Business Tips | Chaze Films, LLC | Boston Video Strategy, Production & Marketing

December 16, 2020 by CF

How To Respond To Low Budget Clients

Whether you’re a freelancer (in pretty much any profession) or someone that runs your own company, I’m sure you’ve come across some clients that simply do not have a big enough budget to actually hire you at your prices.

Some clients may simply be unaware of how pricing in your line of work is or some hope you’re willing to do more for way less. Whatever the case is, it’s a good practice to respond to everyone in general in the same professional manner you’d want for yourself.

First, let’s get into…

How You Should NOT Respond

By Lowering Your Prices – Some people, especially those looking for immediate work or in need of money, will lower their prices just to get paid something.

Some money is better than no money, right? Wrong. At least in this case when you’re trying to run a business. You devalue your own time, work and worth when you do this.

Not only that but they’ll assume you were overcharging them to begin with. And from the stories I hear, once you lower your price and devalue yourself, those clients will continue to see what else they can get from you. A classic case of giving an inch and they try to take a foot.

By Getting Defensive or Offended – There’s no need to defend yourself or get offended, especially when it comes to responding. Whether it’s a sarcastic response or wanting to tell them off because you felt insulted by their budget, don’t.

Like I mentioned earlier, some people simply are unaware of how pricing is in your line of work so you have a chance to inform them in a polite and professional way.

On top of that, just because they have a low budget now, doesn’t mean they’ll have a low budget in the future. So don’t automatically think you lost this client because they could very well come back to you down the road.

Not Replying At All – One of the worst things you can do with your business is not responding to a potential client at all (even if you feel it’s a waste of time). Not only is this unprofessional but it can potentially damage your reputation and you can lose more than just that one client.

If a client takes time to contact you, at the very least, you can take a minute or two to respond.

Speaking of responding…

How You Should Respond

Professionally – I thought this was a given, to respond in a professional manner, but I’ve seen people in the videography/photography profession respond like they’re talking to a friend they’ve known for years rather than a potential client.

Although it’s great to be yourself and personable, first impressions go a long way. I mean, you probably wouldn’t go into a meeting or interview for a job like you’re with a group of your closest friends, right?

Enlighten Them – As I mentioned, a lot of people simply are unaware of how pricing is or even how much work is actually involved so here’s your chance to enlighten them.

I’ve had conversations with clients who have reached out to me with low budgets and enlightened them on the value and quality of my work/services and how it can help them; some raise their budgets to meet my pricing and some move on.

I think it’s important to communicate these things. I mean, there are a bunch of people who think videographers simply press the record button and that’s it.

Well, that is until they try to do it themselves and notice the difference between your work and theirs.

Be Helpful (Give Recommendations) – Some people will not be able to afford you but it shouldn’t stop you from potentially helping them out. Now I’m not saying to do work for free but giving some guidance or suggestions can go a long way.

Depending on your profession, I often either recommend people that I know that have lower prices than myself, recommend helpful resources or possible DIY solutions so they can try to produce something themselves.

If you’re in need of an email template on how to respond to low budget clients, we give away free email templates to all of our newsletter subscribers. Feel free to subscribe at the end of this post to obtain your free templates!

Conclusion

Every situation is different but ultimately, you should respond to low budget clients with the same professional demeanor as you would a high budget client.

Who knows, maybe one day that low budget client may actually turn into a high budget client down the line and you made such a great impression (with your work) and professionalism that they want to come back to you.

December 3, 2020 by CF

6 Reasons Why You Should Send New Clients Questionnaires Before Meeting

If you’re a videographer, photographer or anyone that has service-based clients, we would recommend sending new clients a questionnaire before you schedule a phone call or meeting with them. This will actually help you out tremendously in the small and big picture.

Here are the reasons why you should always send new clients questionnaires before meeting:

It Helps You Understand Their Wants/Needs For The Project

This one is obvious so we wanted to get it out of the way. It helps you understand the project and obtain the information you would need if you decide to take on the project.

It will also let you know if it’s not the type of project you’d like to work on.

It Helps You Prepare (And Impress) For Your Meeting With The Client

If you’re like us, you like to prepare if you’re able to. In this case, you’re preparing for the meeting with your client so you’re not going into it blindly.

Just imagine this: you have enough information about the client and their project and you can go into the meeting well prepared and on the same page as them; you not only impress them with your professionalism and commitment to their project, but you can use that information to help advise them based on your professional opinion.

And if you do it correctly, you can potentially upsell them on services or lock them into a retainer contract for more than a one-off project.

