If you’re trying to “win” a customer, there are a few ways to convey pricing to them.
You could go down the road butt-rock-Barry would and send a block of plain text in a boring, old fashioned email, which just includes the cost. Maybe you’ll get the sale, who knows?
Or… You could create a high-class proposal to absolutely wow your potential client and greatly increase your chances of closing the deal.
To make the proposal really work for you, there are six methods you can use to help along the way.
Listen now to find out how you can create high-class proposals and drive your leads to become clients without spending an arm and a leg.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why limiting your time with customers can create more demand for you
- How you can close more sales by setting a deadline
- Why giving can lead to receiving
- How you can create a high-class proposal to convert more leads into clients
- Why you should just be nice to people
- How showing consistency can boost your close rate
- Why starting small makes people more likely to accept big changes
- How social proof dictates who gets customers… and who doesn’t
- Why you need to collect photos when you ask for testimonials
- How you can make a sale just by being a likable person
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Quotes
“That sounds like an animal in a Dr. Seuss book.” – Chris Graham
“A non-decision is always a no.” – Brian Hood
Episode Links
Websites
456 Recordings – www.456recordings.com
Chris Graham – www.chrisgrahammastering.com
Filepass – https://filepass.com
Bounce Butler – http://bouncebutler.com
Followup.Guide – http://followup.guide/
High-Class Proposal – http://highclassproposal.com/
Courses
The Profitable Producer Course – theprofitableproducer.com
The Home Studio Startup Course – www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/10k
Facebook Community
6FHS Facebook Community – http://thesixfigurehomestudio.com/community
@chris_graham – https://www.instagram.com/chris_graham/
@brianh00d – https://www.instagram.com/brianh00d/
YouTube Channels
The Six Figure Home Studio – https://www.youtube.com/thesixfigurehomestudio
Send Us Your Feedback!
The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast – podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com
Related Podcast Episodes
How To Get More Online Reviews For Your Studio (And Stand Out From Your Competitors) – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-to-get-more-online-reviews-for-your-studio/
People and Companies
Andy J. Pizza – https://www.andyjpizza.com/
SpaceX – https://www.spacex.com/
Games
Kerbal Space Program – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Program
Music
Elvis Presley – Hound Dog – https://youtu.be/lzQ8GDBA8Is
Books
Influence: Science and Practice by Dr. Robert Cialdini – https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Practice-Robert-B-Cialdini/dp/0205609996/
Building A StoryBrand by Donald Miller – https://www.amazon.com/Building-StoryBrand-Clarify-Message-Customers/dp/0718033329
The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591848288/
Old MyChildren MyBride photos
[00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one 21 Whoa. You're listening to the six figure own studio podcast, the number one resource to running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my bald, beautiful.
Amazing purple shirted cohost. I'm so damn glad that we're finally reunited after a month and a half. No podcast episodes together. Christopher J. Graham, how are you doing today, my friend? I'm great. I missed you. You were gone for too long, Brian. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry about that. Well, it's weird cause like we went to Nam together and had so much fun and then you were gone for five weeks and it was just like lots of ups and downs through that.
So glad you're back. If this is your first episode listening to this podcast, for whatever reason, I've been gone for like the last five [00:01:00] weeks in Southeast Asia on a workcation with my wife. If you've been listening to podcasts, you've heard my updates on the intros and outros of the episode cause I'm still working while I'm traveling.
We just, the time zone difference was so crazy. It was literally 12 hours, 12 hour time difference, which was actually convenient cause I would text you and know instantly without math what time it was for you. Yes, yes. So it was easy to like, Oh it's midnight here. Then it'd be. Noon there. That took you a little bit too long.
Yeah, I know what the reason is. I'm Dell lag right now in my brain right now. It is 2:00 AM yeah. So I, my brain just doesn't know what to do with this right now. So anyways, we're back at it now. We are face to face on zoom. You're still an hour ahead of me in Ohio, but it's okay. Amazing. Well, what was your favorite part of traveling man?
Part of it was. Avoiding coronavirus successfully, I believe. I think the gestation period for coronavirus is like 14 is that even the word gestation? 14 days works for me. Yes. So we'll have, we'll know when a couple of weeks, whether or not I actually got it. No, besides avoiding coronavirus in the epicenter of [00:02:00] all that stuff.
So they even have Corona and Thailand. I thought it was only like foreign beers over there. Right.
That's a nice cause. If, if you don't drink Corona, you don't risk getting Lyme disease either. There'll be better guys. I'll try. Those were mediocre dead jokes at best. I'm like, I'm mad because like I've been gone for so long and you've had so long to prepare some decent improvise. A dad joke, if you, if you, you don't improvise it.
It doesn't work us down so hard just now. Even our pun fans cringed it that. James, just just leave the silence in there, just so you know. I want people to know how disappointed I was from that awful pun. Oh, man. Ah, yes. In Southeast Asia, there is coronavirus everywhere. It's rampant. Corona beers. However, no, there's not that many.
No relation between the two of them. No [00:03:00] relation. Anyways. What do you feel like it's like in the board room of like, whoever owns Corona beer that's like, this is not good. I bet their sales have gone up. I would venture to say that the Corona beer sales have gone up because it's top of mind. Maybe you might be right.
