You’ll be hearing from me…sometime…I promise!

CRMThe quest for a workable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software continues. I don’t know about you, but I am having a heck of time finding one that is simple and integrates easily with my workflow.

Remember FilemakerPro? I used that for a while back in the day. Spent hours creating custom forms and fields to manage my free lance producing / writing / talent business. It was complicated and pretty much stand alone. But then I took a full-time job and the free lance gigs were sidelined for about 9 years. When I got back into the free lance side of things, the world had changed and new easier (?) and free CRM options were dangled in front of me.

I tried Outlook Business Contacts for a while, but during a software update, the functionality disappeared, so I muddled along sorting email into folders […]

2018-02-06T06:48:03+00:00May 8th, 2016|Categories: Business, Marketing, Musings|Tags: , , , , |

I’ll take mine with a side of Convenience, please…

42nd Street MenuOne of the things I’ve learned over the years is that when I make something easier for my clients it usually pays off.

Convenience is defined as something that saves or simplifies work – or adds to one’s ease or comfort. 

I make it as convenient as possible to do business with me. My website has demos up front and center on the home page of my website. I have contact information on each page. There are links to more demos and hopefully enough information about who I am and what I do to help them take a chance on my voiceover work. After that, it is up to me to provide value.

We love convenience. Savvy business people have always known that people will pay a […]

2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00April 8th, 2016|Categories: Business, Marketing|Tags: , , |

Matching Your Delivery

The other day I had three sessions in a row with repeat clients for whom my delivery is just slightly different. Pacing, placement, energy, warmth, etc. just a bit different for each project.

One client found me 3 or 4 years ago because they had lost track of the voice they had been using and wanted a voice match. Actually, they THOUGHT I was the same person and after I told them that I wasn’t, they asked me if I could match a sample they provided. I did and we have been doing updates every 5 months or so. This voice is in a slightly different place in my head than my usual signature sound.

Another project was 3 word changes and a new paragraph for a project originally completed about a year and a half ago. The read on this was soft and comforting.

And the third project that day was the […]

2018-02-06T06:48:17+00:00April 7th, 2012|Categories: Musings, Techniques|Tags: , , |

Eggs

You’ve heard the saying – don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I’ve been thinking about that the past day or so.

I am currently in Orange County at the beautiful Pelican Hill resort doing a live backstage announce gig for a biotech company. This is the 4th year in a row that I have been asked to be the voice of the company for this particular sales meeting. It is a fun job. The people are nice. The food and accomodations are always more than good. And the pay is quite good as well. But each year, I try to not think about the next year. Because next year may not come.

Early in my voiceover career – or perhaps I should call it my free lance career, because I was doing other things besides voiceover at that time (producing and writing and some on-camera spokesperson) – I had a […]

Was there a lesson to be learned?

Negotiating rates is the hardest part of my job. I much prefer to have an agent involved in this process, but more and more of my work comes directly to me from my website from places outside the range of my various agents. So more and more, I find that I am providing quotes. Add in the auditions from the P2P sites and a LOT of time is spent figuring out rates.

I have a set rate card for most projects now that I use as a starting point, but there is always something that makes the rate card difficult to apply. The nature of the material may require additional dollars (or not). Or the turn around time is short necessitating a rush charge (or not). The project may be for a really good cause that warrents a discounted rate (or not). The project may actually be more than one project, […]

2018-02-06T06:48:58+00:00July 14th, 2009|Categories: Negotiating|Tags: , , , , |
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