Some people are great with improvising but even if you improvise during a meeting blindly, there will always be something that you may miss. Meetings with new clients are make-it-or-break-it and if you impress, your conversion rates become that much higher.

Helps Your Client Understand Their Own Wants For The Project

You won’t believe how many times I’ve had clients not fully know what they want with their own project. They have a general idea but they need help. Before you give your time advising them, the questions from your questionnaire will often give them more clarity on what they want.

It Adds A Layer To Weave Out Clients Who Aren’t Serious In Actually Hiring You

Time is money, right? Imagine if you can cut out the time spent talking to potential clients who aren’t even really serious about hiring you or they simply don’t even have a budget to be able to hire you.

If you receive a bunch of inquiries, especially on social media, imagine trying to respond to every single one of them to find out less than half actually had a budget to hire you to begin with. Now you just wasted all day responding to potential clients who weren’t really serious. That is time you could’ve been using on other important business items.

And if you receive spam or scammer emails, this will easily red flag them!

Avoid The Awkward “What Is Your Budget?” Talk

You don’t want your first question to a potential client to be “what’s your budget?” because that seems like you’re only interested in getting paid rather than helping your potential client. We believe asking clients what their budget is upfront is necessary but to avoid that awkward talk, we suggest adding that question to your questionnaire.

This will also gives you a heads up on if the client can afford your services.

Helpful tip: put in parenthesis examples of your pricing starting with your minimum. For instance, “What’s Your Budget (ex. $1,000, $2,000, $3,000+)?” This lets them know the minimum on if they can afford you or not.

You Have A Reference In Writing

Whatever their answers are, you have it in writing to reference later, if needed.

Say one of your questions is “do you have an example video or photo style you’d like us to reference?”, now you can refer back to the example they gave, especially if you didn’t take notes or have a bad memory, like us. 🙂

On top of that, there’s no miscommunication on what they’re telling you. It’s in writing for a reason.

Bonus Tip: Save Yourself More Time By Automating The Questionnaire Sending Process

If you use a CRM/CMS (we use HoneyBook, get 50% off your first year) then odds are you have the option to automate some of your processes such as sending out automated emails as well as things such as questionnaires.

This will save you so much time!

Conclusion

Sending out questionnaires have helped us in numerous ways and we believe it will help you out as well. As you can see, this will save you a vast amount of time in the big picture but it will also help narrow down the time spent on quality leads.

And if you need a videographer/video pre-production questionnaire example template for future clients, this is one of the many templates that are available for our email newsletter subscribers. Feel free to sign up here to receive our FREE templates!

November 18, 2020 by CF

Ghosted After Client Pays Non-Refundable Retainer And Contract Is Signed

Whether you’re a videographer, photographer or anyone that works with clients, odds are you’ve been ghosted by a potential client before. It happens to us all at some point but to make things more interesting, have you ever had a client pay your non-refundable retainer and sign your contract to then never hear from them again? I have. Three times, actually. Let me just get into it, especially since we had to add specific verbiage to our contract because of these situations.

What Does Being ‘Ghosted’ By A Client Mean?

We’ve all heard of “being ghosted” in dating terms when a person never hears back from someone, especially when they thought things went well, but nowadays, it happens even in the business world.

Often times it goes like this:

A potential client reaches out
You have a phone or in-person meeting to discuss details on the project or service they’re planning on hiring you for
It goes well and then you send over a contract
You never hear from them again

Sound familiar? Yep. It happens to all of us. Don’t take it personal, stay professional and simply move on (though, I always send a follow-up message to them regardless).

Now things get interesting if they’ve paid a non-refundable retainer and then you never hear back…

Being Ghosted By Clients After They Pay Non-Refundable Retainer And Signed Your Contract

Believe it or not, this has happened to us on three different occasions. Each time that this has happened has been slightly different but this is how the process generally goes:

A potential client reaches out
We have a phone or in-person meeting to discuss details on the project or service they’re planning on hiring us for
It goes well and then we send over a contract as well as invoice for a non-refundable retainer
They pay our non-refundable retainer and sign the contract
We try to schedule a date that works for both of us for the film shoot
They get busy, are going out of town, (or some other excuse goes here) and will schedule when they’re available
We follow up once, twice, thrice, within a month or two timeframe, which they read the messages/emails and we never hear from them again

We’re just as perplexed as you probably are while reading this.

What Should We Do In This Situation?

We know what you’re probably thinking: “They paid you a non-refundable retainer, FREE money for doing nothing! Keep it and move on!”

