The power of a testimonial video

A printer & copier machine company owner contacted me to ask about a testimonial video for his company. Our first meeting was to discuss the structure of the video, Brian the company owner had some great ideas and we also discussed the clients that he wanted me to interview.

There were different questions for each client as they had all been helped in different ways by Brian’s excellent product knowledge and customer care skills.

I made arrangements with Brian’s clients who had agreed to take part in the video, I explained the process, the time involved and appointments were made. The interviews went well and with a little time, all of the clients were good in front of the camera. We had some real gold at this point, but lots of it. I did have to stop a corporate lawyer saying that Brian really knew his stuff when it came to getting his clients out of dodgy contacts from other unscrupulous suppliers, even “he didn’t understand them”. I stopped him (which I very rarely do) “surely you don’t want to say that on camera” I said. Yes, I do, he replied, so we carried on.

There were numerous clients that were in very bad contracts before Brian helped them work through the small print, examples were, if the was 1 dot of colour on a page of black and white, the whole page would be charged as colour, which was quite a big difference when schools, lawyers, network training companies, insurance firms, printed a lot of lesson materials, documents, training manuals etc. etc.

We did have some real gold nuggets in the statements his clients had told, the trouble then was convincing Brian which ones to use, to keep the video to sensible length. We got to the part with the corporate lawyer saying he didn’t understand the contracts, I told Brian what had happened, not entirely convinced he rang the person in question, who again said, no you leave it in, I’m happy to say that on camera.

We had an 8 minute video at this point, so again we reviewed it to try to choose the best gold nuggets, it then went to 10 minutes long, which is a lot longer than I had advised.

The opening of the video was a great idea from Brian, we used his brand new liveried van and he had all of his admin and technical team, the printer manufacturers regional and head office technical team walking out from the rear of the van. This was the entire team that helped him with is first class service delivery.

Brian was only looking for work across the North West of England and North Wales, around 2 hours from his Wirral base. He knew the industry well and had been in the business that long that he knew there was always “an expert” in the office, only too willing to help clear a paper jam, consequently messing that whole thing up and needing a service engineer. Brian’s aim was to be with his client within 4 hours of their initial call for help, hence the travel distance of up to 2 hours.

When the video was released Brian was delighted with it, but he found that some potential clients were finding it a bit too long whilst he was showing it to them. I smiled to myself when he asked for a shorter version.

The video served him well locally, but he was amazed when he was contacted by a company from London’s financial center wanting a number of machines installed. He sold the machines to them and then contracted out the service contract to one of his contacts in the area.

All in all, the testimonial video was a huge return on investment for Brian and I was very happy that he sang my praises about the video and the whole production process as it was one of my earlier video creations some years ago.