How to manage & qualify those early prospects conversations - Shorty EP#64

G' day guys. Tuesday the 18th of February. Dan here with your shorty bite sized chunk of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast.

Today. I want to start by saying g' day to Myron Glover and Grant Taylor both slipped into my inbox there on LinkedIn to say that they have enjoyed watching the show. Myron's over there in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada and Grants down there in Australia.

So guys, good that you can reach out and if you haven't yet done that, then, you know, please check out my LinkedIn profile and come and say hi and let's connect. You know, this is an industry of connection and collaboration, so I'd love it if you slipped over there to Dan Lenny over at LinkedIn and let's, let's get to know a bit more about your business. The more I know about where you guys are at, the more I can tailor this content to, you know, helping you. And that's really what it's all about, you know.

So we've just finished our first weekly coaching call.

For the Video Business Accelerator and interesting chats today about habits and I wonder if this will relate to you. You know, when we start a business, it's because we started life as a freelancer generally and what we're doing is we're, you know, we're kind of starting to take on more work and when we first start that, that's something that we're doing, you know, pretty much it's us. Very few people start a business with a full team and that can be great for a while. But as I say to the guys on the call today, you know, that will only get you so far because there's only you and you only have so much energy. And so you need to be really clear on, you know, beyond just survival mode, what it is you need to be doing to grow and scale that business. Because you simply cannot do everything yourself. Otherwise you just become a freelancer. Except you're a freelancer who's doing many, many different roles. So we shared a diagram this morning about, you know, how, how your business is only a part of you, but within your video business, you've got to be looking for prospects, you've got to be marketing, you've got to be, you know, liaising with prospects, having conversations, which is part of marketing. But then you've got to manage the sales process. How do you get a client from prospect to sales? And we touched on that on this morning's call.

And I'll come back to that in a second. But the, the, you know, once You've got clients. How do you keep those clients? And then, of course, there's production and delivery, which is the bit that you probably spend the most time doing. But beyond that, there's the operations side of the business, you know, managing your quotes, your invoices, your insurance, you know, depreciation on equipment. And what I typically see is freelancers who migrate to running a company. They basically, you know, there's this very common myth in the industry which says, hey, if you make lots of money in a job, buy lots of gear and you'll save tax. And whilst that is true to a degree, on certain capital expenditure, you're still spending your cash. And, you know, for example, unless there's certain rules and tax breaks in your country, and I'm no tax expert, but let's say you spent $30,000 on a piece of equipment, it's unlikely you're going to be able to write that off in the first year. It's more likely it'll be written off over four or five years. And so actually what you're doing is spending $30,000 of capital, but only writing off $6,000 in year one, $6,000 in year two, $6,000 in year three. And so actually, you're not actually kind of saving that much in terms of tax. And look, I have view that if you're paying tax, you're making money. And I think there's a real cling on to that notion of freelancing where when you buy gear, you pay less tax. And anyway, I didn't want to deviate into tax conversations. We're going to get somebody on who understands this at some point to talk about it in more detail. But what we got stuck into this morning was this idea that when you're prospecting, you know, you get an inquiry. You know, how much work do you do on that inquiry before you're being paid? And. And one of the questions we had from one of the team this morning was, oh, I got this inquiry last week. I had to spend a couple of hours really thinking about it and working out how I could do it and how to figure it out. And then the job didn't really happen because I think we all agreed in the call this morning was there's a fear, if you like, of asking the money question. And that fear of asking the money question is simply trying to get some indication from the prospect of what budget they have.

And that can be very challenging, especially if you're doing it over email. And so my recommendation is that you don't do that over email. You actually get on the phone and ask a series of questions to really establish rapport with the client, understand fully what it is they're looking to achieve, and then actually press them for some financial commitment. Because, you know, a film can cost a thousand bucks and it cost 100,000 bucks. Then there's so many variables in between that, you know, we were talking on the call about, you know, how do you. How do you sell that to the client, how do you. How do you go through different scenarios and actually, you know, engage a client in a conversation in such a way that they begin to feel like you understand them and then they trust you and that you're an authority and really, really to protect you. Because, I mean, we've all, we've all been there in the past where, you know, a client wants a proposal and you spend two or three hours doing a proposal and then it doesn't go anywhere. So we want to stop that. We want to make sure that you are the alpha position in your business where you're the expert, you're the authority, and, you know, you actually. We actually ran through a, A kind of role play this morning on the call where we walked through a kind of a scenario. And, you know, our members get the recording of that and then they get their transcriptions. They can start to use that. And what we're saying to the guys in the group was that, you know, you can. You can actually have that in front of you and start to use that as almost a script or a set of prompts so that, you know, we're very big into systemization. Everything in your business that you do more than once can be systemized. And if you want to learn more about systemization, you can go and check out the earlier episode with Dave Jennings. We did probably episodes 10 or 11, something like that, where we talked about, you know, systems for video production businesses. And, you know, that it's all about a repeatable action. You know, you don't want to be on the back foot in any scenario where, you know, you're dealing with an inquiry. Because an inquiry is just that, it's an inquiry. It's. You're not being paid yet. So I would encourage you to not be putting together fancy proposals using Proposal 5 or other software at a very early stage because you don't need to compete on how fancy your proposal is in the first instance. You need to make sure that you're actually delivering something to the client that they want and need. And just also consider this the.

Proposal stage or the conversation stage. We're having a prospect. It's as much about you filtering, do you want to work with them? As it is them to work with you. And I feel that so many video production companies, certainly when they're starting out, worry too much about just saying yes, like, I just want the work. I want the work. We can do it. Yes, we can do it. We can do everything. Yeah, we can. And actually, you shouldn't be doing everything. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I know when I was starting out, you know, I wasted lots and lots of time on prospects that just weren't ever going to go anywhere. They were never really a good fit for our business. And the problem with that is that you end up running around doing proposals, busting a gut, working really hard, and then getting really deflated because the jobs don't come over the line. And the second thing is, don't, you know, don't, don't drop your prices too quickly. You know, make sure that you're pricing appropriately for the work that needs to be done.

Because many, many inquiries will come in. People that are just, are just literally, oh, shall we video this? Let's get a quote. And that's it. You know, there's no real thought. And then you wait for them to come back to you and then it's like, oh, no, they're not that bothered because it's too much. So what you can do here is just minimize some of that effect by being the alpha from a sales perspective right from the outset, actually, you know.

Ask the right questions and establish your authority as an expert in the field. Give them a couple of options and you could just say, oh, look, you know.

This is going to guide price. We can do it somewhere between this price and this price. Um, why don't you send that back to your decision maker and once they've given you a ballpark idea, see how they respond to that, then we can go into more detail. So that's what I do, guys. I would just start to, you know, build some systems around your, your process. And of course, if you want help with that, that's what our video Business accelerator program is all about. We have a lot of these kind of conversations on a weekly basis and we build systems and scripts around these things. If you want help with that, then go and check it out over@denleny.com. anyway, guys, that's it for the shorty this week. I will talk to you 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 favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. We'll see you next week.