I would be fascinated. Should we pull up their stock right now and look at it? No, I'm gonna look it up or, okay. Okay. We're doing it. Okay. Well while you pull that up, I'm going to tell you. And our audience. What I did while you were gone, frustratingly, I was back out in LA last week and I left on Saturday morning, take it back.
AB InBev. So that's the company that owns Corona, says they have lost 170 million in profit duty.
Oh, Oh no. Here you go. Drinkers are confusing Corona beer with a deadly virus. Some people think people think that. Corona. The beer is how you get career.
[00:04:00] All right? You're ready to party tonight, Bob. Dad, go on to Bob. I said, Miller light that Corona. We can't get, we can't drink this. You don't kill us. You damn fool. That makes me so mad. Oh, that's incredible. Humans. Amazing. Well, anyways, so how do we get back on track from this? Chris, I'll take this back and drag.
So frustratingly, I hadn't seen you in five weeks and I flew out back to LA randomly with my friend Andy J pizza. We left on Saturday morning and you got there on Sunday morning and to lax, and we didn't get to hang out and it was annoying. But I had an amazing trip. Andy and I went out and we hadn't dropped yet, but he interviewed one of my favorite comedians.
We'll talk more about that later once the episode comes out. Let's talk about the thing that actually matters right now that you're getting to right now. The thing that I'm super jealous about, you should, because I only missed this by a couple of days. We were in LA just a couple days apart and tell us now what you got to do that I didn't get to do.
Well, I got to go on a private tour of space X. [00:05:00] My friend Matt is an engineer there. And uh, he offered to give us a tour and we did. And I got to tell you guys, I walked into space X, like, you know, I haven't had watched the news as one does, and thinking that this society's on fire, everything's burning. A democracy is going to die.
I don't watch the news, so I have no idea. Well, it's just like, you see all these things that are happening and you're like, Oh, is doomed? And then you walk into space X and you're like, Oh wait, no, no, we're good. These guys are going to face everything. These people are so smart. It was so freaking amazing and inspiring and encouraging because.
You know, I've got like businesses, I've got bounced, Butler and Chris grand mastering and some other other stuff, and I feel like my life is sort of complicated, but you walk into space X and you're like, Oh man, what I'm doing, it's easy like sending rocket science for them. More challenging. I mean it was like art in there.
I always thought it would have more of a sciencey vibe. It had like a [00:06:00] real, like I'm building a rocket. They build it by hand. So there's a bunch of people running around with like wrenches and stuff, putting rockets together. It was so ridiculously dope. Can I ask you a question? Yes, please. Why are there no posts on social media about this?
You're not allowed to take pictures inside of space X. That's what I figured. That's sucks, but I was telling Matt, I was like, dude, if you guys want to change the world, what Ilan should do is have elementary school tours basically 24 hours a day. Going through space X cause kids see that and at a young age and would think, Oh, this is totally normal and those kids are going to be awesome.
As they grow up, they're going to do crazy things. But man, it was like, in my opinion, I think one of the coolest things humans are doing right now is space X, the privatization of space travel. That's so cool. So it was a blast. I had so much fun. I mean, just the business economics behind it are interesting.
Like they said, the price per kilogram to get something in this space before space X was like, I don't [00:07:00] remember the exact numbers, but it was something like, let's just say $70,000 per kilogram to get it to space and now the space X is doing it for like a 10th of that maybe or maybe maybe 20% of that.
It is 10% yeah. I asked Matt, I put on like my full business nerd like hat and just, I must've asked him 90 questions. And one of the things that was super fascinated about, you know, I'm fascinated in anyone's business, like what are the bottlenecks that are keeping you from growth? And that's like one of the things I love about the business coaching thing is I'm trying to figure this out and then help people solve these things and space X.
It's so ridiculously out of my league. But I'm asking these questions because I'm curious. And Matt was basically like, well, the highways aren't wide enough. Like we need to launch in Texas, but all the engineers live in LA. So we're building rockets in LA, but we can only make them 12 feet wide because that's the max width that we can put a rocket on a truck and drive it to Texas.
And that like blew my mind if like, Whoa, it's highways of the problem. [00:08:00] Not like, I don't know the speed of sound or some crap. You'd think it was like really complex science. The main problem is not the highways. It's the fact that he can't get. The employees to move to taxes. That's the real problem. That too.
Yeah. I mean, like all the people that work at space X are part of this aerospace industry that's based right there in California. So, you know, as people are, you know, being hired and quitting and being fired, I assume at space X, there's a revolving pool to pull from in LA, not the case in Texas. Sorry, we're going full nerd here, but the reason I'm going to launch in Texas is the best orbits on the planet are around the equator.
Right. If you're not anywhere close to the equator, you can't just like launch. Go down to the equator and then began to rotate around the earth. Incredibly expensive because of how much fuel you have to burn to make correction burns, and there's all sorts of nerdy stuff you learn if you play Kerbal space program, which is like one of my all time favorite games, by the way.
