In this episode, Jared tells how he learned the hardway that it’s not just about having a good online presence and getting the word out there. It’s also about the followup, and he shares how to set up a followup system that works for your band’s specific goals.
In this episode, Jared tells how he learned the hardway that it’s not just about having a good online presence and getting the word out there. It’s also about the followup, and he shares how to set up a followup system that works for your band’s specific goals.
Hey gigging musicians, it's Jared. And today on the gigging musician podcast, I wanted to chat about follow up funnels. Alright, so let me tell you a little bit of a backstory in this one early in my gigging days, you know, I started a wedding String Quartet back in 2016 ish. And I had enough web web design web development know how to create my first gigging funnel, where I would drive some traffic to my website that was optimized for bookings from weddingwire.com. And once a bride or groom would come to my website, from wedding wire.com, they would submit an inquiry using the lead capture form. And once they submitted that, that is where my system had a big old leaky hole. So, you know, I was in grad school when this was going on. And my goal for starting this string quartet was to help me make some money to fund my grad school. And so I had figured out how do I get people to the website, which was by buying traffic, which is one of the many ways to get traffic to the site. But once they came and submitted an inquiry, it was on me to respond with some follow up. And unfortunately, being in grad school, I was super busy at the time, I was taking a full credit, like full course load, and being in bands and orchestras, and also just kind of being a grad student and having some fun every now and again. But what that meant was that my follow up was not very good. And so when somebody would submit an inquiry on my site, if I didn't respond to them, pretty quickly, I would lose the sale. Probably like, you know, it was a rolling a sliding scale that if I didn't respond, within 24 hours, I still could possibly make the sale. And then each additional day that I waited, it reduced my chances of actually booking that gig. So like, by day two, I probably had a 50% chance, day, 320 5% chance. And by a week or so if I let a week go there is a very small chance, like 1%, that I would actually book that gig, because who are they going to go to? It's the ones who follow up quickly. So that's where I discovered the concept of follow up funnels, and the the concept of a cadence. So in music, you know, we have a musical cadence, which is the resolution at the end of a, a chord progression. But I'm talking about cadence as far as timing is concerned. So I learned this from a sales guy. His name is john. He told me, You know, I told him, I was struggling with this whole concept that I would lose a sale, lose a gig after a little while, and he said, well, what's your sales cadence? Like? And at the time, it was like, I don't I don't know what a sales cadence is, what are you talking about? I know about the music one. He said, Okay, so I've been in sales for decades. You know, that's his career as a salesperson. He did selling for some sort of like printing company, I'm not too sure on the details. I'm a musician. And so he was telling me in his role, he had what is called a sales cadence, which is a schedule a predetermined schedule of how he responds to leads and follows up. So his schedule was something like this, you know, somebody submitted an inquiry with it for him within 10 minutes, he would get back to them with a personalized email follow up. And then he would have another follow up the next day, he scheduled an email to be sent for that next day. The day after that, he put it in his calendar, he actually had a tool that did this, but he put it in his calendar to call the person The following day, it would send another email. Then he put it on his calendar to send a text message. And every so often, he would wait like a day or so just to make sure he wasn't overwhelming them with just constant contact. But he said with his sales cadence, which is basically his follow up funnel, he was able to close 80 to 90% of the deals that he was making. And so how this applies to gigs is that if musicians have follow up funnels in place, a dedicated schedule for when you respond to a lead, and then you follow back up, even if you don't hear from them, because you know, people are busy. It's not that they don't want to book you. It's that they're busy, and they get distracted easily. Especially weddings. You know, weddings have so many different elements that the bride and groom need to book and plan that music is not always top of their mind. But if we don't follow up with them, we're not going to get booked. Even though the couple really wanted to book us in the first place. They're missing out on the opportunity to book you because they're so busy. But you're also missing out on a gig because you didn't have the persistence or the follow up funnel in place to guarantee that you get booked. So that's why I'm super excited about follow up funnels, and just having a robust system of follow ups in place to make sure that my group gets and books the gigs that we deserve. So if you enjoyed this tip, make sure to click that like and subscribe button. And if you're interested in learning a little bit more about gigging funnels, go to gigging funnels.com and get your training on how to optimize your website for bookings. Thanks for listening