#232 Mail-Right Show With Special Guest Stephen Pacinelli

How To Use Video To Personalize your Brand in 2020!

More About Stephen Pacinelli

A passionate storyteller by nature who measures his success by helping people reach their potential, Steve Pacinelli serves as BombBomb’s chief marketing officer. Prior to leading the charge of the relationships through video movement, he led a sales team winning with BombBomb. He has been a sales manager, vice president of events, and the national speaker for realtor.com®, and presented to more than 1,000 audiences along the way.

Thematically these presentations focus on online marketing, video communication, lead conversion, consumer psychology, and sales automation. However, craft beer, photography, motorcycles, and Pacinelli’s family of five always made a cameo.

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the Mail Right Show. This is episode 231. We really have got a special guest. I’ve been really looking forward to this interview. We’ve got Stephen Pacinelli with us. And I totally butchered his name, but hopefully he’s going to not hold it against me. And I also got Robert Newman my great cohost with us. Stephen, would you like to quickly introduce yourself? Obviously I think most people you just see know that you are one of the founders of BombBomb, but would you like to introduce yourself?

Stephen: Sure, sure. And I’m not a founder. I’m the chief marketing officer for BombBomb. But I can tell you the founder’s story. But just a little bit of background about me. I got in the real estate tech industry in the year 2000. And so I have been in this industry working with real estate agents for two decades now. And worked with top producer, realtor.com a national speaker and trainer through realtor.com work there for a while I traveled the country and provided training and education. And while I was in that role, that’s when I found BombBomb, which is a company that allows you to communicate more effectively using video. And it’s a replacement for a voicemail or an email where you can send yourself, people can hear and see you and hear the tone that you’re using. And deliver the message in the way that it was intended.

And in 2011, I had a sales team at realtor.com. We were trying to figure out how we could sell more products, how we can connect with people more effectively. And that’s when I signed up and I was a BombBomb customer for four years. And so I made all the mistakes with video. I used it wrong, incorrectly, didn’t get results, and got results back to video. And I went through the ups and downs of video as a customer for four years. And then came on as the VP of marketing then in 2015 to walk them through the day in the life of a customer or video user. And so, yeah, that’s my quick backstory.

Jonathon: And thank you for agreeing to come on the show. I know Stephen’s very busy and he’s one of a small group of people that I always listen and read your materials. And I’ve been a fan for the past couple of years. I got my great cohost, Robert Newman. Robert, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

Robert: Sure. So I’m the founder of a company called inbound real estate marketing. I’m an advocate proponent of a type of marketing that is not very prevalent inside of real estate, which is basically the law of attraction as opposed to the law of promotion. So if you’re interested in checking out that, check out my website. And you can also talk to John, he does it a different way. So we’re two sides of the same coin. So John, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Jonathon: Yeah, I’m the founder of Mail Right. I’ve been involved with the internet, internet marketing and front end coding for the past 15 years. I started mail right about three years ago. We’re a suite of tools that get you quality leads with emphasis on Facebook marketing, but much, much more. So if that sounds interesting, go to the Mail Right website. And you can book a free consultation with me and we will actually develop a one page marketing plan for you, which you can use in 2020. So let’s go straight into Stephen. You know, BombBomb is a unique product. Video, I and Robert had been going on about video during 2019. And where do you think video is at the present moment? And what were some of the mistakes you see some people making around utilizing video?

Stephen: Yeah. So great questions! Either there is a distinction what I believe is marketing through video and relationships through video. And using video as a marketing tool or using video to communicate more clearly and effectively. And both are valuable tools in real estate agents toolset. Because they want to market their listings, they want to market their brand. They want to market, you know, the routine themselves, et cetera. And there’s a time and place for marketing through video.

But what is underutilized is the relationship video play. And that is rather than being black text on a white screen and responding to a Zillow lead, a website, your own website lead or realtor.com lead, et cetera. And looking exactly the same as everyone else, black text on a white screen where there is no differentiation, you know, sending yourself in person. Introducing yourself, getting that meeting, getting that face to face meeting before you can actually get the face to face meeting.

