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00:00:01
Making Sales Easy by Going After Low-Hanging Fruit
143 Plays4 years ago
Max talks to uber Producer Jennifer O'Brien about going after "low hanging fruit" to increase sales and even out your sales cycles.
Jennifer has over 10 years experience as Project Manager, Producer and Sales Manager for creative production companies. Clients included Microsoft, Amazon, AWS, Expedia, Starbucks and more.
Jennifer helped her last company grow from $1M to $2M in sales.
Content from the podcast includes:
- How to show your work to your clients, what to show, and when to show it.
- Taking advantage of your "niche"
- What Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software should you use?
- When is the right time to hire help with sales and business development?
- How to make the most of referrals?
- internal referrals “land and expand”
- How to ask for referrals?
- How to make the most of your current clients?
- Get more work from your existing clients by pitching to different departments
- Get into technology, how-to, and talking heads videos as basics for your regular client's video hygiene
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
All right, here we are with Crossing the Axis. We are lucky enough today to be here with Jennifer O'Brien.
00:00:14
Speaker
Hi, thanks for having me. You're welcome. Thank you for coming. Crossing the Axis is the podcast where we talk to people about the business behind video production, corporate and commercial video production, and about what it takes to get to the next level, whether or not the next level is
00:00:30
Speaker
going to a million dollars in revenue or $2 million in revenue or getting that national TV spot. It's the business behind the business that so often makes the difference.
Industry Experience and Business Growth
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm Max Keiser, industry veteran and also now making the software pipeline, video production management software at videopipeline.io. And this is our podcast. And as I said today, we've got Jennifer and Jennifer is a
00:00:55
Speaker
long-time producer for a lot of big, you know what? I'll let Jennifer introduce herself. Jennifer, go ahead. Yeah. So for 10 years, I've been working in the Seattle market for a clients like Microsoft, AWS, Starbucks, Expedia, Fortune 500 companies.
Leveraging Opportunities for Business Expansion
00:01:14
Speaker
And not only was I a producer, but I also was a creative director and sales for a prominent company located out there in Redmond, Washington.
00:01:24
Speaker
And we were doing about $2 million in sales and I really played an active role in growing the business from just under 1 million to just over 2 million.
00:01:34
Speaker
That's awesome. And that's exactly where a lot of our audience finds themselves is trying to either get to that 1 million or climb up to that 2 million. Because you can really plateau out in this business. Today's topic, actually, Jennifer was kind enough to provide it, talking about that low hanging fruit. We talk about, a lot of times in these podcasts, we talk about what does it take to get that big client? Or what does it take to lock down that Fortune 500 new client? But so often,
00:02:02
Speaker
It's that low hanging fruit that can actually be the underbelly that grows your company to those levels. So Jennifer kind of gave us that idea and we're going after it because she is absolutely right. Jennifer, when you think of lowest hanging fruit, what comprises that group of lowest hanging fruit? Who's in there? Yeah.
00:02:27
Speaker
When I consult with companies, this is always my biggest topic because as you're growing your business, you know, a lot of people who are starting a company, they're actually a DP or they're actually a producer and they're starting their company and they're working their way through their company, but you're still playing other roles within your company. So you're not a full-time salesperson for your business.
Strategies for Client Engagement and Visibility
00:02:51
Speaker
That means you need to limit the amount of time while your time is limited by nature to how much time you have to do sales activities and capturing a large fortune 500 company can sometimes you know take a year or more
00:03:06
Speaker
to go through several rounds of bidding and building trust and networking in order to get that first deal. So low hanging fruit are just easier pickings, right? Things that can happen or turn around in a week or two weeks where you can be kicking off much more quickly. And I think one of the biggest areas that people miss is tracking their customers through LinkedIn to see when they change companies.
