By Stu Marks, Post Production Editor, IncreaseSalesWithVideo.com 

You are the manager of your family’s two star hotel right on Brikell Bay Drive in Miami because your younger cousin didn’t have what it took to make decisions and the property started to suffer. It’s a nice hotel located on a premium footprint but lacks the expensive amenities to gain more stars because you are landlocked and can’t build a restaurant and add the two parking spaces you are short from that coveted four star positioning.

It’s a busy weekend, the weather is great and you are packed. Life is good. Until, the top suite overlooking the beach has a plumbing failure overnight and the $3,000 a night whale staying the week has no tolerance for maintenance excuses: she wants it fixed “…like yesterday, dude!” Who do you call? Is this a job for Uncle Roberto again, or are you going to start leafing through the Yellows for cheap plumbers? No way, “dude”, you’re getting the plumber in here right now who you know can and will fix this immediately. You’re getting one of the best. Because your very livelihood depends on this moment in time. This is an opportunity to show the family that you are the get-things-done-guy in the right place at the right time.

Plumber gets there in thirty minutes, replaces a cracked shower drain and is out by noon. The bill is $400. Seems high but you don’t spend that every day, and it’s fixed, Ms Whale is happy not to have to move to the other suite and that leaky little maintenance problem won’t be coming back for another 25 years.

Deciding who shoots your customer testimonial video for your web site is no less important than any other important decision moment for you the business owner. You choose a professional to manage your taxes, a professional to handle your real estate and legal matters, why would you hire anything less than a specialist in the area of your web testimonials?

In advertising, everyone deals with getting noticed above the white noise of competition and the mundane, so don’t settle on the lowest common denominator when your business’ very existence based on what you do to increase sales is at stake. You MUST increase business sales, increase service sales or increase product sales. These are all retail sales. No one is left out of this survival requirement.

All businesses must increase retail sales and the tools you use are required to have outreach leverage in order to bring in new business. These outreach leverage tools can’t just speak to new blood, they must excel at it. Therefore, your outreach leverage tool should be crafted and applied by someone who has a proven track record in this genre’. You must hire an established professional.

There are many reasons why business owners fail this simple test over and over again. Instead of making the right decision, they get stopped by three common mistakes:

-         bargain hunting
-         glamour profiling
-         personal attachment issues

BARGAIN HUNTING
When one is focused on bargain hunting they usually miss the telltales of success and failure. Now a days, with the advent of so many so-called video producers entering the arena due to the perceived simplicity of digital video, we don’t even begin to cut rates to match Uncle George down the street’s wedding shooters. Uncle George is usually higher than us. Go figure.

GLAMOUR PROFILING is when one is looking for some sort of Hollywood glitz element in the production company’s profile just because they expect it there because, “hey, it’s TV, right?” Wrong. Entertainment is not business. Producers are not all the same. If you want to produce a game show, call a Hollywood producer. But, if you want to produce customer satisfaction testimonials, you need to hire a producer who has been there and done that. Great producers are not ones who can produce anything in terms of a broad spectrum of genre’. A great producer is one who does well in at least one genre’ and sticks to that as their bread and butter deliberately so that they can end up leading the industry in that area of expertise.

If you are going in for heart surgery, which surgeon would you pick: the one who has done hundreds of different surgeries, or one that has done hundreds of heart surgeries?

A testimonial producer is one who has a proven track record at testimonial writing, and there isn’t much in the way of peripheral experience that can substitute for real experience.

Writing a testimonial is a specialized craft. One has to know exactly how to create a script for someone “in their own words.” Testimonials are real statements, so the talent is not really reading a script. But, there needs to be a script anyway in order to handle all of the other assets that go into a testimonial video production. How to handle this dilemma takes years of experience in order to arrive at the end of the process with great customer testimonials.

PERSONAL ATTACHMENT ISSUES
When a business owner has personal attachment issues, there is usually other baggage being dragged around as well, because this is just plain and simple a character issue. Running a business doesn’t have much room for any other kind of decisions than business decisions. Family and friendship won’t stand up very long against the all mighty bottom line.

So, when hiring a plumber, get a good one. And when hiring a video producer for your customer testimonials, get one who has a proven track record in crafting products that increase retail sales.

For examples of customer testimonial samples that can be used on web pages, or as stand alone DVDs, check out our portfolio page.
IncreaseSalesWithVideo.com/videoportfolio

Here are some other good references:
Video or Written Word: Content is King
The Magic Zone: Finding a Vendor to Produce Your Business Videos
HOW TO SELL 8 WAYS WITH 1 VIDEO