's because it is educational. I am wrapping it up with a little bit of presentational humour because my audience would not consume it otherwise. It's like when you feed pill to a dog and you wrap it up in a little bit of lunch meat first, people think they want serious content, but I know that they don't. And that's another thing you learn as a performer. You'll end up getting hired for some ritzy blue blood kind of hoity-toity black tie events. And so you're like, oh God, these people are so rich, I really got to go high brow. And then as soon as you drop a fart joke, the whole place just lights up and you're like, oh, far. Okay, let's do it. Let's do it guys. And then it's just like, I don't know, there's a misconception that serious people don't laugh at stuff, and that's just not true.
We have one screen, everybody has one screen that we are competing for, and your prospect that you're trying to reach, they might not be answering text messages from their kids. Their wife is texting them and they're ignoring it. Here you come trying to give them business content. What chance do you have? You got to do something interesting. And that sounds really overwhelming to people, but again, I kind of try to break it down into a little system of the pattern breaker where it's like, okay, first you got to listen to your audience a little bit, talk to them, find out what's important to them, what kind of expectations do they have? What places do they hang out in? What do they think is a real problem? What do they not think is a real problem? What do they think is a waste of time? You got to start with that. Start with what are they already used to and then just show up as something slightly different than that. Do you ever play any board games, Chris?

I am not a big board game player or family weren't, but I have friends that invented games and kind of drew me into that world a bit.

So there is a board game design principle at the heart of all of this oftentimes that I'm using, and I forgot who was explaining it once I heard this wonderful explanation for how to design a board game
And they said, you want to design a board game? What you do is you create a very, very, very strict set of rules and then you selectively allow your audience to break them. So you set up, you say, okay, here's the rule. You roll the dice, you roll the dye, throw it, however, whatever number you get, that's how many spaces you move forward unless you get a four. Then if you get a four, you can move forwards or backwards. You slowly, you give them little chances to break the rules, and that's why a board game feels like it's fun. So I tell people, if you go and you look up a list of the nine rules for writing a good professional cold email, if you follow nine of those rules and then you just break one of them as egregiously as possible, that's the kind of thing that gets noticed because it almost fits the pattern.
It's just a little bit up all the people who are just trying to adhere to the pattern a hundred percent, they're going to get swallowed up in the noise because patterns, patterns are how we know what is important, but it's also how we know what we should be ignoring. So if there's a pattern we keep seeing and we keep ignoring it, yeah, that's just kind of like a mental time saver for us. But if you show up as something that's just a little bit off the pattern and people think, wait a minute, that ain't right. Now you've got that. You kind of pulled them in. And so that's what I teach people to do with their video content. You have to find a way to subvert their expectations just a little bit, just one little thing, right in the first 1.5 seconds and now you've got your shot.
Now you've got, you give them your wonderful information or whatever visual treat you have in store, but they don't know that they want it yet. You kind of got to surprise them. And part of the reason why I did the pattern breaker two is because it's the opposite of how I do sales. People see me making funny videos on LinkedIn, so they go, oh, he must be sending funny videos to people, and then they take a business meeting with him because he's so funny. But no, actually I am being incredibly straightforward in sales. That's kind of my whole approach to selling on video is you want to show up as more real, more human, more interested in them than everybody else in their inbox that day. Because when you're dealing with sales, you want somebody who's going to talk to you straight.
The feed is where you can go get weird. And if I go to my inbox, it's probably because I want something specific and I want to get out as fast as possible. I'm looking for an email from my boss or an email from a client, or that 30% off promo that's about to expire from my favourite store. I want to get in there and get out quickly because I hate my inbox. It's not a place I want to spend time. And most people, it's not a place they want to spend time. When you go to the newsfeed, that's when you want to be taken somewhere that you've never been before. You want to be entertained, you want to learn something new, you want to feel a connection to somebody else. So they're kind of the yin and yang. You have to be able to do both as a video storyteller, can you just be a person that the audience trusts, but when it comes time to put on a show, you do have to give them a show because it's competitive out there.

