Three steps to get better clients for your Video Business! EP #349

How do you focus on landing the right clients rather than simply chasing more

Many people focus on simply getting clients, but having the right clients can make all the difference. 💡 We explore how identifying who your ideal clients are, understanding the problems you solve, and knowing why you’re the best fit is key to success.

We also break down the three steps to securing better clients: identifying your ideal client, getting their attention, and communicating effectively to build trust. Plus, we dive into the value of being authentic and bold in your approach, repelling clients who aren’t a good fit, and why this actually helps you grow.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Tune in to learn more!

TVM: Den Lennie, Alana Tompson, Caleb Maxwell, and Matt Smolen.

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Transcript

 Okay, this week we are talking about Three steps to get better clients. Now those three steps are specifically because Caleb is very smartly done some brilliant prep for this call. But I think that the notion of getting better clients is a really important one. A lot of people think that just getting clients is the most important thing.

But I believe having the right clients and knowing who they are and knowing the problem you solve and why you are the most logical, sensible fit for solving that problem is really important. In terms of, getting better clients, I think Caleb, you've identified there's three steps. Identify, get their attention and communicate.

So I'll hand over to you because this is your baby.  Yup. Easy done. All of you legends will be able to speak into this in your own experience of of following this process through, but this is how I broke it down to easily communicate it is in the first stage, you really need to identify what does a better client mean for you?

And it's not going to be the same kind of client for everyone. So you need to work out what problem do you actually solve? That's about you and who has that problem really? Who do you, who needs that problem solved? And. And then where are they? So you need to do some really good work on what problems do I actually want to solve?

What am I good at solving? There's a tool that we use in the VBA that is an audit, a 12-month audit. And it helps refine where the best money-making clients come from. That's one element of a good client.  What clients and industries do you make the most money from when you're producing videos for them?

But then also you can dig into what type of clients are they like? What are they? Marketing managers? Are they not for profits? Are there certain industries that work you work really well with? And then what. Jobs. Do you actually really enjoy what do you enjoy doing? What videos do you enjoy producing?

And so there's ideally there's a nexus between all of those. And so you can identify who the next stage is getting their attention. I always encourage people and I try to do it myself to, to do it differently. There's a lot of proven systems and there's a lot of things out there that'll promise you, bet you've all got marketing agencies reaching out to you on LinkedIn saying we could get your leads, blah, blah, blah.

Do it differently, right? Have a think about what do these people care about? What do they, what are their problems and what are the pain points that they're experiencing because of those problems? And then how am I going to get their attention in a way that stands out from everyone else who's trying to get their attention?

Those are the questions that you really need to be asking about in get their attention. The purpose of a whole, this whole getting attention thing is really to start a relationship. And I know I'm fire hosing through these because I want to hear from all the rest of The rest of my video mentor friends here, but the reason that you want to get attention is to build a relationship.

So whatever you don't be the person that goes to someone you've identified who your best client is and you go, Hey I'm Caleb and I want to work with you.  It's like saying hi, I'm Caleb. Would you marry me? That's just not how it works. Relationships are built over time and they're built from a foundation of trust.

And no one's going to trust you if they don't know anything about you. 

So don't be the person going, hi, I'm Caleb, I make videos and I can do it for you. Don't do that. Don't do that. You want to, I always try and build trust in and understanding in the first kind of stage of getting their attention. And that leads into the next step, which is communicate.

You want to facilitate a conversation, right? You want to actually reach out. And start a conversation and the best way to do that is to talk about them more than you talk about you. People's favorite subject in any conversation is themselves. And that is only true if they are talking to someone who they think really cares about listening.

And you can facilitate one of the best conversations someone has in their entire day, if you just care about them and you reach into their world and go, Hey, I noticed that this is happening, or this is a problem. I know lots of people like you have. I'm wondering if you have that and it's all about.

Reaching out to them, facilitating a conversation making them feel understood, and then you will get, you will garner their interest. You will garner their attention. And then communicating following on from there is how you actually land a client. There's a process you have to go through.

And one of the best ways to do that is by developing a proposal a system of discovering what they need a proposal that's going to build trust and get them over the line. And then and then a way of following up. So that's high level.  That's the three steps. It's interesting. It sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?

And I think a lot of new, a new videographers to business get a bit surprised at how much work is involved in attracting great clients. Because I think when you're freelance,  You're like a commodity, right? People book you because they need your service and you've done a good job for them before and you're liked, therefore you get booked.

So business is actually very simple. Either you get liked and get booked or you're sitting at home on what we used to call a London leisure time, which is days you weren't booked as a freelancer, where you when we were living in London was like, we should be going and enjoying the zoo, but we're too busy stressing about not working.