And so there’s video works well in so many different ways for so many different contexts. And depending on how you want to use video in your business, getting started with personal one-to-one videos to other people can get you more comfortable on camera. And that’s how I really started back in 2011 is sending out these one-to-one videos that I didn’t have to memorize a script for. I didn’t have to be perfect in the video. I could make mistakes because it was only meant for an audience of one rather than an audience of a thousand.

Jonathon: Well, that sounds great. Over to Robert.

Robert: Stephen, first of all, you’re talking to two of probably the biggest proponents of the video in general that you’re ever going to speak to. I use it religiously inside my inbound marketing strategies. I do the hardest of the hard, which is get realtors to film like video, which is serious, that’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my 13-year career of real estate marketing. Is getting these guys to go out and be in front of a camera and like film educational or area videos.

So we’re huge fans. But I don’t know everybody, and I know who you are. I am not drawn, I haven’t followed you on a blog, but I have followed the meteoric success of BombBomb over the years. And one of your top influencers is one of my clients, so was his BombBomb is get awards from you guys who’s like a Tom Ferry, like that disciple and just all that stuff.

So having said all that though, I don’t feel like every single one of our listeners is going to be familiar with the actual service. And I know that we’re saying video, but that isn’t, I don’t think a succinct description of what BombBomb fully does. So I’d like to ask you for like a foundational. So do you mind if I explain slightly for the audience just to catch them up and then you’ll jump in? So video guys, what BombBomb does is it makes a video inside of an email and then you have that video get clickable essentially. And then you can view a video inside of an email.

There’s a lot of communication about this, but I want to let Stephen handle it all because I feel like there’s a difference in the way that communication is received. And if you have any statistics that you could share with our audience to let them know what the effect is of your method of communication versus another, I’d appreciate it. And then there’s also effective in terms of not only is it opened, but how is the message absorbed? Like what is there? And I’ve seen tons of statistics on this, but I’d love for you to share some with our audience.

Stephen: And that’s basically in a nutshell. We make it easy for you to get face to face with the people that matter the most in your business through email, text and social. And so it does work great in email, but our customers are using it for LinkedIn messages, Facebook messages as well. Text messaging and we have a text messaging application. And if you think of it as a replacement for typed out text, and that’s the style of video. When you need to build trust or rapport when you need to overcome a difficult objection that someone wrote you in an email and you can’t get ahold of them on the phone that is an opportunity to use video. A lot of people do video conferencing these days too, and that’s well and great, but you need to get the other person on at the same exact time.

This allows you to get face to face the other 99.9% of the time that you can’t have a synchronous meeting at the same time. And so what we do is we make it simple and easy to record and send these video messages. So let’s say you’re in your Gmail and you get an email and you have an angry customer that feels upset about something. Rather than typing a response out, you would click the record button built right into Gmail and you would just speak your message like you would if you were right in front of them handling their objection or their concern. And you would say, I’m so sorry Mr. and Mrs. Seller that you feel that way. Here’s what we’re going to do, here’s how I’m going to fix it. And you speak the message and they hear the empathy.

They hear the emotion in your voice. They don’t misconstrue the message, which is one of the things that happens the most in a text based email or text based communication. And so you hit record, you speak your message, you send it out. And then you get the tracking and the notification, you know, that they watched it you know exactly how much they watched it. Because you get an email back that will say they watched 89% of the video that you just created. And now you have a way to understand the engagement that you had with that person too. People always tracked. Or for a long time in the digital space, people would track, email opens and clicks. And if you have a mass email system, people with track opens and clicks. But opens and clicks mean nothing because you don’t know if they read your email if they open it and looked at it for a half a second, is that valuable to you?

But the ultimate metric is that they open it. And did they play your video and did they play your entire video? Because now you actually know if they heard and consumed your message and you know how to follow up more effectively. And so whether you’re using it to, I gave an example of someone that was upset. But you can for a brand new lead where you’re trying to win their business for a past client, for a lead that went cold for reaching out. I have a great story if you want to get into it later of an agent Jimmy Burgess that generated $11 million of new listings in 90 days from sending one video a day. And he’s got a strategy that he’s been using ever since and it’s amazing. And so it’s used for that for communication.

Robert: If you’re willing to spend 10 extra minutes with us today at the end of this show, that’s the kind of thing that John and I typically love to offer as bonus content. And that would be offered to our YouTube audience exclusively, if you’re okay with that.

