Today, Den talks about consistency in business and repetition. Sales conversations don’t have to sound needy – you just have to overcome objections. It’s ok, you can always get results from the right people.
Episode Transcription
Den Lennie (2s):
G’day guys! Den Lennie here, host of the How to scale a Video Business podcast here on Tuesday, November the 17th with this week’s Shorty and it is going to be short and sweet because I’ve got a lot to do today. And it got me thinking about it. You know, they have a commitment that’s required when your doing anything in the business and this podcast, it’s no different because it takes a certain commitment each week to make sure that 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.
Den Lennie (46s):
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 hate repetition. It’s something that bores us at some point That kind of gets into the way of, 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, this, this Shorty for example, you know, I committed doing a short episode and a Tuesday, a full episode on the Thursday. And my assistant just said to me, Hey, Den, don’t forget to, to do the Shorty.
Den Lennie (1m 29s):
And I’ve got a million things going on just now, when you were applying for finance for a mortgage, the Australian financial system is very different than British financial system. There’s all sorts of things you got to do. And it’s, you know, it’s not the greatest fun in the world to be honest. And I am doing that whilst 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 to lose days, right? I just can, I it’s, it’s just been tough to do, 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 would be easy to, just to go all out. I just can’t be bothered. Like I was just, I want to bother with the Shorty I, but that’s not what builds consistency.
Den Lennie (2m 14s):
And I likened it to anyone who has 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 I’m, you know, that the fact that I had made a commitment to you, the audience to produce two pieces of content a week. And so, and that’s what I’m going to do, but it got me thinking about it. We were on a coaching call this morning, and a few people who are kind of, you know, are struggling a bit with like, you know, marketing. And I was talking to one of my marketing gurus at will. Who’s a who I’m working with just, you know, and he was saying, you know, it it’s this is one of the challenges of being human being is that we are always naturally want to find the easy option.
Den Lennie (2m 59s):
And when something gets hard are what we fear rejection. Yeah. We don’t do it. So, you know, for example, you got to reach out and find clients, and that is going to take some, some, some brass balls you’re going to have to get on the forerunner or our outreach to people on LinkedIn. And that can be scary. And, but what, like, what I can share with you is someone who’s overcomed. This is that if you’d just do it anyways, and except that no one is going to be part of the journey every time you get to know that 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 add that you learned by doing it. And I bet you’re the first few things that you shot were terrible.
Den Lennie (3m 41s):
I never forget shooting for the BBC. And it was like, I had overexposed everything cause I’ve got the zebras role in the camera. I had been used to shooting at 75% zebras and I can reset to 95%. So I overexposed it with and consistently and really master up. I was like, Oh my God, I am, this is my first game of the BBC. And it just completely screwed up. But you know what? You learn by making mistakes. She learned by putting yourself through the mill, putting yourself through things that are challenging, that are difficult. And I’m, 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 is when you learn how to kind of build more discipline in your life.
Den Lennie (4m 25s):
And so if it comes to reaching out to speak to existing clients, stop hiding behind email, actually get on the phone and ring people up and say, Hey, you know, how are you doing? How are you doing? I’m it’s been a while, but what’s been happening. You know, how can I help you? Is there anything that I can do to support you? So until you are 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’ve reached 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 the client will always be ringing up and asking for something.
Den Lennie (5m 10s):
But if you’re in those early stages of five to 10 clients, and 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 it now fortunately, for the Video business accelerator, our clients, and the members in that group. We’ve got scripts, we’ve got processes, we’ve got systems that we can just come, just modify and recheck. We do 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 see? I had a call with the guy today, who I had connected with on LinkedIn and he said, I know, I know he just want to get me on the phone to, you know, what, to kind of sell me into your coaching program.
Den Lennie (5m 53s):
And I said, well, actually I don’t. I say it because I don’t know if, if we can help you. And it sounds like you’ve got everything pretty much figured out. And so I was like that. That’s not the property of the quality of the process 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 it disarms someone, but B I genuinely am not trying to sell anybody into my program. ’cause if you, if you are not ready for it, it wouldn’t be of any health. And the only way I can know if you’re ready for it is if we have a conversation and they can understand where you are out on your business journey, because we don’t help everyone. We are a very specific, we help very specific businesses who are you have clients already, or who have got reasonable revenue coming in, but they want to improve it.
Den Lennie (6m 39s):
That’s where we’re at. We’re at, is where we ha we do want to help businesses who haven’t got any clients get clients. That’s not our business model. And so it’s OK when you’re talking to a client to not be kind of trying to sell them something, if you try and sell it, the client’s will smell it a mile away. You want to be presenting and asking questions so that you can figure that 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, 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.
Den Lennie (7m 21s):
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 bits, 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 that questions? Because it is a marketing strategy is multi-faceted, you know, we are on this podcast. We run ads, we run direct outreach. We’re on cold e-mail. We run email marketing, and the list goes on. You know, we do direct mail. We do newsletters. You need multiple streams of marketing in your business in order too, to scale.
Den Lennie (8m 4s):
So guys, I want to leave that with you today. So it’s a bit short and sweet today, but I’ve got a lot 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 Den Lennie. If you’re a Video business owner, please hit a ceiling. And we benefit from a mentorship support and coaching and check out how you can work with me over at denlennie.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the show over on iTunes. And we’d really appreciate your taking a few minutes to leave 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, and please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in see you next week.