So I think it's important to identify and acknowledge that you guys all run. incredible businesses and have seen incredible growth, but you also work harder than anyone I know to get there. Do you think there's something in this? Because you all speak to a lot of people who aspire, they, they see you and they go, Oh, My God, this morning I was on the Uplevel call Alana and someone said, Hey Den, I've got a suggestion.

Could we like interview Alana or get her on to do a call? Just talking about her journey. And I'm like, sure. I'm like, man, she's going to tell you that she just followed the process and didn't even do all the work. She just worked harder than the rest of you. I think there's something in that. I think the biggest thing is quite often as a freelancer, it's quite passive.

It's word of mouth. You wait for people to come with you. When you're on a production company, it's the opposite. You've got to go out there and hunt and work hard. So yeah, it is really a different mindset. So how did you do that, Alana? Cause you've gone. Full tilt from just being, not just being a freelancer, but being full-time freelancer  to starting a business and then running the two in unison and still juggling between the two.

But what have your steps been? What have you overcome this? For me, it was just do the work, really. You laid the steps out for me and I just went and did it and it worked. And so I kept doing it and I grew and now I've just brought on my first senior producer. So it's really just going out there and doing the work.

But as far as attracting your ideal audience. clients. I know like with most people it's done through niching. We've said and done, it's a little bit different. We're more of a like challenger brand. So instead of niching, we're leading with our purpose and our mission, which for me is to flip the gender statistics upside down in the film industry.

So we try to Diversify our crews and make sure our crews are 96 percent women or gender-diverse people rather than what they normally are in the greater industry. So being really vocal and upon,  being really vocal and unapologetically me on that stance has really attracted the right people to me, but also repelled.

People that I don't want to work with. And for me, I think that's really powerful. The act of repelling the clients that you don't want to work with, because it gets rid of the people that are just going to waste your time and I'm not going to get what you're about, but it also helps you line up with the people that are really going to resonate with what you're offering.

So I think finding your purpose and what really drives you, and then just staying true to that and being really bold with it.  I love that. Sorry. Great. Yeah, I was just going to jump on that cause there's that thought of repelling clients, there'll be people listening to this going, what are you talking about?

You've got to do everything like what is, what would you say to someone who's If you say no, then you have less, like what, how, why would you say no?  Yeah, I think, yeah. Everyone has that resistance. I did when Den first spoke about niching. I was like, but what about all the other possibilities that I'm missing out on?

You know what I got around niching by instead taking the challenger route, so fuck I fooled you Den. No,  you got me. Yeah. It's what, Is talked about so often in the elite is that when you niche and you become a specialist in something, then you are the person that people go to.

You're the experts. So that's where the power is. That's where you attract the right clients and that's where you scale your business. It's just really that simple, isn't it? It's at the core of everything that we've been taught. Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. I would say. Just gonna say that, I heard you on the Rev Think podcast the other day, Ana talking to Tim and you were talking about a particular job.

that you'd done, and the client's philosophies didn't quite align with yours. And you did the job, but afterwards I think you decided that you probably wouldn't do that job again. And I thought that was such a strong, that was your North Star. That's the thing you go to war for, Gender diversity, because when I had that statistic that 97 percent 96 percent of crew are male, I nearly fell over.

I was like, that's insane in camera, but it's still outrageous. I feel disgusted by that. Like, why are more women not coming in? Let's do it. Do an episode on that.  Yes, please. I'd love to. I do think it's important. It's not just women. It's women. It's gender-diverse people. It's anyone that has a barrier to entry, disabled, neurodiverse.

Anyone that is, sexual diversity, race, everything. It's all the underrepresented groups, really. And what I loved about that podcast is you talked about how. On the project, you did with the Oliven crew for Air Canada. Everyone commented on how the vibe was different. And I think as storytellers, forgive me if I'm stealing your thunder here because what I got from that was, wow, with all male crews, you're restricting the story and the response you can get from them.

the person in front of the camera. So it isn't just a kind of hey, let's all be walking, get more women, gender diverse people on cruise. Actually, it's the right thing to do for the story in many cases. Exactly. We're storytellers. We call ourselves storytellers, yet we tell stories from one point of view.

And if you want to have a rich, Beautiful, diverse, real story that actually represents the society and what life is. Then how can you not have a diverse crew? It just makes complete sense. So look, we're changing things. It's changing slowly, but, and it's not as easy. It takes work. You've got to look for the right people and you've got to trial them out, mentor them.

You can't just throw them in the deep end. But it's worth it. If nothing else, for the sake of storytelling. I'm proud to say that, and it's a small pride, that 10 percent of our members in the VBA are female. It's still a very low number. It's better than 4%,  but let's get it to 40, 50%. I'd love to see that.

But Matt, you obviously don't niche in the traditional sense. But you've got a pretty diverse client base.  What's been your experience of, securing? The right clients for you. I think  Alana and I share a lot of similarities in this. And it's just be unapologetically yourself. I often use the term lean into what makes you different.