Stephen: Yeah, sure. Wonderful.

Robert: So John, I know you’re sitting there quietly, but this is one of your big gets because both Jonathan and I have our various people that we follow, you know on blogs and things like that. And they tend to be a little bit different because I’m an SEO guy, an inbound marketer guy. And he’s more like a CRM logical data organization guy. So each kind of usually have our own pockets of people that we follow. And you’re definitely one of these pockets of people.

So John, why don’t you, I know you’re just dying to ask some questions so please ask away. You’ve been real kind of let me speak at all. I appreciate it though.

Jonathon: So actually time goes quickly and it’s time via our break. Actually 15 minutes goes rather quickly, but we’re going to come back and we’re going to be talking about all things video after the break. Folks with Stephen. See you soon.

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Jonathon: We are coming back. We’ve had a feast on video. I’m going to feast some more, but it’s a fascinating subject. So, Stephen, I think like the thing you said, you know you’ve got a video that you can use as a marketing tool. And you’ve got videos that you can use to build a relationship, which is BombBomb. And then you got the explosion of video on social media. How do you see social media fitting into kind of promotional video that you might have on our agent website and the real one to one kind of use of video that on BombBomb?

Stephen: Yeah, I mean it’s great if you have both. A lot of people aren’t comfortable creating videos for mass audiences. But they become more comfortable sending video to one-to-one. But if you can do both and you create amazing neighborhood tours and you like and enjoy featuring local businesses and creating great content around your area. And you put those videos on Instagram and on Facebook and you feature your hometown, like a lot of agents, love that and they work hand in hand. It’s just that someone decided 25 years ago that email and text-based communication was going to take the place of our most important communication. And that’s how business people would communicate it. And that’s how we did communicate for the past two decades.

And the pendulum has swung and their people are pushing back against the tech space communication because you don’t get the authenticity. You don’t get differentiation in tech space communication. We’ve only been reading and writing for 500 years as a species mass adoption of reading and writing. For 500 years it’s something that people aren’t as adept at, but people, it’s innate in you to communicate more clearly when you’re in person and when you can’t be there in person. You know, video helps build the gap or build a bridge across that gap.

Jonathon: Have you got, especially the ladies, have you got any tips to get over what I call the secret agent syndrome that people just don’t want to get in front of a webcam? And they just don’t want to do it, Stephen. Do you have any kind of insights on how to get over it?

Stephen: Well first it’s the insight and the way that you see yourself in the motivation. And then we can talk about some of the individual tactics. But what I always ask an audience when I’m speaking is if you were in front of more people more often, would you do more business? The answer is always, yes, I’m my best asset if I was in front of more people more often. Well, every time you choose not to send a video and video isn’t right in every instance, it’s not right in a lot of instances for that matter, which we could talk about. But every time you choose not to send a video, you were saying no to a face to face meeting. If someone called you and said, meet me at the coffee shop, I want to talk to you about listing my home, there’s a 0% chance that you would say, my hair is not looking right today.

I don’t feel so great. You would go to the coffee shop, you would have that meeting. And if you start changing the perception in the way that you look at video and not watch the video back. Because they’re going to see you anyway whether you meet them out the coffee shop or not, it is only your fear of sending that video out that’s preventing you from getting face to face. If you know that you would do more business, allow yourself to do more business. And where most people, again, they get hung up on video, they get too scared to do video. It’s simply because they’re not great at memorizing scripts or they feel that the video has to be perfect. In a one to one video to a new lead that you haven’t met before. If you say, Hey Jonathan, thank you so much for filling out the form on my website.

I hope you found everything that you need and if you pause for a second to think it’s okay because again, this style of video is communicative and when you speak to someone face to face, they don’t always instantly know what they want to say when they want to say it. There are pauses, there’s emotion, there are authenticity, shiny and version and the shiny or that something is the less authentic it feels. And so the type of video that we’re promoting is easier to do because mistakes are okay. My favorite story and then I’ll stop.

Robert: Oh, I love it. Don’t, don’t stop. Go.

