If you are serving your perfect prospects, your business could flourish.
I’ve never been a big fan a general correspondence to large lists of prospective buyers. That’s like net fishing, throw out a net and whatever fish swims in, is good.
Well, booking great gigs requires much more finesse and discrimination. I like to focus like a laser beam, on exactly the right prospect for whatever I’m doing. That’s why I like to cast my net on one individual prospect at a time, but it has got to be the right prospect that enables me to catch multiple opportunities.
Translated, that means looking for gig opportunities within a niche market perfectly suited for your act.
In order to do that, you need to know who you are dealing with in much more depth than the name of the venue and whether it is along your tour route.
Here are 6 things to consider as you search to serve your perfect prospects.
Does the venue, business or organization serve an audience with whom you have a deep connection or affinity?
Does the venue, business or organization offer you multiple performance opportunities? Are there several options to perform in one community? Do they have multiple locations or chapters throughout a defined region, country or world-wide?
Before speaking with anyone from the organization, what can you learn about them from pre-call research that you may use to refine your introduction and pitch?
How well do you understand their audience before making any inquiries. If you did additional research, could that help make your pitch even better? Would it be worth your time?
Would you be willing to spend a bit of extra time and effort developing a high dollar prospect if it meant that it would open multiple performance opportunities?
Does this require a shift in how you do things now? Would it eventually be more profitable over the long-term, if you really understood your prospects and sought to serve only those that fit well with who you are and what you do—to serve your perfect prospects?
These questions really require you to know yourself, your art or act, where you would be best presented and to what kind of audience. Understand who your best, most appreciative, most attentive audience members might be. Eliminate all those venues, businesses and organizations that just don’t fit. Start making inquiries to the perfect performance prospect.
Does it take a bit of work? Perhaps. But, consider the time, effort and money spent on blindly sending thousands of emails out to directory lists or purchased databases. Here you are hoping that your target list might, might hit someone’s fancy and spark a response. I’d opt for focused, strategic, targeted niche markets every time. I hope this brings you some new focus to your booking strategies as well.
Let me know if this strikes a chord with you and how you will begin putting this into play in your bookings.
As usual, a great Biz Booster, a great reminder and confirmation of the approach that I am using, thanks to you.