And I think it's the stylistic approach and the way we do things that. Has brought out ongoing success and clients that have got, 10, 12 plus years relationship with this. And I think, if you're looking to bring on new clients there's always a, like that sort of dating process, like Caleb said, where you're feeling each other out and seeing what works and what doesn't and how you'll collaborate and work together.

And I think that what we're doing Pretty successfully is all of our external image, whether it's LinkedIn page, whatever it is, our website, all of it presents the way we go about it that we don't want to make boring corporate videos. We want to do fun, interesting, funny, humorous stuff, all while making the process of it fun and exciting. 

And that's not going to resonate with everybody. And that's okay, because then it just means that those conversations that would go a bit south and they'd be like, Oh, actually, no, I'm not sure you're quite the right fit. Never happened because they're already bounced off you because of what you're putting out there.

But the people that does resonate with instantly okay, cool. I get these, I get the vibe here. This seems really fun. I can see how we would play in that. I really want to tap into what they've got going on over there. I want to Regardless of whether it's us, Alana, Caleb, whoever, it just, all of that then attracts the right people because of what our points of difference are.

And then those conversations are much more lucrative from a possibility point of view, because there's already an alignment there that they've identified themselves. Think there's, in the age of social media and everything being sensationalist it's got to be like, really, Right wing or left wing or whatever I'm not saying upset people, but I'm saying put your best foot forward about the way you want to go about what you do and really just commit to that.

Because the people that align with that are going to be like, you're absolute champions. They will be on board and want to continue working with you because of that alignment. And I often, we love a matter of  It's, I look at it like a radio, right? Where there's all these different frequencies on the dial and the dial's got these tiny little, movements and stuff.

But when you hit the sweet spot and you've got that clear signal coming in, people just go, yeah, this is my jam. I'm like, I'm into it. And the dial can be, pretty wildly broad. So if you only attract the right people, that one little thing, but they like to absolutely get on with it and love what you do, then they're going to be your best clients for sure. 

I think it's okay to upset a few people too. Totally. I think as long as you're being really authentically yourself, that's going to shine through. That's what really matters, figuring out who you are and what you stand for and being authentic. I may have mentioned this thing, it was on the calls recently, that I actually A friend of mine in London is the chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi in London,  and he's been at Saatchi's for 20 years.

And he was over at our place one time, it was about 10 15 years ago, and at the time I had more Twitter followers than him, and he was quite competitive and I wasn't really, I was like, oh, Twitter, whatever, and I remember saying, sometimes I just don't know what to post, and he said, then the most important thing is to stand for something and be divisive and be polarizing.

Because then if you're polarizing, people that love that will come flying towards you. And there'll be people who will virtually hate you. And it's okay, because you can never please everyone. And I think in marketing, The most dangerous thing is to try and appeal to everyone and in turn you end up speaking to no one and I see so many videography websites that quite literally have, we do weddings, we do christenings, we do live streams, here's a short film I made, here's a music video and we rent gear and we can do transfers if you super eight films and it just becomes so vanilla.

You want to be sparkly purple fairy dust, you want to be something that people remember. Is that what Matt is? I'm part purple sparkly fairy dust. I think I see purple sprinkles and fairy dust with Matt, definitely. I love that. Watch out for the rebrand, everybody.  That's so true though.

It's like how many, and I started here, so I'm ragging on myself here, but how many video producer websites say, we're different because we care about story.  That's my favorite one. It's no way. You're filmmakers, not just video producers. Wow. You must be the only ones. Wowee. I even I remember going to a networking meeting that was like pretty traditional businesses and stuff in there.

And I showed up in, I think, shorts and my Air Jordans that I bought after watching The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan docker. And I was like, obsessed with Michael Jordan. I showed up and some guy's Oh, is this, have you come from the gym? And I'm like, Nah, man, like I'm a creative. I'll dress whatever I want, I don't have to wear a suit like you.

And he's Oh shit, that's pretty cool. It's make an impression, be who you are, show up. Good. All of you and be really open and authentic about it. I think it also reminds me of Alana, you posted a behind-the-scenes video the other day, and like halfway through you're going to call from daycare saying your son's been kicked in the eye.

And I'm like, what an amazingly human relatable moment. That on paper doesn't make me go, cool, I'm going to get said and done on my next job. It's, but it's oh man, she's human. This is a great sign of somebody that's got all these things going on and what a great individual. I love it.

Just being you. It's real life, baby. Yeah, man. It's true. And it's funny because we all, to some degree, earlier in our careers,  Decide that we've got to fit a certain look. We've got to appear a certain way to do business. And it's funny, actually, Alana, you said to me at the event recently, I was talking about all the spiritual work I've been doing and I'm now wearing my beads on calls because That's actually a really important part of my life, but I previously thought I don't need to bring that into videography and coaching because it might seem a bit weird, but actually I've learned more into it.