Stephen: My favorite story is my wife. I made it. She had all the same fears that everyone else had and I had the same fear back in 2011 but she’s like, I don’t want to send video. I’m like, you have to send a video. You’re married to the COO of BombBomb. It’s embarrassing. She was actually emailing a Remax agent in Westchester, Pennsylvania. She was selling skincare stuff at the time and she had all the products in her hand, very first video she ever recorded. And she dropped all the products on the floor with the papers while she was recording.

And she goes out of the frame like this and I look over, I’m in the kitchen just down the down the way and I’m like, you keep going and keep going. And she pops back into the frame and her face is bright red. And she’s like, Oh my God, I’m so sorry Susan. I’m such a klutz. And she stopped recording and she said, there’s a 0% chance I’m sending this message out to Susan. And I was like, Oh yeah.

And we sent it and here’s the deal. Susan called her in 15 minutes. It was like, Gretchen, you are awesome. I can’t believe that you sent me that video. Do you know I’m such a klutz? And it seems like, and they talked about how klutzy they were for 10 minutes. And she was like I’ll just buy all the products because she made an emotional connection. Sales are a transfer of emotion and you can’t transfer that emotion in black text with black text on a white screen. And unless you are a brilliant writer who writes all the time, that emotion is not going to be transferred.

The emotion happens when they see you and they hear you. People determine who you are and how trustworthy you are within seconds of meeting you that first time. And if you’re not giving them that chance or you’re giving them a chance to meet you before the three other realtors that they’re thinking about, you have a distinct advantage. Because people will go for the known versus the unknown.

Robert: And I’m going to add something in here for all those people listening. Another analogy of a type. So when we talk about shiny versus un-shiny, this is a conversation I have all the time Stephen. Because I’ve been on the video platform for almost 11 years. Since YouTube first came out I’ve been a video guy. I’ve got videos of me doing reviews on real estate technology that go back to 2010. So the thing about it though is that what people miss and don’t get and you just so eloquently brought up is that emotional transference is about being human on camera, making mistakes, laughing too loud, too soft.

All those things make you human. And one of the things that just drives me crazy is real estate agent always want to go hire a videographer and this or drones and this. And I’m like you are killing your chances for connection right there. Stop. Stop with all of that. And here’s the analogy. Long build up, but you got to realize that the people that do shiny and connect the people that know how to do that are guys on Madison Avenue who are getting paid millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. To try to come up with some kind of message like got melt and showing a guy with peanut butter in his mouth. All of that to create a 32nd spot that connects with you as a human so that you’ll go out and buy that product. Now you, me, everybody else, do we have that kind of skill, patient’s budget?

No, I don’t think so. I don’t, but I can connect and I can make a fool of myself on camera, no problem. And that, oddly enough, has driven my business. All the people’s businesses that I have helped grow inside of real estate. The more authentic they allow themselves to be, the better video works for them. That’s flat out. Like the more, they just skip all the bullshit and do an honest one-on-one. That is the bigger the chance. And by the way, the agents that I know are Christophe Chute who is a master. He’s smooth but at the same time he’s just talking to the camera being authentic and that’s what works for him.

Jonathon: But I think what you are saying Stephen that even when you said is all this marketing activity that agents do in various ways. All fundamentally getting in front of that possible client for face to face meetings, isn’t it?

Stephen: Absolutely. And that’s as simple as it gets when you need to be face to face and time or distance or the technology is keeping you apart.

Jonathon: One of the great things I’ve admired about BombBomb and you being part of the team is your singular focus on just video, personalized video. You haven’t been tempted to broaden out the product as a CRM or this or that or the other. Has it been difficult to keep the product focused on video and not being tempted to spread it in other areas?

Stephen: Yeah, at certain times. And we have made those mistakes here and there. I think now we have a more, incredible focus then than ever on just the video portion and going even deeper on video. And finding the people that gravitate towards video and not trying to force people into it that don’t want to use it. There are enough people out there. And providing a great experience for those people through a fast upload and easy to use interface providing that engagement, working where they work, you know, so we have 60 integrations and 50 of them are in real estate specifically.

And so if you’re in your CRM product, BombBomb is sitting right there in contextually. It’s sitting right there and real evolve. Its sitting right there, you know, and other systems that you may be using. And it’s staring right at you. So that trigger and that reminder like, Hey, I should send a video is right there. And so yeah, we want to keep building that out and focusing specifically on video. And maybe even trim some of what we currently have. And go even more focused on video.

