I remember the sunny 85-degree weather beaming onto my forehead. The Dodgers Stadium was in the background and I had about 6 lines to memorize. I was filming the opening scenes for the Hollywood episode of Ambitious Adventures with 3 cameras pointed at my face. Everyone was patiently waiting to get lunch after a morning that started in the dark at 4:30 am and was concluding with my efforts to nail these 6 lines.

In those 6 lines were a witty 1-liner to introduce the episode and then 1 sentence on the 4 main subjects of the episode. Then it was a transition to kick off the opening scene. No pressure. And no teleprompter.

It’s moments like this where we think the spotlight is on us. It’s up to us to deliver a flawless performance. It’s up to us to mesmerize the audience and leave them in a trance, not wanting to get up and get a snack, but stay in their seats eagerly awaiting the next words that are uttered from our voices.

And it’s in these moments where we typically falter when it comes to making truly great business videos.

We think it’s about us. We think it’s about how we look. We think it’s about our hair being perfectly in place, or our shirt being tucked in just the right way. We think it’s about the perfect delivery and saying the perfect word at the perfect time, or else no one will listen or pay attention. We think it’s about our ability to memorize our lines. We think it’s about the sound of our voice.

When we think it’s about us, we put pressure on ourselves to be perfect. The result is usually far from perfect. 

In my case, we scrapped the fancy intro at Dodgers Stadium in favor of an off the cuff intro from the side of the highway during a break in the schedule.

During this break, I was thinking about the interviews we had just finished with Lewis Howes and Jake Paul and how much our audience was going to love them. I was thinking about everything I had learned and what an honor it was to be filming them for an episode of Ambitious Adventures. I was thinking about how much I needed the audience to see what I had just witnessed.

I asked Shawn and Dan to roll the cameras, as I had to get it out of me. The result…

1 take that made it into the show and kicked off the first season of Ambitious Adventures, which has now been seen by close to 100,000 people through our partnership with Entrepreneur and Facebook Watch.

What was the difference?

I stopped focusing on me and I started focusing on the viewer.

In business we love to think about our product. We love to tinker with it. We fall in love with it. We obsess over the features, the benefits, the colors, the options and the upgrades. We labor over the design, the brochure that will showcase it and the software that will host it. We spend endless nights filming promo videos and putting together FAQ’s and demos and auto responses for customer support.

Tony Robbins said it best in a YouTube video from one of his seminars,

“Some of you have fallen in love with your products. That will guarantee failure. You need to fall in love with your customer.”

When you put your customer first, you are making them the hero. When you make someone else feel like the hero, they are more open to hearing your message and buying your product or service.

Another one of my mentors, Todd Brown, says that you should be spending of your time marketing and only selling. In this breakdown, during the marketing, you never even mention your product. You don’t even talk about it. Instead, you focus on the prospects. You focus on their frustrations and show them ways to over come it. Only once you have gotten them all the way bought in, do you start talking about features and benefits and how to order.

The same is true when you go to film a video. All the scripting and looking perfect and taking voice lessons are the. They are the features and the benefits. None of that matters unless you care about the person on the other end of the camera.

That’s the reason guys like Brendon Burchard and GaryVee are so successful on video. They are not the most polished or the best trained. They simply care about their audience. Selling is easy to them because they have done the best job of being there for their audience and caring about them.

The next time you go to fire up the camera to film a video, or come down into our studio to develop your TV show, make the entire experience about the audience. Make it about the impact you are going to make on the person watching. Don’t make it about you.

Do that and watch your influence grow. Watch your shares, like and comments soar. Your bottom line will go with it.

 

About the Author

Greg Rollett

Greg Rollett is the Chief Marketing Officer of the Celebrity Branding Agency and the CEO of Ambitious Media Group. Greg is an Emmy® Award Winning Producer who helps his clients to create their own online TV shows and advertise those shows using Facebook videos ads and direct marketing campaigns to get new clients. Contact Greg at greg@ ambitiousmediagroup.com. Watch Ambitious® Adventures by going to Ambitious.com/Adventures.