Real people don’t hire voiceover artists

My friend and mentor Philip Banks recently posted some extremely helpful comments on the VO-BB on how to build your voiceover career. With his permission I reprint them here.

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What is a prospect? It’s a potential buyer of your services. So is that any business person? No, not really. You have to spend a little time qualifying your prospects before you approach them and that means before you ask the person who runs the business if he uses freelance Voice Over people you must be as sure as possible the answer is going to be yes.

A few weeks ago I conducted an experiment. Sunday morning I surfed the internet looking for a particular kind of business and sent an email suggesting that if they ever needed a voice like mine feel free to get in touch. I added that my email was a one-off and assured recipients they would not be added to a mailing list and would not contact them again unless they requested that I do so.

1 – Clearly identifed prospects.
2 – No sell, just a clear, polite suggestion
3 – END

It took me about an hour to conduct this experiment and it resulted in me being booked as the voice for an awards ceremony for a 4 figure fee. I know people who send newsletters and emails by the thousand and get very little back. I sent out 21 emails and got a booking and a few expressions of interest, my guess is that the end result will be 7 jobs.

I approach prospects most people approach suspects and suspects are no use to you at all.

Some may say to this that their agent does all this kind of stuff. Here’s a question for you agent the next time you speak to him or her in person or on the phone.

“Who have you told about me since we last talked?” Most of you will get the answer – NOBODY! If that’s the case then your agent doesn’t take care of talking to prospects about you so that means I’ll have to do it or you will …………..Guess it’s up to you.

Philip, how did you get started?” asked Jim. I told him and assumed that what I believed to be obvious would be obvious to him. Oh how wrong was I.

Get list of people and telephone them to ask if they use the services of freelance Voice Overs. Sound ok? I thought so except Jim simply got a list of local businesses and called them. WRONG. Before you make the call you need to be 90% certain that the person you are calling is going to answer yes to the question.

The trick, if there is a trick, is to spend more time digging for prospects than calling people. Right, let’s start project 100. You need 100 names and telephone numbers. What do you want to do? For whom would you like to work. You are able to do long form audio like elearning? Ok, type elearning production into a search engine. Visit the websites and look aorund, it will take time. Is there any evidence to support your theory that this company uses voices? Prove to yourself that they may find a use for you -PROVE do not guess. In the contacts or “about us” section is there a name – Joe Smith Head of production or Audio Producer – DIG DIG DIG. The more you do this the more your investigative instincts improve. From every search you need a company, tel No and contact name.

Unless you have no alternative DO NOT EMAIL – YOU MUST TELEPHONE.

“Hello my name’s Philip Banks and I’m calling to ask if you ever use freelance voice overs”

If you’ve done your homework you will get a yes. If not offered a name, ask for one, the one you already know and ask if you can speak to them for a moment.

“Hello my name’s Philip Banks and I’m calling to ask if you ever use freelance voice overs”

Assuming the answer is yes.

“Would it be ok for me to send you a demo? (before they say anything) You’re allowed to say no by the way”

In 18 years I have had one person say no to me.

“That’s great I’ll send you one today. Thanks very much”

If you are asked for a link to demos on a web site do that instead of a demo CD.

Here’s is the BIGGIE – NEVER EVER EVER ASK FOR FEEDBACK

If you are tempted to ask for feedback

NEVER EVER EVER ASK FOR FEEDBACK

To be certain you have fully understood – NEVER EVER EVER ASK FOR FEEDBACK

You are looking for work not a critique.

Prospecting is the key. No selling required. If you have been thorough in your search for names and numbers and your demos are good enough you will get work.

As a way of finishing this piece here’s the story of a job I managed to secure over ten years ago.

I read in a newspaper that Pilots and crew of a new helicopter were going to be trained using CBT, Computer based training. On noting the name of the company I saw they were about 5 miles from me. I visited the office armed with an audio cassette.

“If you have any projects that require a professional voice please get in touch”. Note that I didn’t tell them what I knew.

As it turned out the CBT was going to be 45 hours with 38 hours of speech content. Over an 18 month period that one job earned me around $25,000.

Any specific questions about prospecting, feel free to ask. (ed: You can contact Philip here. Or me here.)

Want a demo evaluation? Pay Nancy Wolfson to give you one as it’ll be money well spent.

(Update: You’ll find Philip’s thoughts posted, along with some additional comments, on Vox Daily.)