And we had a conversation the other day about a photograph that I'd been using on my website. And a couple of people commented on it and said, Oh, I nearly didn't join because I didn't like that photograph. And I was like, wow, head was blown. And I put that photograph because at the time that felt like it represented what a coach should look like.

And now I'm leaning much more some pictures I had taken two years ago and I sent them all to Alana and I said, which one? And he went, not this one. And then we picked one. She said, this has the right balance of professionalism, sincerity, authenticity, but confidence. And I was like, wow, the head was blown.

But I just wonder how many people, including ourselves,  try and portray ourselves in a certain way that we think the audience will respond to. But in actual fact, the more I lean into who I really am, the more, the better clients I get, I attract better clients. And have you guys noticed that at all? Ah, a hundred percent.

We're in the age of authenticity. And that's it. That's it. What that actually looks like is people are drawn to other people who are authentically themselves because they, in turn, want to be authentically themselves. And so the most powerful thing you can do in marketing your business and who you are, Is be you, and that often looks like being different than what you think the template is or what you think the acceptable is I'm 100 percent all about that. 

Yeah. I think too, like one thing I've shared is you don't have to say no and close a conversation off. If they're not a right fit, that's cool, but you can also still be helpful and point them in the right direction because I think that if you can say to somebody, Hey. We will not be the best fit for you where the wrong style with too expensive and it's whatever it is.

Right? And then you can go, but here's a resource. Here's a direction. Here's somebody else that I think can help you. That's believe in the karmic energy of that. Or you can just, think of it as just being a good person. I've done so many, Meetings where I've gone, you know what? I don't think we can help.

I've sent them over there. And then they've referred us on to other people where they go, Hey, you're really good fit for this person. And then that conversations happens. So even in saying no and repelling people, it's not necessarily closing a door. It's creating a really strong message to your audience directly and then, in the ripple effects of that as to what you are and what you stand for.

And people will get on board with that when it's clear that they are a good match for that. A no is not necessarily a no, it's just an opportunity for you to be clearer on what you are saying yes to. And that's doing business from a point of generosity as well, which I think Could be a whole nother podcast, but I think that sense of being generous and helping people.

It really does. It's very karmic if you want to say or what goes around comes around.  It's actually why we're all together in this new video mentors ecosystem. because we had a conversation and it struck me that everyone had the same vision for the future and the mission to help people. Yes, we're all running businesses.

Yes, we have commercial products available, but actually what drives every single person who's in the video mentors is a desire to help. And I think that's absolutely critical. And I think it's  I think it's impossible to fail commercially if the reason that you get together is because you really like each other, and collectively we can have more impact and help more people.

And I was saying just recently, I forget who I was saying it to, I said, I've come out, it was actually I think after the breathwork class we did at the VBE Elite event and I decided that  we have to help a million filmmakers around the world.  And I was like, Whoa, I got goosebumps. Imagine if we can impact, I'm not saying I have a million customers, impact a million people, either through the podcast,  through reels, through our courses, through connecting with us, to being in our free community.

I was like, imagine even if that's a crazy goal.  But like a million people.  Yeah. That's a vision worth worth getting around, I say.  Yeah.  I love that thought, Matt, of the no's, not no, and it ties in, Jen, with what you're saying in being helpful. We are all genuinely helpful people. And I think that can be a barrier for people.

Being able to say no is they feel like they're obliged to help everyone and helping them looks like doing whatever they want.  And when we're saying no to to potential leads and clients, it's not a no kick them in the teeth and say,  you're the worst. I hate you. Go away. It's I can still be helpful.

This was such a freeing realization for me is that maybe one of the most helpful things I can do is say, we're not a right fit. And I know who is, and that's that, that to be able to say that you need to know the people in your industry. And that's like being helpful, not only to your client who is probably not going to have a great experience with you, or they're just not going to gel or some reason.

But it's also being helpful to the industry around you. Like how cool is that is you're able to not treat other people and other video producers, like competitors and the enemy, but you know that you've got your own lane and everyone else has their own lane too, because they're all unique. And if I know what their thing is, then I can say to this client that I know is not a good fit for me.

Hey, down the road, there's another genius video producer. And I think you guys might gel. So in the spirit of authenticity and real, Matt has to be, he's got a hard out at four o'clock and it's now 4.01. I do. So we need to wrap up this conversation. I'm going to say no to the rest of this conversation,  because I'm not a right fit, because I've got dad hat on now, I've got to go pick up my boys.

Yes! I love this. I saw the switch. You're one minute dad with the moustache and glasses. So on that note. Thanks for watching. See you next week. 

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