Opportunity and Dumb Luck

In the course of my daily prospecting earlier this week, I just happened to reach out to someone at a production company while they were on the phone with their casting director. It turns out they’re casting a network TV show that will rely heavily on voiceover and as luck would have it, dumb luck generated the opportunity for me to audition.

Except it wasn’t dumb luck.

Dumb luck happens when you sit down next to a casting agent on a plane and you both have a love for minor league professional archery.

Dumb luck happens when you drop your laptop coming out of a coffee shop and the person that picks it up for you is Bob Iger.

Dumb luck happens when you reach out to 5 people a day and you generate an audition for a network TV show.

I don’t reach out to 5 people a day. I don’t rely on dumb luck. Dumb luck doesn’t build businesses.

Sales is a numbers game. The sooner you figure out how to smartly, effectively, and personally reach out to more people, more regularly, with more follow up, the more successful you will be. This is the business of relationship development at scale.

Scale, rarely but sometimes, generates instant auditions for network TV shows. Scale creates opportunities for referrals. Scale creates opportunities for “dumb luck.”

You can’t create a 1 in 1,000 shot by taking 10 swings.

That does not mean spamming. Read it again. It does not mean email blasting hundreds of people with generic copy from your Mailchimp account. It does NOT. If you’re doing it, STOP.

It does not mean shamelessly asking/begging for work publicly online. I see this all the time and I’m dumbfounded. I’ll see a random post by a voiceover buyer online and more often than not some chucklehead talent will pipe in with a completely out of context, “And hey, if you ever need a voiceover talent for blickety blockety bloo…”

Well, Chucklehead, if they are going to hire someone, I’m sure the criteria will not be a public, lazy, unresearched, and inappropriate ask online. It makes my skin crawl. If you’re doing it, STOP.

You need a process that is repeatable, trackable, adjustable, and scalable. You can’t just build a website, throw up some demos, and expect the world to come a callin’. Ain’t gonna happen.

You can choose to commit to developing an outreach practice as professional as the rest of your business or you can hope you and Bob Iger share a coffee shop.