Where most video businesses fail in marketing. EP #173 - Shorty

G', day, guys. It's Dan here. It's Tuesday.

13Th April here in Australia with episode 173, this week's Shorty on how to scale a video business podcast. So just come off my weekly coaching call with my clients and we've been talking about all things marketing, which raises a question, which is are you giving up too quickly when it comes to connecting with prospects and taking the conversation beyond just that initial stage? I'm going to share with you why I think it's possible that you are on today's session.

So I think where most businesses fail in marketing, and this is across all marketing, across all businesses, is the they give up too quickly when it comes to following up with a prospect. So, you know what happens is someone makes an inquiry and maybe you get back to them in two or three days, which is not uncommon.

If you don't get any feedback, then, believe it or not, 50% of people give up. If you make a second contact with, then you're starting to get into the, getting into the top 10% of businesses. If you make three contacts, you're in the top 20%. Really, like 80% of people have given up by this stage and if you make four contacts, then 90% of people are giving up by this time. And if you make five or six contacts, you've actually become a factor in the lead's mind. Because people get busy, we all get busy. We intend to do something. I mean, have you ever sort of sat in a situation where, I mean, I did this just yesterday, actually a totally different scenario, but I was watching YouTube in the morning, I was looking at a new Dell monitor, like a 27 inch 4K monitor was being reviewed and I went upstairs to go and start my day and I thought I must, I must check out that monitor when I get to the office. And I completely forgot about it. I got distracted by three different things and it was at the very end of the day, my wife had gone to bed and I went back to YouTube and like, oh, bugger, I forgot to check that monitor out. So a whole day went by where something that had my attention for like eight minutes in the morning completely escaped my mind for the rest of the day. So, you know, that happens to us all. So if you got a prospect who's making an inquiry for video.

And you go back to them.

It doesn't matter if you spend like two hours on a proposal. I mean, I wouldn't do it at that stage. But, you know, some people do you put all this effort into proposal. And then you're like, right, I've emailed it. And then nothing. Like, you've got to follow up. And, and, and yet it's the most intimidating, confronting thing to do to call people up. And yet if you do, your business will thrive because no one does it. You know, if you call someone and say, hey, sort of make sure you got the quote, okay? Let me know if you got any questions. And the next day you ring them up again and say, hey, just want to make sure you got the quote, okay? Have you had a chance to look through it? Is it okay? Or do we need to. Do we need to work on it a bit more?

And sometimes people are like, oh, yeah, I forgot, I meant to show this to my boss. Let me do it now. You build this relationship with someone who's, who's going to basically feel indebted to you because you're making such an effort to help them out. And the second thing that happens is that if you're making this much effort to help them out before they've given you any money, imagine what's going on in their mind. They're thinking, well, you're going to be really responsive when it comes to the job. And the other thing is when you do follow up repeatedly, you just, you just immediately separate yourself from most of the competition. You know, I mean, most people that I come across, thankfully not in my group, but I come across a lot of people outside of the group who say, oh, yeah, I've been so busy, I've been on a job, you know, I got an inquiry. It took me a couple of days to go back to them. It's. It's crazy. You got to respond immediately. You've got to be in a position to respond immediately. And that's very hard to do if you are always on the tools. You know, it's very hard to scale a video business if you're always on the tools, because what happens is you get caught up in production, caught up in the operations, and the strategic stuff suffers. And so what happens is while you're generating the coin by going on location, doing all this work, you're backing off your marketing. And so what happens is the feast and famine starts to rear its head because you're not doing any ongoing marketing to reach new prospects that might come online 30, 60, 90, 120 days later. And so I think there's often an impatience of like, you know, wanting the work but not being willing to necessarily put the work in. And then yet when an opportunity comes in Giving up too quickly. I gave an example this morning of a client I have and we had six points of communication before I actually offered to send a case study. And at that point another four or five communications before this person turned and said, I'd love to have a chat about you helping me run my business. And I worked out as 117 days from the first point of contact until this particular person said, hey, I'd love to have a conversation about you helping me in my business. And now she's an amazing client and we're supporting her to build her business. So, you know, don't give up too quickly. It's very easy to.

Kind of become fearful of picking up the phone and following up with someone when you haven't heard anything. We as creatives play all these stories out in our minds that.

They probably don't want it or they've changed their mind. We talk ourselves out of things. And something that I say often is that as a marketer, and we're all marketers because we all need to market our businesses, marketers don't think, they test. And I think this is where there can be a discourse or a disjointed element which is, you know, as creators, we're always coming up with and thinking of ideas. We're thinking of ways to improve.

A project, for example. But in marketing we can't afford to do much thinking. We've actually got to do testing. We've actually got to test A versus B option 1 versus option 2 and let the market decide. But, but if, if you, if you can just do, if you did one thing today, which is to list all of the clients that you have worked within the last year and connect with them all again or any inquiries that come in the last month. Follow up. We're getting some quotes for some solar just now and you know, we're looking at two different companies. The three companies that that were contacted us, one didn't get back to us. So they just immediately discounted themselves. We had meetings with two of them and there's one company that we prefer to go with who's actually not the cheapest company. But we just felt we had a good connection with the company and we liked the value to the company and we liked how they were a local business and family run even though they weren't the cheapest. But the other company were just really thorough in their follow up. I mean they called me immediately. In fact, as soon as we got the inquiry, an email came to us saying someone will call you on Monday. Someone called us on Monday. They arranged to have a meeting. I think they called us twice to arrange a meeting. We had the meeting. They've called us three or four times after that and then also sent us a text message saying, hey, you still interested? And I found that to be really interesting because I just got busy and I still haven't had a look at the quotes because what I wanted to do is get some quotes in to get an idea of what it costs. And if we flip that into a prospect. Getting quotes for video, like most, most people don't know what video costs and they might be fearful that's going to be expensive. And so at some point you have to get a ballpark that says, okay, it's going to cost X. And so I didn't have a clue what 12 and a half kilowatts of solar would cost to go on the roof. So I got a couple of quotes. Now I've got those quotes. It's nothing to do with which company I'm going to go with. It's me having a chance to sit down and go, okay, now that I know the rough ballpark, when, when is the. When is the right time for me to do this. Now I've decided to do it in the new financial year, which is not until July because we're coming into winter here as well, et cetera. And. And so I'm just like, you know what, this is not a priority right now. That's not to say that I don't think both companies are perfectly capable, but my priorities have changed and so it'll be something I'll look at maybe in 60 or 80 days time. Now that happens in video as well. People want to get a quote, get an idea what it's going to cost. And if you don't follow up, if you leave it to them, then you're going to miss out. So start making more follow ups. If you did one thing in your business today that I could guarantee would generate you work, it would be to simply call prospects and clients and say, hey, how did you go with that quote? Was it what you were looking for or do we need to go and look at it again? It's the one thing that will have the biggest impact in your business. So some really salient free advice for you today is go and follow up with your clients, call them up, don't email them, and let me know how you get on. All right, guys, I will see you in a few days. 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. So thanks for listening and see you in the next episode.