Don't be needy in sales conversations. EP #133 - Shorty

G', day, guys. Dan Lenny here, host of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast here on Tuesday, November 17, with this week's shorting. And it is going to be short this week because I've got a lot to do today. And it got me thinking about, you know, the commitment that's required when you're doing anything in business. And this podcast is no different because it takes a certain commitment each week to make sure I deliver two episodes a week to you.

And today I want to talk a little bit about that and how that potentially can disrupt you and your business as well.

You know, there's. There's lots of things we do in our businesses that can be very repetitive. And in fact, repetition is actually the mother of all, you know, success. It's just that as creatives, we. We hate repetition. It's something that bores us. It's something that kind of gets in the way of being creative. We think to be creative, we've got to be, like, always coming up with something new. And that's actually a fundamental flaw in the creative business process is that what we need is consistency. And so this shorty, for example, I committed doing a short episode on a Tuesday, a full episode on a Thursday, and my assistant just said to me, hey, Dan, don't forget to do the shorty. And I've got a million things going on. Just now we're applying for finance for a mortgage. The Australian financial system is very different to the British financial system. There's all sorts of things you've got to do, and it's, you know, it's not the greatest fun in the world, to be honest. And I'm doing that whilst, you know, building my business, running my business, speaking to clients, hosting calls. And so some, Some days it just gets a bit overwhelming. And I wanted to share that with you. Like, I'm having one of those days where I just. Guys, it's just been tough today. You know, I'm kind of trying to juggle lots of balls in the air at the same time. Things coming at me from every angle and, you know, it'd be easy just to go, oh, I just. I can't be bothered. I just. I won't bother with the shorty. But that's not what builds consistency. And I liken it to anyone who's got a successful YouTube channel. You know, in some cases, they've been pushing out a piece of content every week for three or four years before it starts to take off. We've been doing this podcast for just about two years now, and, you know, the fact is, I've made a commitment to you, the audience, to produce two pieces of content a week. And so that's what I'm going to do. But it got me thinking about, we're on a coaching call this morning and a few people were kind of, you know, struggling a bit with like, you know, marketing. And I was talking to one of my marketing gurus, Will, who's who I'm working with just now, and he was saying, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's one of the challenges of being a human being is that we always naturally want to find the easy option and when something gets hard or where we fear rejection, we don't do it. So, you know, for example, if you've got to reach out and find clients.

That'S going to take some brass balls. You're going to have to get on the phone or outreach to people on LinkedIn. And that can be scary. But what I can share with you as someone who's overcome this, is that if you just do it anyway and accept that no is going to be part of the journey, every time you get a no, you're getting closer to a yes. And like anything, you know, you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to shoot or to edit, you learnt by doing. And I bet you the first few things you shot were terrible. I'll never forget shooting for the BBC and it was like I overexposed everything because I got the zebras wrong on the camera. I'd been used to shooting at 75% zebras and I camera was set to 95%, so I overexposed everything consistently and really messed it up. I was like, oh, my God, this is my first gig with the BBC and I've completely screwed it up. But you know what? You learn by making mistakes. You learn by putting yourself through the mill, putting yourself through things that are challenging, that are difficult. And, you know, business is going to continually present things that are difficult and that's where you learn the skills. That's where you learn to manage things. That's where you learn to kind of build more discipline in your life. And so if it comes to reaching out to speak to existing clients, you know, stop hiding behind email, actually get on the phone and ring people up and say, hey, you know, how are you? How are you doing?

It's been a while. What's been happening? You know, how can I help you? Is there anything I can do to support you? So until you're ready to Overcome that fear of just getting on the phone or reaching out to your network and asking for referrals, it's not going to get any easier. You know.

The heavy lifting gets done in the early years when you reach out to multiple clients until you build up a network of clients in your database. And once you get to 30 or 40 clients, you'll always be busy because a client will always be ringing up and asking for something. But if you're in those early stages of five to 10 clients, it is just simply a numbers game. You have to reach out to people, you have to make those connections, and you have to find ways to communicate. Now, fortunately for the video business accelerator clients and the members in that group, you know, we've got scripts, we've got processes, we've got systems that, that people can just, can just modify and reach out. So we take all the heavy lifting out of it, if you like. And, and if you don't have that, then you've got to figure out, how do you connect with people. What do you say? Had a call with a guy today who I'd connected with on LinkedIn, and he said, oh, I know, I know, you just want to get me on the phone to, you know, to kind of sell me into your coaching program. I said, well, actually, I, I don't. I said, because I don't know if we can help you. It sounds like you've got everything pretty much figured out. And so I was like, that's, that's not the purpose of the call at all. The purpose of the call is actually just to get to know a bit more about you and your business. And the reason I share that is that A, it disarms someone, but B, I genuinely am not trying to sell anybody into my program because if you, if you are not ready for it, it won't be of any help. And the only way I can know if you're ready for it is if we have a conversation. And I can understand where you're at in your business journey because we don't help everyone. We're very specific. Specific. We help very specific businesses who are, who have clients already who have got reasonable revenue coming in, but they want to improve it. That's where we, that's where we have. We don't help businesses who haven't got any clients get clients. That's not our business model. And so it's okay when you're talking to a client to not be kind of trying to sell them something. If you try and sell it, the clients will smell it a mile away. You want to be presenting and asking questions so you can figure out if this is someone you can help or not. And if you can't, maybe you can just give them some tips and some, some advice and follow up at a later date. So I really wanted to just kind of, you know, drop in quickly today to say, think about, you know, where you're at in your business. Is. Is getting clients your number one issue? And if it is, what are you doing in terms of a marketing strategy? Have you got multiple layers of marketing running in your business to attract people into your business, to attract prospects into your business to then evolve them and help them to develop to becoming leads? And can you help them answer some of their questions? Because a marketing strategy is multifaceted. You know, we run this podcast, we run ads, we run direct outreach, we run cold email, we run email marketing, the list goes on. You know, we do direct mail, we do newsletters. You need multiple streams of marketing in your business in order to. To scale. So, guys, I'm gonna leave that with you today. Sorry it's a bit short and sweet today, but I've got a load of work on that I'm doing for my clients at the minute and I will speak to you again on Thursday.

You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.com don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes. And we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share if you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers, you know, then please do me a massive favorite. Share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.