Do you ever misread emails or text messages? Or have your emails or text messages ever been misunderstood?

Are you tired of cold calling and sending cold emails? Or of feeling like you're interrupting or bothering people?

Have you ever felt embarrassed by your spelling, grammar, or punctuation? Or has autocorrection ever caused you trouble?

Yes. Yep. Affirmative.

Would you save time by doing more talking and less writing?

If you got face to face with more people, would you create and close more opportunities?

Yup. Absolutely.

And yet every day you continue to entrust some of your most important and therefore most valuable messages to faceless digital communication. The same black text on the same white screen that doesn't build trust, doesn't differentiate you, and doesn't communicate as well as if you just looked someone in the eye and said the exact same message.

The pendulum's swung too far away from the personal touch and human connection that drive your success and satisfaction. It's time to rehumanize your business. No matter the product, service, company, brand, or idea you represent, when people say “yes,” they're saying yes to you. To who you are. With the strategies and tactics you'll learn in this book, you can get to “yes” faster by being more personal and human.

What does it mean to rehumanize your business? It means being more, well, human. Restoring a face-to-face element that's gone missing. Being more intentional and personal in your approach. Building better business relationships. Recognizing that you're truly winning when you win with, through, and for other people. Treating people the way you prefer to be treated. “Targeting” and “hunting” less and connecting and serving more.

What's one of the best ways to do this? By adding personal videos to your emails, text messages, and social messaging. Not videos for marketing, but rather videos for relationships. Not videos that are scripted, produced, and edited, but rather videos that are conversational, authentic, and imperfect. Videos that save time, improve results, and increase satisfaction—your own and that of your customers, future customers, and everyone else with a stake in your success. This is your new and old way to sell and serve—using today's technology to make sales and service truly personal again.

Building trust, rapport, and relationships are best done in person, but time and distance have increasingly driven us to faceless, digital messages. To make matters worse, most of us aren't very good writers; our messages are often misunderstood or require longer exchanges to arrive at mutual understanding. Video puts you back into your communication in a way that accelerates sales and improves customer experience. It restores that missing face-to-face element. But now you can get face to face at scale. All through quick, simple video messages with the webcam or smartphone camera you've always got with you.

If you're in leadership or management, inside or outside sales, account-based marketing, recruiting or talent development, or customer support or success, you'll be more successful when you rehumanize your processes by mixing in video messages. If you're in software, consulting, education, real estate, mortgage, insurance, financial planning, automotive, nonprofit, public speaking, entrepreneurship, or almost any other role or industry, this applies to you. Anyone working in a professional capacity benefits from better relationships. And video does this better than any other medium except being there in person.

Because you're reading this intro, you may already be sending video or at least you may have given it a look or tried it out. With more than a decade of experience and unique expertise, Steve and I offer practical and proven strategies, tips, and insights to help you implement video day to day. If you've not given it a look or tried it out, you likely know someone who is “doing video.” Have you ever heard someone say that?

• “I don't do video. But Mary does video.”
• “Yeah, Mary does do video. I tried video. Do you do video?”
• “No, I don't do video, either.”

Replace “video” with “phone calls” or “email” or “meetings.” For example …

• “I don't do phone calls. But Mary does phone calls.”
• “Yeah, Mary does do phone calls. I tried phone calls. Do you do phone calls?”
• “No, I don't do phone calls, either.”

Sounds silly, right? Well, that's where we're headed. Because “doing video” no longer requires scripts, lights, editing, or budgets. “Doing video” means occasionally recording a webcam or smartphone video in place of a typed-out message, a phone call, or even a meeting. In the pages ahead, you're going to learn why, how, and when to make video part of your business communication mix.

My coauthor Steve got going with this video philosophy as he searched for a better way to sell software. He deployed personal video email to the members of his outside sales team as a way to generate more revenue both on and off the road. With video in place of text, they built value before getting to price, shortened the sales cycle, and closed multiple $24,000 annual contracts with people they'd never met in person and never even talked with over the phone. He transitioned from a BombBomb video email user to our Chief Marketing Officer a few years later and more than four years ago.

My engagement started with part-time projects—creating a homepage video, writing an email nurture campaign, recording videos for those emails, and other deliverables for a couple of friends, Conor McCluskey and Darin Dawson. After founding the company a few years earlier, they were preparing to bring to market a video email service. Bored after more than a decade of traditional and digital marketing for local television stations, I was doing project work on the side with several other companies, too. But I exclusively locked onto this idea and locked in with this team for its forward-looking nature and rehumanizing potential.

Most new technology is understood in terms of its predecessor and video email is no exception. I viewed our initial product offering as an email marketing platform with video uploading and hosting built right in. And, as a product, that's what it was at the time—and I fully expected MailChimp or even Google to devour the available market for it by rolling out a similar feature set. Through constant and direct customer contact (something I rarely had in my broadcast television career), it became clear that we weren't just a “video email marketing” service. This mental shift or change in understanding is most clear in the increasing gap between “marketing through video” and “relationships through video.”

In this book, you'll get language, understanding, and practical applications of this rapidly emerging trend of rehumanizing communication, accelerating sales, and improving customer experience with video. It's about realigning some of your day-to-day efforts with millennia of human brain training that dictates how we communicate and connect with each other. It's about evolving tactics and improving results. It's about how and why a salesperson sent his 12,000th video—and the likelihood he's the first person to create that volume of video to build relationships and increase sales. It's about being there in person when you can't be there in person.

Over the past decade, we've watched our own community grow from about 100 active, paying customers to well over 40,000. They live all around the world and work in all kinds of industries. We've learned and taught from their success stories and examples in hundreds of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, stage presentations, and, of course, videos. We've seen other companies come “down market” from prescribing scripted, lighted, produced, and edited videos to recommending our “video voicemail” style videos. We've read about multibillion-dollar companies like Coca-Cola and Levi Strauss & Co. intentionally reducing the quality of their photos and videos to make them appear more trustworthy to consumers, a phenomenon we'd described years earlier as the “Shiny/Authenticity Inversion.” With a growing range of companies, communities, and individuals getting involved, this movement is just getting started.

In Part One, you'll learn what personal video is, why it's rehumanizing compared to the status quo, and why you should participate. In Part Two, you'll see who's using personal video and when you might use it, too. Part Three is the how—recording and sending, cameras and equipment, psychological barriers, and more. Part Four delivers advanced strategies and a look to the future of this growing movement. Throughout, you'll get practical tips to replace some of your typed-out text with a more personal and human touch.

And, no, the irony is not lost on us that this is all being shared by way of simple black text on a plain white page.