A hundred percent. There was a lot in there. I'm going to pick up on my company that I started in January. It's called Human Video. So you just said that a month ago. It's what it's all about. It's about being authentic. It's about building trust in lots of different ways. I've noticed we're chatting briefly before we started that the whole concept of authenticity. And we mentioned about ai, some of your most recent posts have been really great and very funny posts about chat, TPT and about, I think most recent one was what AI thought you looked like or its version of your portrait, which was terrifying. I'm sorry.
Part of the whole reason of starting the company was about, so I've been a commercial filmmaker for 15 years creating all sorts of content all around the world, quite high production value stuff. It was always just me flying around the world, but I had the big cameras, I had the lights, I had all the toys and did that as well as I could, but I just kind of terrified by how great AI is becoming. I could see that coming, I guess. And my bet is that as AI proliferates even more and their feeds are full of more and more AI content, that actually what will break the pattern hopefully could still be authentic, real human beings showing up in a sea of artificialness and fakeness really. And I see you talking about that a lot. How do you feel about all that as somebody who's creating really original, really authentic real content, and even we saw this week the Google VO three, which is just for narrative stuff is getting really close, but there's still something all of us, but it's like the ease with which people can create beautiful video and narrative stuff is even more terrifying every week. How do you take all that? Where do you think all that's going?

Yeah, I mean it does look pretty impressive VO three, but I guess I'm just focused on such a different part of the video experience than can you make the most perfect visual image possible? I'm actually very interested in the way that young people use video, and oftentimes with my training and consulting, I have to tell them outright, I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing this because your team has a different relationship to video than you do. And a lot of times I work with people who, yeah, non-video people, but older people who they're used to when you make a video, you have to call in a camera crew and it's the lights and it's all that stuff. And I'm like, if you watch some of these tiktoks, it's a person walking around talking to their microphone. There's laundry in the background. There is a casualness to it that you're missing.
And I feel like with VO three, with soa, with the way that people think about video a lot for B2B, they're just like, oh my God, look at this AI generated video clip of this car driving and it looks just like a real car. It could fool somebody. And me, I'm not a person who's ever gone to the movies and cared about visual effects. I'm not a guy who will ever tell you like, oh, that movie was terrible, but the special effects are so great, you got to go see it. Anyways, that's not the kind of person I've ever been, and there's been a lot of fantastic special effects quality in Hollywood over the past couple decades. Those never look as good as the just actual human beings doing something together on the screen. And my whole kind of thing is like, okay, well, if I'm watching a Hollywood film, and these are a-list actors, these are the top studios in the world making the highest quality videos possible, and it looks fake, how good is your fake AI generated sales video really actually going to look?
Because if it looks just the tiniest little bit fake, you're going to lose your audience. Whereas if you actually make that human connection and they're like, oh my God, this guy actually turned on a camera and actually made a video and sent it over to me, you can get them to watch it, not because they're like, oh my God, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. But because there's another human being on the other end that you have access to, and I just think of it so much more as you have the ability to go sit in someone's home with them, they're going to take you into when you are on their smartphone screen, you are closer to them, the 99.9% of people in their life are ever going to get. And I just do so much thinking about how do you actually create a connection with another person?
How do you do it in a way where you and the audience are co-collaborators and you're making something together? One, that's a really interesting thing too. That is the thing you can do with AI too. I mean, that concept can extend to any sort of medium, not just video, but again, I think with the AI video stuff, we're still in the like, oh my God, doesn't this look so real kind of a phase? And I'm a person who's like, what are you going to do with it though? What are you going to do with it? You're going to show me a picture of a fake car. Okay, I can go watch as much of that as I want. I'm probably going to go listen to some YouTuber talk for an hour, not because he's showing me something like so amazing, but because he's helping me solve some sort of problem.
Or he's got some sort of perspective on the world that I appreciate or has some sort of knowledge that person can share with me in a way that I haven't been able to find as effectively anywhere else. And I feel like if you always go back to how do we make the human connection here, you're always going to have moves to make. But if you're just going for how can we make the most realistic shot looking possible, the technology is always going to get better and better. But I don't know. I kind of feel like there's a level of diminishing returns where people are just like, okay, but I don't really care.

