This 1 Thing Is Costing You TENS OF THOUSANDS IN Work
Watch the video now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7BCZWipA74
I can’t tell you how many dozens, maybe hundreds of voice actors who have told me over the years some version of, “Well, I reached out to 500 or 1000, or 2000 people and I didn’t get a single job.”
And because I know why, the first thing I ask is, “Ok. Tell me about your follow up.”
”Huh?”
“My what?”
“Whadya mean?”
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Look, you can have a great demo, solid training, connected reads, even a few happy clients, and still struggle to build a consistent voice over business for one painfully simple reason: you don’t follow up.
Or you don’t follow up enough. Or you fully intend to follow up, but then a couple of weeks go by, it starts to feel awkward, and you decide it’s probably too late.
This is one of the biggest holes I see in voice actor marketing.
People spend insane amounts of energy worrying about the first contact. They obsess over subject lines, build prospect lists, rewrite emails, and wonder whether they sounded too salesy or not salesy enough. Then they hit Send and somehow convince themselves the work is finished.
It isn’t.
The person on the other end of that email has a job. They have meetings, deadlines, client fires, Slack messages, approvals to chase, and seventeen browser tabs open. Your email is not the center of their universe, and that’s actually good news. Because when someone doesn’t respond, it doesn’t mean they hated your reads, hated your email, and have decided never to work with you.
Sometimes they just missed it. Sometimes they saw it and meant to reply. Sometimes the timing sucked. Sometimes there wasn’t a project for you then, but there might be one three months from now. And yeah, sometimes they’re just not interested.
The problem is that the silence doesn’t tell you which one.
Silence Is Not Rejection
Voice actors are especially good at turning silence into rejection. We’re trained to notice nuance, read subtle cues, and think carefully about how something lands. Those are great qualities when you’re performing, but they don’t serve you when you’re trying to run a business.
You send one email and hear nothing, and suddenly your brain starts telling a made up story. “I don’t want to bother them.” “They probably weren’t interested.” “I’ll look desperate if I email again.” Or “They’ll call if they need me.”
Maybe they will. But you’re placing an awful lot of faith in a busy person remembering one email from one voice actor they heard once three months ago.
That’s not a marketing strategy. That’s delusional.
Years ago, I reached out to a local production studio and heard nothing. A week later I followed up. Still nothing. I followed up again a few weeks later, and this time I got a response. They’d been buried dealing with a huge project, my email had gotten lost in the chaos, and they wanted to know if I could record a commercial for a state-wide client that Thursday.
I booked the job (in this case without even auditioning). I hadn’t become more talented between the first email and the third. I had simply stayed visible long enough to still be there when the opportunity came back around.
That’s what follow-up does.
And this is where I think a lot of voice actors misunderstand the problem. They assume they need more courage, a thicker skin, or some magical ability to become a born salesperson. Maybe some of that would help, but the much bigger problem is usually far more fixable: they don’t have a system.
If your follow-up strategy lives entirely inside your head, you don’t have a follow-up strategy. “I’ll remember to email her next week” is not a system. Starring a message in Gmail isn’t a system either. And while a sticky note on your monitor that says FOLLOW UP WITH STEVE technically qualifies as organizational technology, you can do a hell of a lot better than that.
You need a place where you can see who you contacted, when you contacted them, what happened, and when you intend to contact them again. That can be a CRM, a spreadsheet, a task manager, or even a notebook if you’re disciplined enough to actually use it. The tool matters far less than the habit when you’re getting started.
The simplest rule is this: every outreach conversation should have a next step.
You email a prospect on Monday. When will you follow up? Put it somewhere. A producer says, “Nothing right now, but definitely keep in touch.” Great. When exactly are you going to keep in touch? They don’t have to know, but you do.
Because “sometime later” way too often turns into never.
Follow-Up Is Bigger Than One Job
Here’s another place where people get tripped up: they think follow-up only applies when there is an active project on the table.
Nope.
Some of the most valuable follow-up you’ll ever do has absolutely nothing to do with chasing a specific job. It’s staying in touch with people you want to work with.
A producer tells you they don’t have anything right now. Fine. That isn’t the end of the relationship. A creative director says they’ll keep your information on file. Great. That doesn’t mean you vanish for two years and hope they stumble across your demo someday. A client hires you once and loves the work. Wonderful. Why would you wait for them to remember you the next time they need a voice?
There are really two different kinds of follow-up happening in a healthy voice over business.
One is project follow-up. There’s a specific opportunity, audition, quote, or conversation in motion, and you’re checking in to see what happens next.
The other is relationship follow-up. You’re simply staying visible to people who could become clients, refer you, or hire you again later.
That second kind matters enormously because most voice over buyers are not continuously buying voice over.
That sounds obvious, but we forget that constantly.
You might contact a production company in March and they have absolutely no use for you. Then in June they land a new healthcare client and suddenly need six narrators. If your entire strategy was “I emailed them once and they didn’t respond,” you’re now depending on them to remember an email from three months ago.