00:03:36
Speaker
So if I'm working with so-and-so at Microsoft and they decide to go to Google, I now have a contact at Google and I'm gonna wanna definitely follow up with them with a congratulations on their move to Google and then with a request for a meeting, you know, six to eight weeks after their transition. That is a great way to potentially open up a new client and a new line of business while also getting introduced to their replacement within the current team you are working with.
00:04:05
Speaker
That is awesome. That's very true. I can't tell you the number of times that happened to me, especially as people change seats all the time. And LinkedIn is, as you say, a great place to track that. What about clients when they sort of start going inactive on you and, you know, trying to stay up to date with those inactive folks and not get too discouraged about them being inactive?
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah, 100% when I first got into sales I really felt like I was just pestering people you know as my mentor was just telling me email them again, email them again.
00:04:43
Speaker
It took me going to a conference and hearing someone speak and say that the average sale takes approximately 18 points of contact. So, you know, you have to, you know, get back in their line, like sight lines and, you know, how's it going, catch up emails, sending them little notes, things like if you know that their kids are in baseball and there's a funny baseball thing, you know, sending
00:05:09
Speaker
people, these kinds of things, these kinds of sales activities that build relationships that tell people that you know who they are and that you're here for them as a person, not just as a client. What about sharing your work with them and so forth? How often do you want to share work with them? What stage of work do you want to share with them? A newsletter is great. Not everybody will open it, but they will see that you sent one. Insta posts,
00:05:37
Speaker
are great, but not everybody's on your Insta. So I really think LinkedIn posting is a great way to reach a lot of your clients in a centralized location. Make sure you're friending all of your clients on LinkedIn. That is really where they go to get business news. So if you've shot something or done something cool, a newsletter is great. LinkedIn posting is great.
00:05:57
Speaker
but you wanna keep your name in front of them for when that right opportunity arises in almost every,
Niche Specialization and Client Referrals
00:06:04
Speaker
we would send a newsletter about once a quarter. Again, they take time to prepare and they take time to send, streamlining that the best that you can, keep it really simple, just focus on one or two topics, try to include some value. What did you learn from the project? What next, what best practices made it such a success?
00:06:26
Speaker
Those kinds of things I always kind of found an interesting thing and I think I often had some folks saying don't don't do this but I swear it worked and that was showing clients stuff, assuming I had the clearance to do it.
00:06:41
Speaker
Showing clients stuff that was in progress if I knew it was really in their line of work. In other words, I always found that if I was working on a lawyer video and I had like three other ex-clients, or not ex, but past clients that were lawyers, I could take a little bit of what I was working on and sort of show it to them almost while it was still being worked on and say, hey, look at this cool stuff we just shot.
00:07:05
Speaker
And something about letting them under the sort of kimono, as it were, and it just felt very intimate. And I always got a response from them. Oh, that's cool. Thanks, Max, for sending that or whatever. Whereas they knew it wasn't something I would put on any of the Facebook or anything that I really had thought of it just for them. And I often had a lot of luck with that.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Clients who want to see something that looks pretty much exactly like what they want, or they want to know that they're hiring someone with some expertise. So for example, I really found my niche in technology and like AI and data science specifically. And anytime I would compete against another vendor who didn't have a bunch of samples that were AI or data science related, we would win over them every time.
00:07:55
Speaker
Absolutely. And there's a great example of low hanging fruit, low hanging fruit being the niche that you're starting to develop, which kind of almost always happens inadvertently. Um, you know, that you, like we strangely got into the niche of making, um, rights videos for Muslims. Um, and, and then all of a sudden we were like everybody in the Muslim community across the country and even around the world was coming to our company to help them make videos about.
00:08:22
Speaker
any aspect of Muslim tolerance. Yeah, because there's a comfortability and a trust that they don't have to explain to you or have six meetings to get you up to speed. They know that you're going to understand the terminology and phrasing and it makes a huge difference in a sale. Absolutely. And you start to understand what's out there and what are the techniques people are already using and how you can get ahead of that. Because everybody wants their video to both be sort of in line with the others, but also a few steps ahead, something new in it and so forth.