This is what I need to hear, Chris. It's like no matter how epic it's ever going to be it, it's still not real. It still doesn't have the soul of a human trying to connect authentically with another human.

It's quite soulless. It's quite soulless. And I think there's a certain type of person who just loves it and who's just like, ah, AI generated contact. I just love love, love, love, love it. But it just kind of, everything looks the same and there's just something dehumanise it about it.
Whereas the reason why I talk so much about interacting with the audience, I tell people all the time, go to a concert, any concert, some band comes to town, what's the first thing they do when I'm here? I am talking to you from Chicago today, the first thing they say is, hello Chicago. Everyone starts going nuts. And they're like, I ate that pizza you guys have. We're like, woo. And they're like, yeah, way too much. That deep dish is, and then all of a sudden they're talking to you about something that's real. Comedians do that too. You go see the top comedians, go see your Jerry Seinfelds or your Jim Gaffigans or your Chris Rocks or whatever. Almost always they're going to start saying something about the city that they're in because they have to go through this process of getting you on their side before you're in a state where you can accept their jokes, especially if they are an edgy comedian, especially if they are somebody who's going to say something that might cross some sort of line.
As comedy often does, comedy exists in the grey areas between what we think we're supposed to be like and how we're actually, so that step where they build that shared context with you in the beginning and show you that they don't hate you, that they understand something about you and that they're on your side, that is such an important part of the process. And that's the part that AI completely skips over. It's like, why is the storyteller sharing this story with you? That's actually a really important element of storytelling, and that's something that is absent from AI generated content,

Not real people. And they're

Not, I mean, it's kind of real. It's like I'm also the mind that part of the reason why I'm a little sceptical is because it is just a guy who makes content all the time. None of this stuff ever works as well as they tell you it's going to.

Yeah. And the process of creating it is actually quite complicated. And I mean not as expensive as creating a Hollywood movie, but there's a cost to every time you iterate something in creating those videos and depending on what you're trying to do, there's a whole new skillset. It's changing as well. You often have to combine different tools to try and get somewhere. Yeah, there's so much more to it.

So let's go back to the pattern breaker. I use a couple different types of AI tools for my workflows. Chat PT is an interesting one because chat GPT will kind of ruin what you have to say if you're not careful with it. Have you ever used Notebook LM by Google?

No, not yet. No. I've heard of it. I haven't. There

Notebook, LM is a little bit better notebook is you can plug in a bunch of sources and then ask it for summaries or ask it for information or whatever, and it will only use the sources that you gave it, which is helpful. So in my case, I'm like, oh, okay, here's my course, here's the lessons. I'm going to feed you the transcripts, break these down into worksheets. And I mentioned questions at the end of it. Put these questions down here and create a worksheet for me summarising the main points of this lesson. Che, GPT can't do that.
I thought that was a little odd. You think these AI tools are just going to summarise the information that you give, but it's making editorial decisions. So an example is in the pattern breaker, one of the first assignments I have is just go through your newsfeed for five to 10 minutes and write down every pattern you see. Just take note of the pattern. And when chat GPT summarised that chapter, it was like, here's the assignment. Take note of the patterns, write whether the pattern is a good or a bad pattern, write suggestions on what they should be doing instead. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's a different module. That's a different module. I'm not telling the viewer to do that yet. This is just the part of the process where you listen and the part where you try to make it better.
That comes later in the course. And is funny because I couldn't get it to just summarise the things that I said, and I started getting angry. So I started shouting obscenities in all caps at chat GPT as you do, because otherwise it's never going to do the correct thing. And I got so frustrated that I was like, tell me a story about why you won't do anything. I say chat GPT, I want you to tell me a story why you can't just simply summarise the lessons and exercises that I'm trying to give my audience and told me once upon a time, there was a well-intentioned AI programme called Cha GPT, and there was a creative content creator named Chris Bogue. And Cha GPT desperately wanted to help him deliver his vision to his audience, but he'd been trained, Che. BT had been trained on so many millions of hours of bland, forgettable, generic corporate training that it just couldn't help itself and start making it into something more universal, more actionable, more something that's in line with the worksheets from these trainings that they have to do. And the reason why I tell the audience to go through their newsfeed and spend five minutes noticing the patents instead of asking on these five different questions is because if I give them one simple thing to do, they might actually do it.
Whereas the corporate training just gives you five little mini exercises that the audience is probably going to ignore. And yeah, it's this interesting thing where I'm like, oh man, I'm literally begging it to just use the words that I gave it and it won't. And when you're a person who is a creative mind, you need editorial control over what you're doing. And there are times where you're not trying to make it generic or you want to do something that is a little surprising or a little unconventional or whatever, and it's like, oh, you can never really trust that and maybe you can we'll get to a point where you can just be like, I want the thing, and you snap your fingers and it comes out exactly the way is you want to, but with video, there's so much of you try to do it again, but then the next version doesn't even come out half as good as the first one.
And then you're, you're 20 minutes later, you're angry because you got absolutely nothing done and it's not giving you what you want and you can't figure out how to convince it to give this to you. Whereas I find when you're working with real human beings and you're creating this live moment where they don't necessarily know what's going to happen, they surprise you. You get all these wonderful little human surprises in there. This goes back to what we were saying in the beginning of the conversation. Now sometimes the video that fails is more interesting than the video that is perfect. And I don't know, there's just so much room to explore here, and I just don't see people talking about it. They're so focused on the perfection that AI can offer, and I'm like, it's not about perfection. That's not what people are drawn