Jonathon: Obviously 2019 was a turbulent year with the rise of buyers and other services. What advice would you give to the real estate agent? Might be beginning their career or might be in their second year about how they can become a much more effective agent in 2020?

Stephen: Customer experience, fanatical view perspective, and actions around creating a great customer experience. Because any industry that’s right for disintermediation. And there’s a bunch, you know, out there, people want to come in and cut out the middle man and make things better, more efficient or what have you. That’s where relationships win. And building an incredible customer experience, whether using video to help you do that or you are just a great person. And you are mindful of your customers and think about the experience that they get before they meet you, while they’re working with you and after they work with you. That would be if I was getting into real estate right now. I would build a point of view, a set of core values that were all around a fanatical customer experience process.

Jonathon: The thing is though you speak to a lot of agents and they truly feel that their customer care experience is fantastic. But the reality tends not to me what they think. What do you think that is about?

Stephen: I don’t know, I can’t speak to that directly. But if you’re not tracking in the technology space they have something called the NPS or net promoter score, which is a system to easily track how many people would recommend you as a vendor or as a service partner, et cetera. And eight to nine are the scores that you want with, or I’m sorry, nines and tens are the score that you want with eight being neutral and seven is being seven and below being a detractor. And so something like that and getting with their customers, whether they decided to sign up with that agent and list with that agent or not, or work with that buyer’s agent.

And this is the key, whether they use the agent or not to send out follow-ups that ask why or why not that asks them about the experience. It somehow quantifies the experience in some way. So you know if you’re winning or losing. And especially from the people that decided not to choose you. As simple and easy questionnaire so you know where you’re winning and losing, not just from the people that were attracted to you and that already liked you. But from the entire gamut feedback is what I would say.

Jonathon: Funny enough Mail Right has a system to be built for that easily. So you have just start a great sales job for me, Stephen. Thank you so much. We’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. We like to keep it slightly below or around 30 minutes. But Stephen’s agreed to stay on for some bonus content where you’re going to be.

Robert: Wait, wait, wait, and wait! John, I’m sorry man, but you are not selling that the right way. So you’re going to let me step in and I’m going to sell it the right way. Stephen is going to reveal a secret of one of the people that is using BombBomb to sell $11 million in real estate in the span of one year. And he’s going to give us some of the info.

Stephen: 90 days, 90 days. It was for 90 days.

Robert: 90 days. Holy cow, I got it wrong. So how somebody used BombBomb to sell $11 million of real estate in 90 days. I think you all want to stay tuned.

Jonathon: You did a great job there. You must be patient with me listeners, I am English at my core. So Stephen how can people find out more about you, what’s on your radar and about BombBomb?

Stephen: So you can go to bombbomb.com for BombBomb. If you’re interested in video my buddy Ethan Butte and I wrote the only book on how to re-humanize your business and use video as a communication tool. We had just sold over 21,000 copies and we got top 15 business books of the year. Number 15, I might say, but we made it the top 15 Porchlight business books of the year, just the skin of our teeth and getting in that 15th spot. But it’s right under Charles Swab, which isn’t too bad.

Robert: So what was the name of the book again?

Stephen: It’s called re-humanize your business.

Robert: All right. It’s re-humanize your business for those people that are on my Instagram feed. I’ve got a decent while, a small stream of people now watching the show through my Instagram. So I’m going to pick up a copy of suggesting to all of you. Pick up a copy. It’s called re-humanize. We’re meeting with Stephen Hasson Nellie today, the CMO of BombBomb.

Jonathon: And Robert, how can people find out more about you and your company?

Robert: This show, they don’t care, but I’ll go through it anyway. Inboundrem.com. I’m an inbound marketing guy and I’ve written lots of great content to help your real estate business succeed. And it’s all free. It’s all on my website. Go check it out.

Jonathon: That`s great. And if you want to find out more about Mail Right, go to mail hyphen right.com. Like I said we have a free marketing plan offer. A one page that we will customize for you and you can have a nice discussion with me and we can personalize it.

Robert: Remember he is English.

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