00:08:53
Speaker
Yeah. And another thing with sharing current work with inactive clients is also to say, Hey, I also have an idea for you and just pitching, even if the pitch goes nowhere, the fact that you thought of them took the time and pitched something gets their ideas and wheels turning.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, okay. So, so you, how do you keep track of all this stuff, Jennifer? Do you use a CRM or when do you, when is the right time to bring on a CRM? That kind of thing. A customer retention management system. It's like HubSpot or any of these, you know, throughout these acronyms, like CRM, expecting everyone knows it, but, but any kind of customer. Customer relationship management. There you go. Customer release. I don't even know what that is. No worries.
00:09:44
Speaker
What I like to call what I the phrase I you'd like to use is you need to have a stage appropriate CRM yeah so if you are just starting out and you are a one man band or a two person band.
00:09:56
Speaker
you can use Excel spreadsheets to create a CRM and just simply put in all the information you need for your clients, their titles, where they're working, and a little bit of information about what you know about them.
CRM Tools and Business Growth Management
00:10:12
Speaker
Once you get to the next level, there are some affordable CRMs out there. I used to use a program called Nimble. It was about $25 per person per month.
00:10:22
Speaker
And it had a LinkedIn feature so that we could look at LinkedIn through our CRM system to see if our records were matching what was current on people's LinkedIn pages. None of them are perfect. They're all a little bit wonky. Like, I think that's part of the reason why Max is trying to make the industry solution, which would be amazing. And I think Pipeline
00:10:46
Speaker
can be a CRM as well. And then it just goes up in pricing the bigger that you get and the more clients you're trying to manage and the more automation you want to put into your sales process. Right. Yeah. We found HubSpot to be pretty amazing for free right out of the gate. They have a pretty generous free offering that you can get in on.
00:11:09
Speaker
And, and we use that for free for like almost a year, I feel like before we had to actually start paying and then sadly it goes up like astronomically. So you may have to switch from it, but in the beginning HubSpot was just a good place to once you're a little past the.
00:11:24
Speaker
As you say, Jennifer passed the Excel spreadsheet. Um, that's a pretty, also a pretty ubiquitous one, but they just sort of help. But I love the idea that you're saying like, you probably don't need to jump into it. If, if you only have like 10 or 15 companies you're working with on a regular basis, cause it's just going to overwhelm you, but just, I think the most important thing is to note when you've contacted someone. So when you're making a sales connection,
00:11:50
Speaker
Make sure to go back to your CRM and note the date and what was discussed so that the next time you're looking for someone to contact, you've got an hour to do sales. You can go to your sheet and say, wow, I haven't contacted this person in three months. We last spoke about this conference. And you can follow up and
Sales and Business Development Tactics
00:12:07
Speaker
say, hey, how was the conference?
00:12:09
Speaker
So what about when is the right time to and we had a podcast about this a little while ago about how to go about it, but when is the right time to start looking for help with sales and with business development? I think again, stage appropriate phasing is the way to go. So in the beginning, hiring an assistant.
00:12:31
Speaker
that is sort of someone who wants to get into the industry, maybe has a little bit of experience. Just to help you do the data entry side is gonna be really helpful. You can just CC them on all your emails and have them going in and automatically updating your documents. They can do that remotely for not a lot of money. Then kind of thinking about when you're ready to hire a salesperson, because most of us don't get into the industry to be a salesperson or to just do business development.
00:13:00
Speaker
And that's usually not where people's passion lies. So that's not your passion. At some point you will want to hire somebody who does do that professionally. It's super niche and it's very expensive. So, you know, when you're ready to go from 1 million to 3 million, that's when you need to find the money to bring someone on.
00:13:20
Speaker
And again, as I said, we have that entire podcast dedicated to just that question of how to begin that process and who's the right person. So do take a listen to that. So lastly, talking about referrals, like that's kind of one of the most awesome things that happens, of course, is when you get a call from someone, they say, hey, I was talking to my friend, Bob, and he mentioned that
00:13:44
Speaker
that you folks do this kind of work. What's the right way to optimize your chances of landing that referral?