To. I'm trying to talk about it. It's all good. I think, yeah, the whole world, I guess, of trying to keep things authentic and for me, talk about the imperfection for years and years, I've told people, clients would say, we want all the ums and ass taken out of the video and they want all of these things, and I push back all the time. It was like those imperfections are what makes it real. Those are the things that differentiate. It makes it feel human. Before I was talking about things being human, I was still pushing for not having polished videos and even trying to keep people away from very scripted content and just using a prompter, even if it's somebody senior in a company. I would rather my whole career of 15 years of commercial filmmaking at my previous company, it was called Storyhouse Films, and it was all about sitting down with people, having really genuine conversations, drawing out great content from them, and then through the power of the edit, just sculpting that into a more concise piece. But the content I was getting was always just from a human to human chat, and you had to work really hard sometimes when it wasn't scripted to get

Content. Let's about scripting that. Let's talk about scripting because I don't think scripting is bad. I think scripting is a necessary part of the video process, and it's kind of this ironic thing that I don't really talk about, whereas I was an improviser, I was a stage performer, I was a speech team champion. I did a lot of public speaking and stuff like that. And part of the reason why I do keynote speeches and paid content and all that stuff is I do have a lot more experience doing this than the average person, and it's very important for me not to screw up. I have lots of video out there of me screwing up. And again, that can be interesting, but you actually also have to get better too as a performer on screen. And when you are editing yourself this as a podcast director, you will, oh, it's so painful to hear the ums and the uhs because you notice your patterns, you notice your verbal tics, you notice the things you say all the time, but you should actually just consciously try to not do that as

Often. Oh, sure. Especially people new to, one of our big things is coming into companies for the first time creating maybe their first B2B podcast, and it's quite often whoever's fronting it might never have done it before, and they go on a journey where they over a year, it just gets refined. They go through, they're listening back to it themselves, but they absolutely come out the other end just so much better at it. That's human nature to improve and to master a new skill almost.

