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Real people don’t hire voiceover artists

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People

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.)

Experience isn’t the best teacher …

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover

It’s the slowest teacher. That’s a quote from my friend and sometimes teacher, Pat Fraley. Sadly,I have in fact learned several things the slow and hard way. Maybe my pain will help you avoid these mistakes in your own work.

Lesson number one: Always talk about the money right away. Years ago I was reluctant to bring up the subject of the budget for a given job or project first. (Here I’m talking about situations where someone contacts me about a job directly. When they come to me through my agent, all those details are all ready set.) A church had asked me to come record a narration for a marketing video they were preparing. They didn’t bring up money. I didn’t either. Not on the phone when they called. Not in the studio before or after the session. Then, as I was getting ready to leave, the producer, a member of the church staff said,

Thank you for your good work today. We’ll send you a check in the mail in a few days.

Sure enough, a few days later a check arrived in the mail. For $25. That was the last time I didn’t talk about the budget before we started recording.

Lesson number two: Give your clients the benefit of the doubt when a payment is late. This is one that I’m especially sad about, because I ended up hurting a relationship. Here’s what happened. I had been hired through a local radio station in a small market to serve as the signature voice for one of their clients. After some time that client decided to run some commercials on a different radio station in the same small market. But, they wanted me to continue as their signature voice. So I contacted the production people at the other station, recorded the copy they sent me and delivered the audio and my invoice to them just as I had with the first radio station.

Four months later, I still hadn’t received payment so I sent a note to the production manager at this second station noting how overdue the bill was, reminding him that I had delivered the audio they needed promptly, and asking when I might expect to receive payment. It wasn’t a mean note, but it certainly wasn’t as kindly or nicely worded as it could, indeed should, have been.

In reply I received a rather sharp rebuke from that production manager, informing me that my payment would be sent by the station right away, that they would take care of billing the end client for the money but stating in no uncertain terms that I would never work with him again. And he has been true to his word. The check arrived a few days later and I’ve never heard from him again.

As a result of this painful lesson, I’ve changed my collection practices. First, I usually contact people well before things get so far behind. Second, I always give them the benefit of the doubt that some kind of mistake in communication or accounting or some other thing has resulted in my invoice being lost, etc. Third, I try to make clear that I want to do what I can to keep lines of communication open both about billing and future work.

Lesson number three: Always talk about deadlines right away. I’ve had a couple of near disasters in this regard as well, but the most vivid recent example comes to my from my friend Kelly, another voiceover talent here in Charlotte. She’d received an email the other day about doing a small narration project and indicating that a script would be coming from someone else shortly. The email came rather late in the day and Kelly figured that she wouldn’t have the script until morning.

Lo and behold, when she checked her email at around 11:00 PM, the client had sent her a note asking, “Where is my narration? And in the morning, Kelly got another email saying that someone else had been awarded the job instead. Kelly would have been more than willing to work late if she had known of the tight deadline, but the client didn’t mention it, so she didn’t know. I’ve made similar mistakes, so I try to always ask what the deadline is, or even more often I’ll reply with when I expect to have the job done, asking if that deadline with work and indication that if it won’t what does he or she need?

As I said, I hope these brief stories will help you avoid similar goofs in your own voiceover career. And if you have a story to add, leave a comment.

If you don’t like to read …

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover

… you might want to find a different direction for your career. That’s the spot on advice from my friend Karen Commins in her blog post today Reading for success.

Karen is very kind to mention and link to me in that blog post so I thought I’d offer just a small insight into just how right she is that I love to read. When I was in Junior High School I read every book in the school library except the “girls” books, you know, the Nancy Drew and similar books aimed and young female readers. By the time I was in High School my passion for reading had grown even greater, so in those 3 years I read every book in the school library including the “girls” books. The only one I didn’t finish was Webster’s Third Unabridged International Dictionary. I wasn’t allowed to check it out and didn’t have enough hours during the school day to get all the way through it along with everything else I was reading.

How much did I really read? My grandmother was the librarian in the town library in our little village in Minnesota. I read so much that she, as a librarian, actually told my mother (her oldest daughter) that she thought I was reading too much! I didn’t stop me though.

Obviously, you don’t have to love reading quite that much. But Karen is right, to be a successful voice actor you do need to love to read, and especially you have to love to read aloud.

Recording at Home and On the Road

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People

Jeffrey P. Fisher and Harlan Hogan have just issued an updated version of their classic book The Voice Actor’s Guide to Recording at Home and On the Road (Second Edition) providing a soup-to-nuts guide to creating an inexpensive but professional sounding recording studio in your home (or to take with you on the road).

My thanks to John Florian for the heads up about this new edition of this book. You can read more, including an exceprt from the book, at VoiceOverXtra.com.


Added to the blogroll today

Blogging, General, People

I’ve just added a new entry to my blogroll in the first section here to the right, because there’s a new blog that’s just been started as an extension and adjunct to Voiceover Universe. It’s called Meet The Bloggerz and I’ve been invited to be one of the contributing authors, along with my friend Dave Courvoisier. I imagine a few others will join in as time goes along. In any case, I’m thrilled to be included and hope you’ll plan to visit Meet The Bloggerz from time to time.

New York Voice Over Mixer

General

Erik Sheppard and Voice Talent Productions have issued an invitation for you to join Bob Bergen, Peter Rofé, Erik Sheppard, September Day Leach, Elaine Clark, David Goldberg of Edge Studio and a host of other folks at Butterfiield 8 located at 5 Easter 38th Street, NYC from 6:00 to 10:00 PM on December 5th.
I wish very much I could be there, but I’m flying in Portland, OR that day for a workshop with Marice Tobias that starts the following morning.
Update: Thanks to Erik for providing the link in the comments below. You can find all the details on this special page on his site.