Join David Jay and Dallin Nead as they talk about how to make your business more personable.

Connect with your audience with these simple tips from David Jay of Warm Welcome.

‍David is the founder and CEO of Warm Welcome and was recently named a Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer.

David has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million ARR. Revenues from Warm Welcome, along with his other four companies, exceeded $6 million in 2020.

David is a startup junkie, he has started service based companies and several software companies. He believes that business can be a tool to help us build better relationships and connect us to a purpose far beyond ourselves.

Warm Welcome exists because we believe that business, at its best, is personal and purposeful.

welcome to visionaries where we explore stories strategies and insights from the world's most inspiring entrepreneurs brands and creators we're on a mission to help visionaries like you stand out and monetize their knowledge influence and message online exploring topics like business marketing creativity and personal development let's build your vision for a happier more meaningful life business and community together david is the founder and ceo of warm welcome and was recently named a top 100 tech innovator and influencer david has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million dollar annual recurring revenues david is a startup junkie and he has started service based companies and several software companies he believes that business can be a tool to help us build better relationships and connect us to a purpose far beyond ourselves warm welcome exists because he believes that business at its best is personal and purposeful david it's so good to have you on the show today thanks dale it's great to be here here yeah of course you know what we're gonna jump into for those tuning in is this idea that you can approach your customers in this virtual world today in a more warm and personalized way uh and do so with video and content and not feel like you have to have the most polished approach uh and what david brings the table is this incredible new software and opportunity to really introduce yourself and insert a nice video message throughout your sales funnel and it's called warm welcome but david go ahead and walk us through a little bit more of like a backstory around like what inspired warm welcome and kind of what led you to this point sure so i'm a kind of a startup junkie i started uh you know my career as a wedding photographer and i just dropped out of college became a photographer typical service space business problems tough to scale gotta work every weekend and so over time i gravitated towards tech and towards some more scalable things but uh warm welcome came about when we were creating a different type of video software and a buddy of mine eric noff who has a company called webconnects he goes i want to use that as a way to greet people and welcome every new customer that we have and i was like that's genius like that is the direction that i hope the world goes i hope we can make things a little bit more warm and friendly and personal and so we built warm welcome kind of around that idea helping helping people have better conversations with their clients instead of just broadcasting messages yeah that's so powerful you know and it's interesting um like you speak about your background with dropping out going into the service providing route with photography um i i went to and i did some photo and video but like i worked for corporate and so there was mass communications of email into your intranets and i would say i mean whether you're a massive company with thousands and thousands of employees or a team of one to few as you are in startup mode uh the relevancy of breaking down the barriers and having more personalized approach makes warm welcome a suits like this even more um attractive um and that's something i began to sell like my world in corporate several years ago before i quit um and went full time with my business it felt there's a very much of like you said like kind of a broadcast style it's like here's a one-sided conversation we're gonna broadcast this message out to you or to our international employee base or customer base to get this message but the response that you get from people wasn't really there it was very difficult um how do you feel like warm welcome cuts through that noise and makes it more simplified to have that conversation yeah well it invites the conversation and you know the conversations at the forefront of every interaction whether it's a video bubble on a website or a video email it's it's asking the person receiving it to participate not just listen not just uh accept or reject whatever is said uh but it's saying hey let's talk about this and you know that's i think a common problem that any business has is we get so focused on what it is we're creating the service we're providing the product we're building that we forget that our main job is to help the customer solve a problem that they have and so kind of flipping the script and saying you know hey what is it that i can help you with instead of here's what i have to offer here's the product i'm building it's you know what's the problem you're having let me come alongside you and uh see you see if i can help i love that so i mean i get excited about this stuff i i've just started sampling out more in the last few months as far as video messages from a conversation starter standpoint trying to get responses uh one barrier i feel like definitely exists for people is this idea though that it you you may get those warm and fuzzies right um when you see a personalized message people are saying your name um in a video form do you find that it's easier for people to hit reply and respond with the video as well uh or is there still often a barrier that exists for those who are like i don't really i'm not in the mood to show up in video audio or written word is kind of an easier approach um what do you think that barrier looks like and how can people resolve that for themselves yeah there's definitely a barrier you know people are they're they're transitioning uh pretty quickly kind of after the last year where everybody was working from home and getting comfortable uh basically seeing into everybody's bedroom uh it's it's not as big of a deal if you know you've got your hair combed or your makeup on or whatever but there's still a barrier so we're not by any means forcing video communication on anybody in all of our all of our different widgets you can respond with video you can respond with audio and you can respond with traditional text um and so it's whatever somebody's comfortable with but uh oftentimes you'll see as the relationship goes on people get more comfortable just talking like they would face to face right you know if you're going out and having coffee with somebody or having a business meeting you're going to be face to face and there is an advantage to that and when you can bring that onto the internet make it a little bit more scalable uh that that's helpful and so i think the people that transition the quickest uh will win in in this new world where we're selling everything through the internet but people's businesses haven't caught up yet they haven't brought that human advantage