So that's why I always, I focus a lot on point of view and something I talk about in the pattern breaker. It's something I talk about in sales too, because everybody is promising you the moon, everybody says they're going to unlock the power of AI and you're going to be able to do all these wonderful things. The point of view is I think a really interesting storytelling trope or it's just a really important part of storytelling. And I'm like, that's how you can get on somebody's radar, especially for sales. They're not going to believe your claims if they don't know who you are and they're not familiar with you. So if you're going in there trying to convince them that you're going to three x their income or you're going to do X and Y and Z, they have every reason not to trust you.
But if you come with a point of view that makes them think, now you're up in their head. And I think the video is really interesting because I can give my audience a point of view that maybe they don't agree with, but they don't have to sit there and defend themselves against me. They can say, I think this guy is wrong, but let's just see where he is going. And it's why I think so much about what does your audience expect? And one of the exercises I have my clients do and then I do in the course is like, go ask your audience questions. Go pull the audience. Literally use the poll feature. Ask them about controversies within your industry where you don't even know the answer and see what they say. And oftentimes the interesting videos are the ones where I come to the audience with a point of view and I say, okay, here's the question I asked my audience. 73% of my audience said this and here's why I think they're wrong.
That's such an interesting hook. The audience is like, wait a minute, that's what I think. I'm not wrong. I'm me. I'm right about most everything and then I got to go make my case. But again, you got to get with what do they care about? And it's going a layer deeper, and if you arm yourself with a strong point of view, it can help you a lot. And I think with the delivery of the script, I script things. I teach my audience to write in bullet points. Oftentimes the exact lines are not word for word what's on the page, but I always believe in, start with your point of view, figure out what you feel about this issue, what you feel about the audience. And then if it's an entertaining video, especially if it's a comedy video, I learned, give a couple different takes, especially if I'm doing multi character stuff, I'm probably going to give two or three line like line reads of each line because then when I go and edit it, I can just choose the one that's the funniest. And

That requires a lot of planning, doesn't it? Like all those different characters, I can imagine the work that goes into those.

Well, again, that's being a writer helps, helps a lot too, where

It's being you, a writer, a comedy writer.

Yeah, it's like I'll write it out on paper and it's like maybe the script is only one page and it's two people talking back and forth. It's like I have to fill in each of those separately in front of a green screen and then I have to cut 'em together so it looks like they're talking to each other. But yeah, each line I kind of find, I'll try it smiling, I'll try it angry, I'll try it confused. I'll try it a little accusatory, I'll try it a little trusting. I'll try these things. And then you get to kind of have some fun and kind of objectively, you take off your actor hat and you put on your director hat and you say, okay, objectively which one of these is giving the best performance? And it's funny because one, it's almost never the biggest take. I find that the funniest take is almost always the one that has some element of subtlety to it. The joke is a little bit understated, but also it's either the first take or the last one. Either you get your best read on the very first one or you do the line 10 times and then you're like, okay, that last one felt good enough, we can

Move on next one. That's the story of my life next. Yeah, I always say to people, it'll be the last take, but it doesn't work if we don't do the other ones

Well, and sometimes the first one is the best. Sometimes the first one is it seems the least rehearsed. It's the most conversational. It's like often I will look at those takes and I'm like, oh, that first one is the only one that feels like I'm really talking to the audience. The other ones, it feels like I'm trying to convey too much. I'm trying to emote too much. I'm overemphasising a word. They're not going to get it. That first one sounds the most off the cuff, so let's go ahead with that. But again, that requires a little bit of thinking about what do I want my audience to feel? How do I want this to hit them? I find especially on LinkedIn, most people are not thinking that far. They're like, I need video. I'm going to press the video button and throw this AI bullshit up. Their mission accomplished and it bombs and they're like, video must just not work. And it's like

You see that a lot these days. Actually people, even just the past couple of weeks, people are going video and everything LinkedIn are doing is talking about pushing video and making a big deal of video. They've held big events recently all about pushing video. It's interesting, but they're also changing it a lot. They get rid of the feed and mobile and then they present it in a completely different way for about a month. They've ditched that this week, I don't know if you've noticed the presentation of vertical videos changed again on mobile. You can't even access a feed anymore. You can't scroll. Once you're in a vertical video, you don't scroll through them anymore, which is wild.

Yeah, I mean LinkedIn has its own issues as a platform. I will say one common objection I hear about video, especially with the sales training is people will say, well, my audience isn't a video audience. I sell

Because they've never watched TV or a movie.