Although, that is essentially what happens, we actually want to do the work they hired us for. But if we never hear back, then we can’t.

So, what do we do?

Well, each time we implemented something new from these learning experiences.

Side note and fun fact: we actually had a client pay us the non-refundable retainer, remaining balance, we filmed and edited but needed, not only their approval to finalize the video, but their logo and other materials to include, and then never heard back after numerous failed email attempts, calls with voicemail messages and texts.

Luckily, it was an organization which we could look up other contacts and we resolved it that way.

But back to implementing new processes from these learning experiences.

New Steps We’ve Implemented Because Of These Situations

Although these situations don’t happen often, you want to be able to protect yourself from things such as:

If they claim you never contacted them or they never received your messages
If they come back a year or two later (after your rates or entire company’s procedure has changed) wanting to pick up where they left off
If they claim you weren’t trying to actually do the work, for some reason
You potentially losing out on other work if they’re constantly rescheduling (if you turn down another client on the same day, for instance)

These are the steps we’ve implemented over the years and I’m sure we’ll adjust accordingly in the future as well and suggest you always do the same to fit your business:

Reach out multiple times in different ways (emails, phone, social media): We understand people get busy so courtesy follow-up usually works. But after a couple of months of no response, we’ll eventually send an email stating if we don’t hear back by a certain date, we’ll assume they no longer need our services and any payments up to that point will be forfeited.

Adding specific items to our contract for the future so they know in advance: We actually did this after the latest ghosted payment because anything more than once, may happen again so we want to be transparent and covered within our contract.

Below is the wording we included in our contract (we are NOT lawyers so please always have a professional look over your contracts), which we’re constantly changing our contract to reflect circumstances that will help protect the clients as well as ourselves:

Expiration and Cancellation
Current contract agreement is valid 2 weeks post origination date to secure services. If Client fails to return signed contract agreement and/or non-refundable retainer within specified time frame, contract voids and a new agreement will need to be created and issued.
If Client fails to arrange film dates or anything that will prevent the Company from performing the scope of work after contract is signed and non-refundable retainer is paid, the Company will make reasonable attempts to contact Client. If Client fails to respond, arrange film dates or supply Company with material needed to finish scope of work, contract will expire one year from original date of signed contract.
If the event is cancelled or Client cancels, the Client must notify Company immediately in writing. Company will work with Client in an attempt to reschedule an agreed upon date within one year of the original filming date. If the event is rescheduled more than twice then this contract becomes void and no refunds will be granted. In the event that the Company is not available for the new date, Company will refund Client any payments except for the non-refundable retainer.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, we will probably never know what happened since we were unable to get in touch with these previous clients. We can only do what we can as well as prepare for these situations if they ever happen in the future. Hopefully our experience helps you prepare by adding things to your contract to protect you and your company for the future.

Let’s just hope this doesn’t happen to you, let alone, happen three times!

If this has happened, we would love to hear what happened and what you did!

Please let us know and let’s hope we don’t get ghosted anymore!

… I’m being optimistic, of course.

September 1, 2020 by CF

10 Tips For Sending Cold Emails To Businesses That Get Responses

Are there businesses or clients that you would love to offer your service or business to but you don’t know what to say when sending them an email? Your initial “cold” email to a business or potential client you’ve never talked to will determine if they actually take the time to read it and respond versus them deleting it almost instantly.

If you don’t know what to say, let us help you out with that! Here are out 10 tips for sending cold emails to businesses you want to work with! But first…

What Are Cold Emails?

There are different definitions of what a “cold email” is, but in essence, it’s an email sent to a potential client that you have had no prior relationship or contact with before.

Whether you’re in a business for yourself or just starting out, you’ve probably received some sort of cold email at some point. Often times, they are totally spammy, impersonal and gets deleted before you make it to the second sentence.

Please do not send those types of emails.

I often get these types of emails – whether they’re trying to offer me an outsourcing video editor service or wanting me to sign up for something – there have been times where I actually take the time to respond to them and let them what they could do to improve rather than send the same email to everyone. I mean, you want to turn a cold email to a warm lead, which is the point. But even if I respond to them, they already lost me.

With that said, here are our tips from our experiences on how to send cold emails or messages to business:

1. Research the business you’re contacting

If you’re reaching out to a business, at the very least, you should know what they do and what you can offer to help them. That should be a given but you should go in even more detail when you’re researching.