onto their website and so we're that's what we're trying to help them with yeah you know and something that's powerful for for those i i don't think we mentioned it yet but literally yesterday david you sent me a message using warm welcome uh shows up in my email i can see the embed so i see your face click on it you say my name um and it's personalized that way and there's something about the approach that is feels so simple yet genuine um because it's not like you're trying to be an actor or present something that you're not right like you're using your conversational voice uh you're not trying to sound like someone you're not you're not really you're not reading off a script and so even if you're saying something and you kind of stumble you just keep going and try to do it in one take uh the camera is typically from your webcam uh but yet you can still plug in like a nice webcam if you want to um but there's something about that just simplified approach as if you're talking on facetime um to a family member or friend and it was the kind of that that first initial response and so you feel like there's this good feeling of an obligation around like oh you know i i want to respond like this is a priority for me because this is like a one-to-one reach out versus like hey everyone like everywhere you know it's more a lot more personalized and i like that yeah you nailed it we still have this expectation of a response when we see somebody's face right if you're walking down the street and somebody stops and asks you a question it would be very awkward for you to just look at them and then keep walking right yeah but we do that with emails every day when they're just text or a website every day when it's just text or graphics or promotional broadcast type of video where when we see a human who's talking to us and asking us something we're much more likely to respond to that than we are a text-based communication even if it's a personalized one-to-one email uh or a personalized message that said we're just getting over text text yeah it's a terrible way for humans to communicate yeah and the difficult thing too is is sometimes with text like text message based marketing too it's it's really fine line as far as like getting contacted to your personal device oftentimes or business device through text message which i feel like is most often off-putting that it is i guess on putting and getting people to respond that way but there's something about showing up in email with the personal video approach that we've seen only shipped in 2020 with more people going virtual with their businesses um but the importance of the sales cycle um and including video throughout the entire customer experience and realizing hey you don't necessarily have to go and hire a professional film crew to film all your videos you can have these interactions and depending on what you're selling or simply just what kind of information you want to research and collect from your customers you can simply use the tools you have on you from your phone to your webcam and there's no extra budget involved just a simple way to engage yeah yeah yep you just have to show up and do it and exactly you're right whether it's at the early stage and lead gen or early part of the funnel by adding video to that it's probably the quickest easiest cheapest way to increase the amount of leads that actually move on to the next step so yeah on the river on the flip side right at the end like having a personal video or just a video in general that is more engaging when somebody is going to unsubscribe right like put a warm welcome video on your unsubscribe page that says hey i'm dj i'm the founder and it looks like we've blown it in some way i want to make that right i want to know i want you know i stand behind this product and so push one of the buttons below you can send me a text audio message a video message whatever you want send me an email but let's you know give me a chance to make this right just doing that alone will will decrease your turn right and it's not a personalized video i'm not sending a personalized video to every single person but it's a personal video it's allowing people to see me as a human another business owner who doesn't get everything right i'm putting that out there and they're acknowledging that as they're about to unsubscribe and i'm just inviting them to give me a chance and again it's not hard it's not something you have to get all dolled up for uh take you five minutes to put that on your web page right right on your app and you have an immediate result yeah exactly you know and one thing that uh when you did send me that message yesterday you asked me a question that kind of really brings me back to uh the simplicity of getting started with this kind of approach of building what i like to call like a video sales funnel or building a video supply inside of your business is one of the first steps you can take with mastering content and showing up for your audience is committing to engaging and having one conversation per day with your perfect fit customer um and in doing so whether it's through warm welcome and maybe to based on your customer you know you have to go through text whatever it may be you know a call if you have one conversation a day with your customer not only are you understanding their current problems um a way that you can craft a better solution but you're able to have that marketing touch point every single day and maybe eventually close them on one of your products and services or just simply just help them and give out that free kind of value and so to me it all comes back to that one action item of committing to one conversation at least a day it should be many more than that but at least one a day yeah i love that it's a great great challenge and i think people often don't do that because of the time and energy it takes to just coordinate it right yeah right to write to a client to try and get you know synced up schedule wise like it's very difficult it takes extra energy and effort to do that where when you can do it asynchronously right i could send you a quick little question over video when it was convenient for me and you could answer it when it was convenient for you no scheduling no calendly no back and forth it's just done in a matter of minutes that's a i think a better approach or maybe just a new approach that we haven't had the ability to do before yeah yeah and it's and the fact that you can do it through video and it's not like you have to drop into someone's dms on instagram or these other places right like it's it's literally direct to them or direct to more than just one as you're talking about with like you know avoiding that churn rate and engaging with them there at the bottom of the funnel and i like in the way that it's it doesn't feel as spammy and it's like what do you have to lose um you're not you're not going overly polished with it you're not trying too hard it's just and you're keeping it simple keeping a message less than 60 seconds um and like you did with me yesterday you know using a perfect i guess case study to the solution of warm welcome is is a simple message and um you are showing an understanding of the person by talking about them and then you are inviting them to just to take action on one thing one call to action in the video uh and the call to action is not necessarily like go by now it's more just like hey i'm curious like can you reply to me and then what what that is going to do is maybe provide some instruction right that's helpful for your business but start that conversation um that can happen every day so yeah i know i just i i think it's so i think it's incredible i think it's so good and it's it's much better more genuine way to show up um beyond say just spammy people which i'm sure you get many of these across social media and your messengers um of people trying to do business with you and pitching right off the bat yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah we started out with just video email and then we realized hey the website is really the yes the gold mine and we can help people improve their websites dramatically by this you know conversational video bubble or video embed you know you can have a nice big video on your web page that people can interact with and you know that's something that you would have thought would have happened 20 years ago with the internet yeah right because you walk into a store well there's somebody there to greet you you know you walk into the apple store there's somebody there to give you a warm welcome to say hey we're glad you're here is there anything i can help with you know you walk into almost any store there's going to be some sort of sales rep or clerk that's there that welcomes you greets you and asks if they can help with anything the internet is void of humans right we have these chat bots which everybody hates we've got these uh you know text based kind of customer service things but that's all like completely missing the human touch the human element right you don't you don't communicate empathy over a chatbot or even a customer service chat right it's just almost impossible to do so so all you can do is give people information you can't help them really understand a product much better through text right i'm selling something i'm trying to describe it through the text of a live chat widget like give me a break why can't i just put that thing be on an interactive live video with somebody from the company they can show me the product they can walk me through it like that builds trust so much faster than someone you know chatting back and forth giving you these canned responses and and yet it's taken us it took us this you know coven thing for people to realize oh geez there's a better way to sell online maybe we should add humans back into the internet and so it's it's funny the things that disrupt our our kind of status quo way of going about things but anyway we're we're excited about the change yeah yeah and i'm sure as you're saying that um as i thought i'm sure many of you listening or watching thought the same thing of one of your most recent customer service calls um say with another company where you're trying to get customer support and you're either put on hold for most likely hours on end i like i feel that way and you're you're getting annoyed and frustrated because it's like you get to one department they're like oh this is not really our department let me put you on hold again you listen to some crazy cheesy music and then you're put to another line and literally there's been times that i've like been linked up to probably three different departments before to actually maybe resolve my issue with something whether it's like government related business related and the customer support support uh experience is is terrible because it's causing you to waste a lot of time um and so to eliminate that and get direct to a human to get the support you need um that video approach and the on-demand experience right because like thinking like why we've gone to on-demand tv and film watching from the netflix or the amazon prime of the worlds it's because we no longer want to have to deal with commercials which is again that kind of time waste we want direct access to the content we need right now and the answers we need right now and so that on-demand customer support um i think is incredible uh to have that back and forth and a response time that works with with our timeline as well and video is such a great way like whether it's like face-to-face maybe you have to use quick screen share to demonstrate a resolution um and this is just speaking the customer service side let alone the other aspects of the customer experience you know we're talking about the website we're talking about um email and other forms of communication so uh yeah no this is great yep yeah just about any business you know we're kind of more in the tech space so we think that way but think about somebody that's selling purses online like if if they were to go into a first shop there would be somebody there to talk them through the differences of the person right and show them this one oh look how this one hangs look how this one opens look at the zipper right the internet they don't have that they think that a pretty promotional video and some text is going to sell the purse it's like no have a person have a human there just like you would if you had a store that's available you know they can be working on other things if no one's if no one's there to chat with them but if somebody's on your website wanting information about your product thinking about buying it why would you not be there present to help them you know buy your stuff like this that's a no-brainer but we think that some fancy graphics and text is going to do the sale and it's just not yeah or help us stand out too i mean uh it's just it takes sometimes just the little tweaks uh to that experience and not to have just like another mediocre website experience which is you know truly an online store or storefront um going to your website and that's where people actually buy what you offer online and to make it as easy as possible like be that person who creates them at the door which is when they land on your website and and so yeah like that's uh hopefully you feel um the inspiration around stepping into using video more with your sales conversations and customer conversations because it's it is truly a a warm welcome of an experience uh make it genuine and show up for your audience that way the internet has been it's been good for buying things but terrible for selling things and yes we're trying to make it a lot better sales experience for both the business and the customer yeah incredible well david this has been so good where can people learn more about warm welcome and get started with building out um that uh that solution inside of their business yeah they can just go over to warmwelcome.com check it out lots of different ways to use it you can use it just kind of embedded video on your website or through emails we're creating some neat use cases for podcasters to help them own their network and not be as reliant on the platforms you know helping people get the names and email addresses of their clients because if you sell something on amazon you don't know who bought it you distribute a podcast you don't know who's listening we're trying to help businesses get control of that again and just have those direct conversations with their customers yeah wonderful well we'll definitely make sure to include that down below and david thanks so much for your time yeah

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