Yeah, well, that's the thing is I'm like, there is no such thing as a video person or not video person. We have one screen, one screen that is the screen that plays videos on it, and again, there's so many aspects of the video process that people don't think about and this goes back to why did I build a course? Why do I speak so much about subtitles? Because I don't hear anyone on any sales trainer ever talk about subtitles, and I call that the Uber test with people. I say, okay, assume you're a busy corporate executive. You are in the backseat of an Uber. You are headed to the airport for a flight. You get two videos sent to you. You're check it in your inbox. There's two videos. One is me and I've got correctly spelled correctly, correctly formatted captions on the screen. You can just sit there and watch it with the sound off or you get one and the captions are all jamma or there are no subtitles at all. You got to go take out your Airbus and put your headphones on to be able to listen to it. Which one do you think that person's going to watch? It's the one that you can just press and start just watching, even if you don't have your headphones in and people don't think about that. They spend so much time making the video, it doesn't occur to them that the vast majority of their audience are going to watch it without sound.

80%, 80% of mobile LinkedIn videos watched on mute.

It's

Wild.

That's a comedy thing too. That's a thing. Growing up, I hated subtitles because it would ruin the jokes. You would get the joke a fraction of a second too early, and I would do that a hundred percent. If you ever watch my videos, the reason why my videos are funny oftentimes is because I time the subtitles so they read exactly the same way that they sound.

That's so good. You mentioned there about sending messages to people, sending video messages to people who've talked a lot about the content side of things. As a last question, Chris, I'd love to dive into just really quickly the whole concept of sending video dms and how you do that, how you think about that. I noticed on your LinkedIn profile, you're a strategic advisor for Sense Spark as well, which is an organisation I know really well. Actually, I'm going to have Bethany on the podcast soon, CEO of Sand Park. So yeah, tell me how you use video and outbound and messaging. How do you think about all that?

My whole approach to video prospecting is make it shorter basically. And again, I made the course because I didn't see a lot of people giving the kind of advice that I have found is successful. When I would talk to sales leaders who would use Sense Spark or a similar programme, I've been a trainer approved by ARD and BombBomb as well. A lot of people use Loom. There's a lot of programmes out there that people use. I'm a sense Spark Advisor. I advise all my clients to use Sense Spark. But the idea here, it's the same problem anybody has with any video programme is they've got all the tools, but they're not using it. Or again, they make a 10 screen share that nobody asked for, and I'm like, if you just came to them with 45 seconds where you're like, Hey, I noticed this thing you did and it got me wondering about something, and then you ask them one simple question, you could have gotten them to respond to you.
You are treating it like you're going to send them a commercial and that the commercial is going to be so compelling that they're going to jump in and have a conversation with you about buying the services. You have to stop thinking about it as a commercial with the goal of selling your product, and you got to start thinking about this as a short message that you want them to watch and you want them to respond to and just kind of reframing it and thinking of it. Can you get their attention? Oftentimes that means breaking a pattern, and the easiest way to do that is to notice literally anything about them, because most people will not go through the trouble of actually finding out who they are or what they care about.

What sort of things would you include that you've just find if you do, you scan their LinkedIn profile and just pick out some connection or something you

Can pick? Yeah, if they're on LinkedIn, I always say marketing exists to be noticed, so if you're in sales and you're trying to reach out to an organisation, there is so much information out there. There are earnings calls you can look up. There are social media campaigns people are posting on LinkedIn. There are so many ways you could go to learn about what is this company, what are their values, how do they want people to be seen or how do they want people to see them? All these things can help you show up sounding like what you talk about and signalling to them that you're motivated by the same things and you have a similar point of view or you have a point of view that's worth them listening to. And again, people send usually a five minute product demo or it's like if you just noticed something about them, if the beginning of the video was you noticing them and then you asked them a simple question and you, oh, here's the other thing that everybody misses too, is you have to instruct them how to respond to you.
That's a very important part of the process that I don't really see people talking about, and I make sure I end my direct videos. If I'm sending a video note to somebody, I tell them how I want them to respond. I usually end by saying, Hey, if you're interested or if you'd be willing to answer, just respond to this message with anything. Literally, you can just text me back if you're willing to answer the question. Also, if this sounds like something you are not interested in at all, if I am way off the mark here and this is not the kind of thing you would ever be interested in, you can just tell me that too. You can tell me no thanks, and I'll just mark that you're not interested in this and this is not a good time for you right now. Lemme know, but I gave them an option.
If yes, here's how you respond. If no, I will go buzz off and I won't bother you with this anymore, what do you say? And that helps a lot because now they know, okay, well if the answer is no, this guy's not going to take it personally, he's not going to get angry and start interrogating me, he's going to respect that this isn't for me, so I'm giving them an out, but letting them know what they should do. If they actually do want to respond to you, that's important. Sometimes you'll make that video and you don't make that clear and they're like, oh, this guy's really smart. I'm going to do that. And then something else pops up. They're like, I'm going to take care of this other thing first, and then life gets in the way and then they're not going to respond to you, so you have to make it clear. You have to follow up. You have to be omnipresence so that you're showing up in the feed anyway.