Good luck with that. 🤦🏻♂️
This is why effective marketing is less about getting somebody to say yes today and WAY more about making sure you’re still in the conversation when their need finally shows up.
That also changes the emotional tone of follow-up. You’re not trying to corner someone into hiring you. You’re not trying to close - hell, there’s not even a project afoot at this point. You’re just staying top-of-mind, making it easy for them to remember who you are, and giving the relationship another chance to move forward.
A perfectly good project follow-up can be as simple as, “Hi Tamika, I’d still love to help with the project if you’re moving forward. Let me know if you need anything from me.”
A relationship follow-up might be just as simple: “Hi Susan, I saw this article in [X publication] and it made me think of you because [bullet points A and B relevant to their needs]. I hope this is helpful.”
That’s it. You don’t need to apologize for contacting them. You don’t need to write a five-paragraph defense of why you’re following up. And you definitely don’t need to open with, “Sorry to bother you again.”
You’re conducting business. You’re allowed to politely stay in touch. If the prospect asks you not to, then honor that request.
Stop Throwing Away Warm Prospects!
There’s another cost to bad follow-up that I don’t talk about enough: it keeps forcing you back to square one.
Think about how much work goes into finding a good prospect. You identify the company. You figure out who the right person is. You find their contact information. You research them. You write the email. Maybe you customize your message. Maybe they even respond.
At that point, you’ve done the hard part. You’ve turned a stranger into a warm contact.
Then a huge number of voice actors promptly abandon them and go looking for another stranger.
That makes no sense.
If you never follow up, your marketing machine has to constantly manufacture brand-new opportunities just to replace all the warm ones you allowed to die. You’re endlessly researching, emailing, and prospecting while sitting on a pile of relationships you already paid for with your time and effort.
Warm prospects are valuable because you’re no longer starting from zero. They’ve seen your name. Maybe they’ve heard your demo. Maybe you’ve exchanged emails. Maybe you’ve already worked together.
Every additional touch builds familiarity.
And familiarity matters.
Clients don’t always hire the objectively best voice actor in the marketplace. They often hire someone who is good, appropriate for the job, reliable, easy to work with, and already somewhere in their orbit.
Your job is to stay in the orbit.
That doesn’t mean pestering people every Tuesday until they block your domain. Following up doesn’t mean chasing someone until one of you dies. Give yourself an endpoint for active opportunities. Maybe you follow up once or twice over a reasonable period, and if there’s still no response, you stop pursuing that particular project.
But stopping pursuit of a gig doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the relationship.
That person can move back into your longer-term marketing cadence. Now you check in next quarter. Maybe you provide a helpful resource they can use. Maybe you reach out about a new capability that may help them. Maybe you send a blog post you wrote about their industry. You job is to reach out with relevance and value.
That distinction takes a lot of the angst out of follow-up. You’re not staring at your inbox wondering whether this person likes you. You’re simply executing the next step in your system, always from a place of service.
This is why consistency beats intensity in voice over marketing (and in just about anything in life). A huge burst of outreach once every four months might make you feel productive three times a year, but it doesn’t create any momentum. Relationships are built over time. Familiarity is built over time. Trust is built over time. The voice actor who regularly stays in touch has a huge advantage over the one who introduces themselves once and disappears forever.
Build a Follow-Up System You’ll Actually Use
And yes, this can absolutely turn into money.
Think about how many potential clients have passed through your inbox over the last year. Auditions. Referrals. Producers who said they’d keep you in mind. People who downloaded your demo. Clients who hired you once and then disappeared. Leads who sounded interested but never quite moved forward.
How many of those people have heard from you again?
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, good. There’s money and work hiding in that gap.
You don’t necessarily need more prospects. You may need to do a better job with the prospects you already have.
Start simple. Pull together every warm lead, audition, inquiry, or past client you’ve interacted with recently. Figure out the last time you contacted each one. Decide who deserves another touch and when you’re going to make it. Then block a small amount of time every week to actually do it.
Thirty minutes twice a week can change the way your pipeline looks. Not because follow-up is sexy or exciting, but because almost nobody does it consistently.
That’s the opportunity.
Successful voice over careers aren’t built on one giant break. They’re built on hundreds of small, boring, consistent business habits repeated long enough to compound, build momentum, and produce real resutls.
Following up is a big one of them.
So if you’re wondering why your marketing keeps starting and stopping, why your pipeline feels unpredictable, or why people seem interested and then vanish, don’t immediately assume you need a new demo, another class, or a completely different marketing strategy.
Take a hard look at what happens after you hit Send.
Because your next client may not be somebody you haven’t met yet. They may be somebody you already contacted, somebody you auditioned for six months ago, or somebody who hired you once and simply hasn’t thought about you lately.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do for your voice over business isn’t finding somebody new.
It’s following up with the people who already know your name.
If you need practical accountability and a like-minded community of voice actors all supporting each other in the same goal, to build a marketing system you’ll actually use, check out vopro.pro/vopro.