Persistent Beats: Mastering the Art of Getting Gigs and Growing Your Music Career

Hey, what's up gigging pros! Its Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Today, I wanted to chat about how to get whatever you want in your music career and in your life. I'm actually down in Texas right now visiting some family. And it is very interesting, very different kind of place than what I'm used to. But it's fun. We we've been visiting a lot of things, we actually just went to the magnolia market in Waco. And that was pretty cool. If you don't know what that is, I honestly didn't know what it was before coming down here. But there is a you know, I don't I don't watch that much reality TV show survivor being the exception, and Married at First Sight only because, you know, I was the violinist, I'm one of those weddings, but on HGTV and now the Magnolia network, there is a show on improving homes called Meg. Now magnolia. It's called fixer upper. And actually don't think they're making any more fixer uppers. But they're, it's led by this couple called Chip and Joanna. And they basically help people find fixer upper houses. And then they spend, you know,$100,000, fixing them up making them look amazing. And so magnolia market is basically a little compound that's basically like Disneyland or Disney World for Chip and Joanna where they'll show you that you can buy like lots of Home Improvement type things. I only bought like a cupcake, and some pizza for lunch. But anyway, that's not what this podcast is about. I wanted to share with you guys something that we were discussing on our one of our Fulltime Music Academy Gold coaching sessions, which was why do most musicians not get the gigs that they want and not get the things that they want out of life. And one of the conclusions we came up with is just simply that we're not persistent enough. We're not demanding enough, we're not aggressive enough about going after our goals. And so, you know, the first step is deciding what do you actually want? being super clear on what that means? What does it look like envision it, can you see it, feel it, taste it, smell it? Can you see the numbers in your bank account, then after that is coming up with a plan to get it. And you know, the only two options there are either you get it or you don't. And so the idea is you got to come up with a plan that either gets you the result, or makes it very clear that it's impossible to get it there's no room in the middle. And so one of the things about being aggressive enough about it doesn't mean you have to be like pushy and burn your bridges and be rude to people. But it means being persistent. And I just recently released the Corporate Gig LaunchPad course in our Fulltime Music Academy course and members area. And one of the concepts I teach in it is called a sales cadence. Now, as a musician, especially those of you who run your own musical acts, you are in sales, whether you like it or not, you have created a product or service, which is your musical performance. And then you have to get it out there into the hands of the masses, regardless of if that's like bar gigs, you're still selling yourself to bar slash restaurant managers. And then if you're in the, you know, corporate event world, you're selling yourself to corporate event planners, destination management companies. And so you have to let these people know that you exist. One of the challenges you face is that when you reach out to these people for the first time is most of them are going to ignore you. And that's just the reality of it. And this is where many musicians will get hung up on they'll be like, oh, you know, they don't like me, I'm not worth it. Or they're not worth it. Which is quite frankly not true. You know, if you have that mindset, you're going to deprive yourself and the people that you work with have lots of opportunities. And so getting your first rejection, whether that's a literal them saying no thank you, or if that's just them, ignoring you, really is just the starting point with that one person. So a sales cadence. I borrowed this from the actual world of outbound sales, true, true sales. And so it's basically the idea that you're going to plan a series of outreaches to the same person through a variety of communication methods. So if your first reach out to them is by email, your next reach out to them might be to follow them on Instagram and then DM them. And you might even do that the same day. But basically, you're planning out the timing of this, like first I'm going to email them then an hour later, I'm going to follow them on Instagram. And immediately after that, I'm going to DM them saying hey, I just sent you an email wanted to make sure you got it. And then you keep planning more outreaches for example, maybe later in the day, you might plan to call All their phone. And if they don't answer, leave a message. And then two days later, if you still haven't heard back from them, then you call them again. Maybe you follow them on Facebook, message them on Facebook. And then four days later, you might send them a text message. And so a sales cadence was just this planned, consistent process. That basically, you know what, I got this from Alex Hermoza. Yeah, I talked about Alex quite a bit lately. But he basically said, If you treat your reach outs, like you're actually trying to get a hold of these people. And like, if you're trying to get a hold of your mom, or something, I talked about this on the other episode, another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast, is that you would actually, if she didn't answer the phone, the first time you called, you would go ahead and text her. And maybe if you were really trying to get a hold of her, you would go and visit your mom, knock on her door, say, Mom, is everything, okay? You haven't been answering my calls. And so the sales cadence is the true. You know, it's that planned out for every single lead that you have. And so I've been suggesting this to a lot of my Fulltime Music Academy members, to just have a sales cadence in place, so that you actually reach the people that you're trying to get a hold of. And, you know, it's gotten me thinking like, why don't we do this for our inbound leads to so if somebody reaches out to you saying, hey, I'm interested in having you play for my holiday party, and then you reach out to them and they ghost you? Well, instead of treating that as just like, oh, it's done, they ghosted me they're not interested. No, treat it like a sales cadence. What do you do next, like how many how many days you're gonna wait. And then what's the next step, you're going to call them, you're going to text them, you're going to try to find them on Instagram, follow them, DM them, like treat it as if you're actually trying to get a hold of these people. I'm also really excited because we've been building a lot more into BookLive lately. Some of you may know about BookLive. It's our software tool that manages all the back office of running a busy gigging act. And I've been building The Gig Vault into BookLive. The gig vault, as you may know, is a treasure trove of over 24,665 leads from across the country, the United States, of private event venues and event planners that we've got their contact info, and, and putting it into BookLive so that you can actually see and filter like, oh, I want to find all the ones in Colorado and add them to my list, and then start to reach And the really cool part about BookLive is, it's going to act out to them. as a CRM for you to actually track Hey, you reached out to this person on Monday, Wednesday, it'll possibly even remind you, hey, time to follow up via Facebook. So I'm super excited about that. It actually, it's so cool. I started adding like bars that have live music into it. And so this is going to be a total game changer. Anyway, I don't want to spoil it too much for you. I just want you to give it a shot. So get your free trial of BookLive at BookLive.com And then give it a shot. So that's all I got for you today. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "your music will not market itself!" Bye everybody.