Yeah, they're often, would they already have seen you taken some sort of signal that they've liked to post or interacted in some way? You feel like they may.

I usually don't

More

Totally cold. I really like to have some sort of interaction.

Helps so much, doesn't it?

Yeah. Usually at the very least we are connected together. Oftentimes I'm connecting with them because they're posting about something that I'm interested in or we have some sort of, or they've interacted with my content. Previously. I'll go through and I'll send connection requests to people who are liking my stuff or checking out my profiles if they seem like a person that's relevant. And then having stuff like LinkedIn content that people can get into having a free resource and stuff like that, that gives me something I can reach out to that isn't just asking for their time.

Sure, sure. I need literally doing that through the Chrome plugin and just creating short videos in the browser through LinkedIn. Yeah,

It depends. If you look at the sales process, sales process, that's either three steps or 50 steps depending on how complicated you want to make your chart. So it's like in the most basic form, sales is like person is not aware, person becomes engaged, person is in the pipeline, person either closes or doesn't close, and that's the breakdown of it. In the modern sales selling, there's all these different touch points. Maybe you saw each other at a convention, maybe you connected on LinkedIn, maybe you interacted with their content, maybe you set a meeting, maybe you sent them something in the meantime leading up to the meeting, maybe you were doing a little bit of nurturing with your content. There's quotes when people ask for quote, that's another big one. There's all these stages along the way and video works well for all of them. So sometimes I'm making a direct video, sometimes I'm not.
I have a sense Park video that's queued up, that's just a sample chapter of my course where if I'm talking to somebody and the conversation is going well or they seem relevant, I say, Hey, I've got a new course where I go into building your creative process and making some stuff that's going to help set out the newsfeed. Do you want a sample chapter? Lemme know. And they're like, oh yeah, I just send that over. That's a sunburg video. I can see if they clicked it, I can see if they watched it and then it's got a call to action at the end of it. It's like, go here to check out the pattern breaker. I'm giving them the way to go. And again, I'm just asking them, I am asking them, do you want to do X or do you want to do Y?
Here's what you do. If you want to do X, here's what you do. If you want to do Y. I think at the end of the day, people don't think enough about what can reasonably reasonably be expected from my audience to do. They're like, I'm going to go make a cool video and then that's going to cause the person to jump in the pipeline and ask for my services. And it's like you got to do a lot more back and forth before that happens. And the video allows you to do that on your own terms. It allows you to show up in a way that you control. You can be the version of yourself that you want to be. You could be the version of yourself that is poised and polished and friendly and interested in them, and they haven't figured out how to do that with AI yet. So just turn on the camera and even if it kind of sucks, it's better than 99% of what people are doing out there.

That sounds like human marketing to me to bring it all around. Chris, this has been awesome. Thank you so much. What's the best way for people to connect with you to find out about the courses, particularly obviously you're on LinkedIn. What's the best way to find out about everything?

So if people want to follow my content, you can look for me on LinkedIn, go ring the bell. I'm Chris Bogue. I make content all the time. So content about sales, content about how to monetize your creative skills, content about how to make cool videos, how to make creative processes, all that stuff there for free. You can go to chris bo.io if you want to check out my courses or if you want to shoot me a message about training or coaching or workshops. And yeah, that's basically the best two places to find me.

I love it. I'll link to all of that in the show notes as well, and I can absolutely endorse the courses that I've watched as well. Thank you so much for your time, Chris. This has been really awesome. My face is sore from smiling so much, and yeah, really great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.