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, so first off, you've got to request referrals. 100% you need to ask the people you work with if there's anyone that they can refer you to that would benefit from your services. Referral is the number one way that you're going to get low hanging fruit and it's going to be the number one way to have clients just walking right through the door without doing any sales work at all.
00:14:16
Speaker
So you have to request the referral. How do you do that? How do you do that request? What do you say? Oh, usually I'll, you know, when I'm wrapping up a project or we're getting close to a final edit, I'll just say, Hey, you know, it's been really great working with your team. Is there anyone else on your team that makes videos or on like an adjacent team that you could introduce us to?
00:14:35
Speaker
We'd love to further our reach within your org. So you're talking about within an organization. Was that typically what happened or was it referral from just any other business owner or whomever that they might know? I think client to client referral is always the best. So someone who's worked with you and they are happy with the work and they're telling their colleagues,
00:15:01
Speaker
you know, these are the guys I used, look at the cool video, super happy, because what happens is when that referral contacts you, there's no competition. There's no competitive bidding. They just, they want you because they trust you based on that referral.
00:15:16
Speaker
But I love that idea of the inter-organization referral. Again, I tend to think of referral as like, you know, Bob who owns company A is referring me to company B, a friend of his he plays poker with. But you're also talking about this inter-organization and that's really true when you start
00:15:31
Speaker
working with these large organizations, Amazon, Microsoft, so forth. I mean, they're just just tons and tons of opportunity right within that within organizations you wouldn't even think of. We wound up doing so much, so many PR and hiring videos for Amazon at one point that we never thought, you know, we thought we were doing retail for them. We wind up doing, you know, ads about we're hiring 100 percent. And the HR is a great example. So if I'm working with a marketing team,
00:16:02
Speaker
maybe in a smaller company, I might say, or a medium-sized company, I might say, you know, wow, it's been great working with your marketing org, would love to, you know, continue on. But did you know that we've been making a lot of videos in the HR with HR departments, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden you've prompted a referral to their HR department. They may not wanna meet with you right away, but it's another contact to continue to push and you can show them the work that you've done. And again, you wanna,
00:16:30
Speaker
if you're going to ask for those referrals, ask specifically for the things that you do have samples for. So it's a quick, here's my work. These are the metrics if you have any. Yeah, so often the doors originally open with marketing and I'm talking about smaller, like say it's a bank chain, right? The door is open by the marketing department because they're used to hiring video people and so forth. But the other departments like Pierre, they dream of having a video.
00:16:56
Speaker
they don't have any idea how to approach it they they really do and so getting that as you say jennifer saying hey we'd love to go pitch in front of them i found that to be really work like they would be like so excited and suddenly and they honestly wouldn't be looking around very much you already got the referral from internal in the organization
Building Trust with Low-Cost Projects
00:17:15
Speaker
And suddenly they're like, hey, let's carve out that 10,000 bucks in the budget for next quarter. And you're absolutely right. It's kind of amazing the way you can burrow into these organizations and then just start spreading. We had organizations that we were doing videos for five or six different departments by the end of the time with them.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing about low-hanging fruit is a lot of times the jobs aren't the glossy, you know, it's quite hard to get those, you know, half a million dollar budgets or whatever. But talking head videos, technology explainer videos, animated explainer videos, you know, when you present them and you show them how affordable it can be, even though, you know, your price is over 10,000,
00:18:02
Speaker
they oftentimes just thought that it would be more than that, or you don't know what their blocker is until you have that conversation. But yeah, getting in front of them with that, those are the talking heads and the technology how-to videos. They're low-hanging fruit. Everybody needs them. Everybody wants them. They just need someone to make it easy for them, and they want somebody who they don't have to explain the whole
00:18:29
Speaker
backlog of everything. So if you can show them your experience with it, it can be a pretty easy in.
