Nick Griffin
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks, Larry. Always good to hear from you.
The “struggle” is an emotional one of being ticked off that someone would think that homemade accomplishes the same objective as professional, but the conflicting thoughts is why I posted this in the first place. And I think I’ve realized all along that showing the differences between the two videos is likely to just alienate the prospect or, equally worse, teach them ways to improve their home brew.
Brendan has it right, though. The whole thing has to come from the perspective of what do THEY value — what’s their ROI. If they can be convinced that a professional image and sound has a positive impact on their business then they buy. If not, they don’t.
All in all, good thread guys. Thanx!
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As I stated at the outset:
[Nick Griffin] “Will being able to actually SHOW the differences mean anything to our delaying prospect? I have my doubts, but figured I’d throw it out to the group for consideration.”I’m heavily leaning toward Herb and Chris’s direction. So to offer up advice to myself: Don’t bother with the “How NOT To” and find better ways to get the point across. Sure it would feel good (for a few minutes) to show just how bad amateur video can look, but not likely to win in the end. It’s more confrontational in a sales environment where being supportive and nurturing almost always works better. Additionally I have had situations in the past where clients attempted to do stuff on the cheap and then crashed and burned. They come back when they know you’re there to help and go elsewhere if they feel that they’ve lost an argument.
Thanks, guys!
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[Christopher Wright] “I do think that in all fairness, humility isn’t one of his strong suites though! ;>)”
Two answers:
1) It rarely is with highly successful people.
2) If you knew Walter you would see how there are so many people with a fraction of his ability who are undeservedly prideful and he’s not even close to that mentality. He has and continues to work for it.
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[Christopher Wright] “As they say, pride comes before the fall, and Walter has that in spades.”
Christopher, perhaps I will be the first to come for Walter’s defense, but I don’t think he is being boastful at all. I’m seen firsthand his operation and the kind of work he’s doing. He’s successful for many good reasons, not the least of which is a great deal of talent fueled by a healthy measure of drive. He’s not creating a “build it and they will come” business which almost always IS subject to crashing and burning. Walt is building in a slow and measured way. He’s great at what he does and earns his successes every day.
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[grinner hester] “I’m in the friend-making business.”
Very well said, Grin! If you’re going to spend a lot of time with them it’s important that you like them and they like you. Otherwise it’s painful and fake and nowhere near as productive.[grinner hester] “Once it comes to this level, there really is no competition that can steal a client.”
And that’s the money part of your post. Relationship selling is the highest level of business. Especially when they’re no longer shopping price, but are interested mostly in positive outcomes. -
Rob-
Sorry to say this, but I think you’re hosed. And it’s both your fault and the fault the people who hired you. They didn’t properly set things up for you and you let them. At some point you should have asked (demanded?) at least a couple of hours for you to go through the assets, their condition and their locations BEFORE they split town.
Now you’re left to either point out that their stuff was not as organized as they thought it was or that they made a serious error in expecting an outsider to read their minds with no input. OR… they’re grinding you, knowing that to get their project done in the timeframe given you’ll need to devote 20+ hour days to sifting through their stuff to find what’s there and what’s not.
I may be wrong, but I don’t see how this ends well. Sorry, and I do hope I’m wrong.
BTW- liked the pretzel video. For the kind of show it is it’s clean, logical and holds together well. Not a glamorous piece but then again a whole lot of the work out there isn’t either.
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I’m happy to say that we have several dream clients — most of the time.
The main contact point in our largest client is one of the most reasonable and even-handed people I’ve ever dealt with because he knows that a deal has to work for both sides to have real value. He lets us be creative with very little interference. He gets our invoices pushed through quickly and he does his best to protect us from the not so nice people in his organization.
In fact, virtually all of the people we work closely with are friends and would be even if we didn’t have a business relationship. It’s one of the things I look for in going after new clients. Not to say that this is the primary reason for picking prospects but it has, at times, come down to the deciding factor, even as recently as this summer. If you can see up front that you don’t like someone’s basic MO and don’t get a sense of trust from them, WHY get involved?
Just this past week the leadership team of one of our dream clients drove a few hundred miles to our offices in order to discuss several new ideas. After a couple of hours of debate on whether the word “all” should be replaced with “any,” or even deleted, I was going a little nuts. Then I realized that the fact that these people, at this level, cared this much about their ad message was a reason they deserved our sincere appreciation.
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I agree with Mark. (Yet again. Sigh…) I will add one additional thought. As good as this would be as a resource, it would never be worth risking the COW to obtain. Ron and Kathlyn have created an amazing community and giving a gaggle of lawyers any excuse to interfere with it, distract it, or slow it down would NEVER be worth it.
So, Brendan, please proceed with this. Just set it up off-shore and cover your tracks with a few dozen shell corporations. Bermuda is a bit cool this time of year but Grand Cayman is delightful.
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[Matthew Chiumento] “HD, can make some people look really bad…LOL”
Anybody see last week’s 30 Rock? They had a very funny segment with people going between an SD and an HD camera. I also thought when it was still on the air that Boston Legal‘s directors really didn’t need to give us close-ups of William Shatner and Candace Bergen’s pores. But for training and industrial video?? Those people aren’t SUPPOSED to look beautiful.
[Matthew Chiumento] “I wonder sometime on how high of level to go?”
Even though the 350 can shoot SD DV I’ve never seen the point of it. We’re shooting everything in the camera’s highest quality HD, even when the finished program will be 4×3 SD. For me future-proofing is just common sense. So it makes sense to go as high end as will be required by the higher end of your spectrum of jobs.
We’ve also discussed before in other places on the COW that HD downsampled to SD actually looks better than stuff shot in SD. Seen it for myself.
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A little over a year ago we bought a “B-stock” Sony PDW-350 and have been extremely happy with it. The details can be found here.
While we started with re-purposing existing 2/3″ lenses with acceptable results, my need for a wide angle took over after a few months and our primary lens is now an HD Fujinon 13×3.3. Sure I’d like to have a 900 with the 2/3″ depth of field but the cost of the lenses plus the cost of the camera make 1/2″ the 350 / 355 a cost-effective compromise.
As to issues of XDCam in FCP, I’ve not experienced any problems, but then again the majority of our work is on Media100 because of its faster to use interface.