Let me give you some examples…

Say you’re contacting a business as a videographer and you notice they don’t have any videos to help market themselves on any of their social media or even their website. That’s where you would come in and offer exactly what they don’t know they need yet.

But look a little deeper. For instance, if you notice that none of their social media accounts have been updated in the past year, that probably means they’re not really focusing on social media so you can even offer that service or focus on how you can help outside of it (sponsored ads, video for their website or landing page, etc).

2. Focus on them, NOT yourself

One of the mistakes I made early on was not focusing enough on the potential client. You have to explain and educate how you can help them while taking away the focus on what you’re gaining out of it.

It shouldn’t be why they need you but rather how you can help their needs.

How can whatever you offer them help their business? Why should they take this specific action? Focus on that first so you can get a response back and ideally, setting up a phone call or in-person meeting to discuss in more details.

3. Personalize your message to someone specific

Now let’s get into the emails. One of the first signs you’re just copying and pasting the same message to everyone is how you address them. Did you not take a couple of minutes to at least check out their social media or their About Us page on their website to get their name so you know who you’re actually contacting?

What’s even worse is when people just automate who they’re addressing things to by using your social tag such as “Dear @chazefilms” or something as generic as “to whom it may concern”.

If you want to seem less spammy, take a few minutes to do step 1 and do research on your potential next client’s name, at the very least. Think about it like this, if you actually address them directly, you already caught their attention because they’re probably thinking “wait, how did they know my name?” or “wait, do I know this person?!”

4. Who are YOU – Introduce yourself

You’ve done your research on them, now introduce yourself so they can do their research on you, if they wanted. Make sure you have a website, social media and other places where they can find more information about you because after all, you are a stranger to them so they’ll probably want to do some research on you as well.

Supply them with enough information for that so they’ll feel comfortable moving forward with you after looking you up.

If you have some sort of mutual connection or anything, make sure you mention that so they don’t feel like you’re a complete stranger but a friend of a friend.

5. Compliments are good

Do they have a great product or service? Maybe they have amazing photos on their social media? Whatever it is, make sure you compliment them on it. It can be something simple and subtle so it doesn’t feel as though it’s over the top and you’re just trying to kiss their ass.

Don’t get me wrong, you want to but without them feeling like you are. I mean, who doesn’t like compliments? And if you’ve done your research, this should come pretty easy.

6. Be clear on how you can help their business

Don’t beat around the bush, you have to be clear on how you can actually help their business. Are you helping them create new fresh content for social media? Will your services help them gain more customers? How will you directly help their business?

Whichever way you can help them, be clear about it so they know exactly what they’ll be getting from you and how it will their business. And if you have lots to offer, just focus on one that you think is their biggest need for now. The goal is to turn them into a repeat client so one task at a time.

7. Show proof of your expertise

Did you help another business grow? Did you help them create such an amazing video that they received lots of exposure or new customers from it? Show them this proof.

If you made an amazing video that helped a previous client, link to that specific video so people can see how well it was received and how it performed. If you helped their social media grow, show them some before and after statistics. If you have clients that wrote you testimonials on your services, link to them.

All of this will help backup your claim on how you can actually help because it emphasizes the proof of your expertise.

8. Catchy, short subject line

This should be higher on the list but since there wasn’t a specific order of priority, well, here it is. There are different ways of adding a catchy subject line but it really depends on the type of client you’re trying to attract.

For instance, contacting a small business versus realtor versus corporate will probably all be slightly different. But in any case, we would recommend keeping it short (under 50 characters), address what the email is about in a catchy way and try to include how you can help them.

For instance, “Lets help you attract more clients through video”. Short, to the point and it addresses what the email will be about while catching their attention on how you can help their business.

9. Call-to-action

The goal with sending cold emails is to get them to do a call-to-action, a.k.a. respond. But you don’t want to go back and forth with emails all day because potential clients want to be able to talk to someone.

Offer to discuss more details on the phone. A majority of the time when I’ve scheduled a phone call with a potential client, I’m able to lock them in just by being genuine on wanting to help their business.

10. Show appreciation

Remember, we’re taking up their valuable time so showing some appreciation to them goes a long way. It doesn’t have to be anything over-the-top but something more than “thanks!”.

For instance, “I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you!” Short, simple and shows appreciation for them even reading your cold email.

Conclusion

There is no perfect way of sending a cold email and often times, you have to adjust and test as you go to see what works for you but following these tips listed above has helped me get responses as well as turn them into paid clients and I believe it’ll help you too!

I’ll have email templates available for our newsletter subscribers so make sure you subscribe if that interest you!