00:18:36
Speaker
Absolutely. And all of it's just building trust to get to that higher level production. We saw it again and again, where we started doing, you know, straightforward stuff, but we always would put a little extra sugar in there and by and by over the years, we wind up doing the high, the high end stuff because the trust was there and they saw that we had the capability. I think the challenge was reminding them that we did have the capability and the creative ability to do the higher end stuff all the time, never stopping saying,
00:19:04
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, that's that's critical. And before we jump off today, I do also want to mention the low another bit of low hanging fruit is with the client you're already working with. So if you land a new client, you bid out a project, you're working on that project. As you get towards the end of that project, if things are feeling good, clients happy, you can always say, Hey, have you considered making taking what this cool thing we're making and turning it into a one minute spot?
Increasing Client Value through Upselling
00:19:33
Speaker
and a social spot and a five second piece and a LinkedIn specific piece and like all these different things and putting together social packages for content, webinars included, just remixing what you've already made into other things. A lot of times they'll say, well, we've already spent 12,000 and we're really happy with what we have. So, yeah, let's spend five more thousand and make six more products.
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, the funny thing is is often the way the marketing department looks at it as a per as a dollars per video. So you may actually be lowering if they were looking at well we got one video for $12,000, and suddenly they're getting six videos for 15.
00:20:14
Speaker
It looks like oh wow we're geniuses we're getting videos for two and a half thousand bucks each and I can't tell you how often that was the thinking that at the end of the day pervaded was a sort of per dollar. Of course we know in the, in the industry that's not the way it works at all but, but.
00:20:31
Speaker
But in the same way, the first question I ask you is, well, what is the cost of a video, which, of course, is an impossible thing to answer at the end of it. If you can actually provide more deliverables per dollar, they see that as a huge win upstairs for them.
Embracing a Business Mindset
00:20:46
Speaker
Totally. And the last thing I'll say about that is just that
00:20:52
Speaker
The clients who I have sold that to on their next jobs, they order it right from the get-go. Absolutely. Again, because they're able to say, geez, we're getting so much for this one. Arguably, this price isn't nothing, but look how many parks we're getting for the end of it. You're absolutely right.
00:21:13
Speaker
Well, thank you, Jennifer. That's wonderful. And I am sure it's going to be super duper helpful for everyone listening and reminding them that it doesn't have to be the giant sail in the sky today, but rather it can be those small things that just add up. Anything else you want to add before we leave?
00:21:32
Speaker
Um, no, I just want, I think the one thing I would add is whether you are a freelancer or you are a legit, you know, I have employees kind of business. We're all a business and everyone should be employing these sales techniques and getting this information. Um, because there really is no such thing as freelancing. We're all our own individual businesses and we're all hiring people to work with us on jobs. Yep. So taking this perspective and having that paradigm shift and setting aside.
00:22:02
Speaker
time for sales is really important to every person in our industry. Yeah, absolutely. I would always get a little frustrated when business itself was sort of a bad word almost amongst the creative elements. And I'd be like, they're hand in hand, man. And all you have to do
00:22:26
Speaker
is like I actually produced a feature film and there was more business in that than I ever had doing corporate and commercial. And so people seem to think there's some horizon where the business part just goes away. No, you got to embrace the business part.
00:22:42
Speaker
And to add to that, you can never stop selling. When the train gets going and you're super busy because you're working all the time, that's because your sales is working. If you stop doing sales and you only focus on the work, you're going to run out of work. So never stop selling. Never stop selling. Embrace it and believe in your work and that people will want your work and want to share it and be a part of what you're doing.
Closing Remarks
00:23:06
Speaker
Well, thanks again so much, Jennifer. Really appreciate it. Jennifer O'Brien, our guest today. And this has been Crossing the Axis from Pipeline at videopipeline.io. And we look forward to having you back again next week. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye.