Stop Hiding: Why B2B Leaders Must Get on Camera – EP4 – Content Wars

Nathan Yerian: You sound good enough to talk to customers and employees. You look good enough to present to customers and employees. Who do you think is going to watch the video? Turns out it's customers, it's employees, it's the market in general. If you're good enough to be hired to represent the company, it's just a different way to represent the company.

Adam Marquardt: So you came to me to talk about the people that don't want to get on camera. 

Nathan Yerian: I think the real issue is, if you went into any company and you just talked to their marketing team or marketing person and you said, hey, would you like to do video? 

They're going to say, yeah, we would love to have more video content for our social channel. We would love to have it for the trade show. We'd love to have it for our website. We'd love to have it in general, but we can't get it done. 

Adam Marquardt: Why is that? 

Nathan Yerian:
They think they can't do it internally. They think they can't afford it because of how they've used video in the past. The big one that keeps coming up is they don't know who's going to be on camera. There seems to be a reluctance in the leadership ranks or knowledge leader ranks of who would actually be on camera. 

Adam Marquardt: So from the conversations you've had, is it a general unknown of like, I actually don't know? Or is it like, I'm afraid to go ask them because I feel like there would be pushback. 

Nathan Yerian: So two things, either they have actually experienced pushback. They've done a video in the past or they've mentioned or they've done something and somebody said, oh, I'm not the guy or I'm not the girl. Or they anticipate that that's going to be the reaction if they bring it up. So how do you overcome that? 

I'm not sure from a marketing perspective how you need to approach that. So like you can't just walk in there and be like, hey, you know, quit being a. You can't just walk in and say, hey, like, you know, it's time to put on your big boy pants and get something done here. You know, unless you're the CMO, I guess you could say that maybe, but that's not really marketing's role to go in and try and force leadership to do something. But at the end of the day, it doesn't hurt to remind the leaders what their role is. Your role is not just to sit in the corner office and pull some levers and sign some checks and call it a day. If you're the CEO, part of your responsibility is to cast your vision, not just in the company, but externally as well. So and that could be, you know, the CEO, it could be vice president, it could be a division leader, it could be the general manager, it could be whoever it is. But if you are a representative of the company, you need to externally represent the company. 

And part of that is on video. So it can't always be in person and shouldn't always be in person. You're very limited if the only representation you ever give of your company is on a one to one basis. How many one to one conversations can you have in a given year? 

Not many. So as a leader of any company, almost at any level to expect that it's outside of your role to be on camera, I think is a little bit ridiculous. So how you approach that with your leadership, I think changes on who the leader is, what the company policies are, these types of things. But these are conversations that marketing should be having with leadership of, hey, guys and gals, we need to get you on camera representing the company with our message. 

How would you like to do that? And it's not just a, well, maybe, you know, we were kind of thinking there's a video and maybe you could get it is just, no, hey, look, we're going to do some stuff. We have stuff to say into the market and we want you to say it because you're the leader. 

Adam Marquardt: From the conversations you've had in the past, what are some of the objections that the leadership team will try to block these efforts with or will try to shut it down by? I would like to say 

Nathan Yerian: that there are reasons every now and then there is a reason. There's a real reason. And, oh, hey, we're going to have a production day and, you know, Susan couldn't be there because, you know, her son's graduating and she needed to, you know, go to the Naval Academy and that that's not able to be rescheduled. Got it. Susan, you need to go handle that. 

Adam Marquardt:Congratulations to your son. 

Nathan Yerian: Yeah, exactly. You are off the radar for that particular shoot. Don't think you're getting out of the next one though. Other than that, almost every single, and I'll just call it an excuse is an excuse. It is, it is some aspect of insecurity surfacing. It's, oh, I don't look the way that I want to look. I don't look good on camera. 

I hear that a lot. Oh, I don't look good on camera. I don't like the way my voice sounds on camera. I don't have anything meaningful to say. Okay, so, so basically you, you don't look good. You don't sound good. You, you can't string sentences together. I'm just unclear on how that actually works in real life. 

So if there aren't cameras there, you can string sentences together. You sound good enough to talk to customers and employees. You look good enough to present to customers and employees. 

Who do you think is going to watch the video? Turns out it's customers, it's employees, it's the market in general. If, if you're good enough to be hired to represent the company, it's just a different way to represent the company. 

Adam Marquardt: One of the things that I've heard again and again over the last few quarters is what you said earlier of people saying, I don't like the way I sound. Or I'm afraid I can't string together a cohesive thought or series of thoughts. And I think one of the things that they fail to realize is that's why we have multiple cameras. That's why we have editors and the ability to fix that as much as we try to not fix it in post. 

I think that is one of the things that people have to understand is you don't have to have a perfect cohesive sentence or thought that we can put things together that will make a unified thought. 


Nathan Yerian: Thank God otherwise you wouldn't be able to do this. 

Adam Marquardt: What do you mean? 

Nathan Yerian:In all seriousness, like when you're talking about what you're going to talk about, we are not going to just show up with cameras ago. Okay, Tim, go. I mean, there's going to be preparation of what we're talking about, why we're talking about it, the points we need to make. It isn't necessarily going to be a scripted thing, but we're all going to know. And Tim, you're going to know these talking points because it's your business. It's what you do every day. 

We're not going to ask you the quadratic equation in some certain instance. We're going to ask you things you know. We're going to ask you things you surround yourself with every day. It is literally the same as when a customer says, hey, Tim, what about this? You're just going to know the answer. 

is the way you look. Hey, guess what? We're not gonna come and bust into your home and you happen to be wearing your nightie. It's, you know, you're gonna get to pick your outfit, guy. You don't want your hair to be out of place. We can have, are you okay? 

Adam Marquardt: I'm just picturing. You kicking down Tim's back door. 

Nathan Yerian: Bring the cameras in. Tim, get ready, dog. We're here. But in all seriousness, you know, if it's a, hey, we're worried about our hair, worried about our makeup, you could have hair or makeup there. I think in most cases that's overkill. There's a lot that will be done in post-production as far as how it's colored. 

There's a lot done in how it's lit that, you know, effect all of these things. So how you look, is it really an excuse? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. How you sound? How you sound is how you sound. 

When you talk to a customer, guess what? That's how you sound. Most people don't like the way their voice sounds to themselves. That's fine. I can hear myself right now. 

I sound ridiculous to me. And me. Yeah. But I'm okay with that. 

Like, turns out this is how I sound. So here we go. Doesn't matter. A lot of people think we're just gonna show up and we're gonna record them and it's gonna be verbatim what they said. It's not. We have the gift of editing. 

We can take little snippets of things that make sense and string them together into a cohesive thought, even if it wasn't one. Many times. We had a customer who will remain nameless that has a very, very nice gentleman there that he is the sweetest guy, but my goodness, you put a camera on him and he falls apart. Can't string sentences together literally. 

I've never seen it before other than this one individual. But if you talk long enough, and he says enough things, you can string them together to make him sound awesome, which is possible with almost anyone. I say almost only because I'm gonna say that and then we're gonna run into something that's worse than that, it's just not gonna work out. But the reality is if you can speak at all and say anything, you're going to say bits and pieces that make sense, that are gonna be valuable to the audience, to the viewer, that are gonna make sense. Most people are gonna say a lot of those things. Most people are gonna have a little hiccup, a little mistake, a wrong word used, something of that nature. All of that is not going to make the video, is going to be cut out. You are not going to look stupid because turns out, it's our job to make a good video and when you're saying wrong words or using things out of context or whatever doesn't make any sense, it isn't gonna make the final video because it makes the video less quality. 

Our job is to make you look great. We can't do that if you have a mess up on a word. So nothing that you're messing up in your statement is going to make it to the final video. 

Adam Marquardt: Okay, so you have this executive team. They are in their head, they're in their feelings about the way they look, the way they sound. How do you get over that and move past that so that you can create successful content moving forward? 

Nathan Yerian: I think a lot of it is a mental game. It's just insecurity. You think you're gonna be judged by other people and the first thing is to realize most people don't give a shit about you. Like they're doing their own thing. Like maybe, maybe on one day of their life, they're gonna see a few seconds of what you say. Do you really care what they thought of you in the few seconds that they saw you on that video? Like what impact do you really think that has on their lives that even if they're like, oh, I don't agree with that. You think they're gonna, oh my goodness, we're gonna show everybody and we're gonna make a huge deal about whatever. 

It's just, it's ridiculous. Like so you need to kind of realize you're not as important. What you're talking about might not be as important to the viewer, right? 

It's so important you get that message out there. But this is not world ending things here. This is pretty lighthearted usually. Lighten up about it, have some fun, smile. If you mess up, laugh about it, joke about it, try it again, it doesn't matter. In the end of the day, it doesn't matter. If you take yourself a little bit less seriously, you'll be fine. 

Not life ending, not game changing. It's a camera and you talking. You talk every day. You talk to your family. You talk to your friends. You talk to your coworkers. You talk to customers. You talk to investors. You talk to people. That's all you're doing. 

You're talking to people who you can't see the end. So if you realize it's not that critical, that's probably the first step, right? And then the next step is how can I get better over time? If I'm going to be on camera one time, there's a good chance that I'm gonna be on camera again. Video is not going away. Video has become an increasing part of our marketing, sales, sometimes internal communication, lives in a company. It's not going away. So if you're being asked to be on camera one time, there's a good chance it's gonna happen again. So look at it as a learning experience. What could we do this time to make it better than it was last time? Whether that's better in quality or better to make you feel more comfortable. 

What are the things that could be done? And a lot of times it's the approach that you're taking, the preparation that goes into it, or the realization that we are not taking verbatim what you say, we're gonna pull out the point of what you're talking about, and we're gonna present that in the best light possible. 

Adam Marquardt: And I think that's something people often forget because I even, after reviewing content with you, you'll sometimes be like, oh, hey, what about this thing or this thing? And it's like, I'm watching this video and I'm thinking about the message that they're trying to communicate. I'm thinking about the concept they're trying to articulate. And I'm really focused on that because whatever they're saying is the area of my focus. I'm not focused on their voice, their what they're wearing, the setting. 

Like sure, all those things help tie it together, but it's not the core thing that I'm sitting there looking at and picking apart. And I think that for 99% of viewers, the 1% that is sitting there doing that, you'll never hear from or you will and you'll move on from it. But I think realistically, I think that we get so caught up in the look and the feel and the, you know, you said it earlier, my own voice, everybody goes back to that. But I think at the end of the day, for the viewer, it's about the content that you're talking about or the topic you're talking about because the reason they're consuming that video, at least to the point that they are, is they want to know more. They wanna understand what you're saying to see if they agree or disagree with it. 

Nathan Yerian: They're not watching your video to catch you messing up. They're interested in something else. And you know what? If you flub a word, they're going to look beyond it because they are looking for the content. They're looking for the information. They're looking for your perspective. It doesn't matter to them. So the big question becomes, why does it matter to you?