Did you know that? You told me the other day and that made me so sad that you weren't with me. It's [00:09:00] basics. Oh, I know. Like I've put hundreds of hours into that game over my lifetime and the second one comes out later this year. Anyways. Should we talk about something of substance now? Simply possibly. All right, so if you bear with us for this long, thank you for sticking around.
When Chris and I don't talk for a long time, by the way, our banter pre episode or pre topic is so much longer than like when we're in a rhythm week to week. So hopefully next week we'll be fast reg in the actual topic this week in our Facebook community. What's your for not a member. Go to the six figure home studio.com/community.
Will take you straight to our Facebook group and you can join for free over 6,000 members. Tons of good conversations going on. It's the only thing good about Facebook. I want to say every policy has like dozens of replies in it. Like it's one of the most active Facebook annuities I've seen. I posted in the community.
I was like, Hey, how many people are using proposals, like formal proposals to close their deals for their studio? And. We had like 40 something replies in a pretty relatively quick amount of time, like it's only been a couple of days, but we've had a lot of crazy replies and it was a pretty [00:10:00] overwhelming response from people saying that they use it.
They've closed a lot of deals with it, and it made me think about a couple of things, and this is what the episode is based. This is like the topic of episode a day. One of the things is most people are probably still not using proposals for their studio. Chris, you just started using one somewhat recently because over the last year you moved to a quote based system.
Right? Well, let's slow down for a minute. Let's define what do we mean by proposals? Yeah, so it's, you buy this girl a diamond ring that's like 12 times your salary or something. I don't know. Okay. So there's, there's that a dad joke. Stay in your lane, Brian.
Oh man. So if you're not familiar with what a proposal is. This is a very common thing in the freelancer world. This is not just recording studios. Graphic designers for sure do this. Videographers, illustrators, like anyone in any other freelance industry, it's not that common in our industry for whatever weird ass reason.
I don't understand why we're so far behind his businesses, which by the way, this is how all industries operate. If you really dive [00:11:00] down deep in any particular industry, you'll find it insane. Things that everyone in that industry does that makes no sense, and then you'll go to a different industry and be like, Oh, they are doing this thing.
That makes perfect sense, but they're not doing something else. It's like these business ideas are contagious, but haven't like made their way to every industry yet. Super interesting. I tried my best over the years, and I've gotten a lot of people on the proposal game, but it's not one that's really.
Found its way. It's not super prevalent yet in our industry, but here's what happens. Let me just give you the process, the overview, if anyone's still not falling along right now, someone comes to you. Let's just use Chris's example here. Someone comes to Chris, they're interested in mastering services from Chris, so they contact him on his contact form.
For a quote. Is that right? How that's how it works for you right now, right? Fill out a quote form. Yeah. Now the ball is in Chris's court. He can look at all the data and he can say, this is what I'm going to charge for this project. Now at this point, you have two options. There's actually more than two options, but these are two main options that most people are going to take.
The first, and this is what I did for the [00:12:00] first probably six years of my audio career, and this is what I call the white trash proposal. This is the politically incorrect term for, I don't, I don't totally co-sign it, but I don't totally hate it. This is the white trash proposal and this is where you just send a block of text and an email giving them all the details and there are tasteful ways to do this and there are less tasteful ways to do this, but.
The gist of it is like, hi, the prize is going to be $2,000 and it's going to be here. You're going to get this, here's this deliverable. It's going to be three rounds revisions. It doesn't come with editing and all this stuff. It does. Let me know if he liked that. That's the white trash proposal. Just FYI.
We do have fully stock refrigerators full of course, light and Corona, if you're into that sort of thing. We're giving away free Corona cause we can't sell it, and that's the voice. The person reads it in their head when they're reading your white trash proposal. If it's sent via email, that's what most people.
Tend to do even worse. We'll send a text message or they'll do like an Instagram DM and that's all they do. Either way, it's just a block of text. The second way is through a [00:13:00] formal proposal. I call this a high-class proposal. This is what I've called off for years, and I just like to differentiate white trash proposal versus high-class proposal.
This is what I want people to think about whenever the next time they're sending out a price for a project, a high class proposal is much more beautifully done. Every time you say high class, I hear Elvis Presley from. I think it's blue suede shoes like you thought you were. We build a song every single time.
That song starts to play in my head. Great choirs.
Continue. Please. Yeah. Everyone in my family thinks we're related to Elvis for whatever reason, because like he'd come to family reunions back in my like, yeah, my dad's like played with it, but I don't think there's any blood relation whatsoever. What the hell was he doing in your family reunion? My dad was a kid, so this is like in the 60s or something like I don't, I don't know.
That's awesome. Let's go back to the topic here. Okay. Hi. Class proposal is Chris Graham gets a quote and instead of sending a block of text, [00:14:00] which is what. You probably did for years of just as like it's an email template you would send out. Now you're sending a well formatted proposal that includes a lot of information in it and it's well formatted.
It has breaks in it, and some software, which I'm going to get into in a second. This is what I recommend and what I've used for years. Makes this so much better to look at and allows you to do things that PDFs and things like that don't do. So anyways, hi, class proposal. Keep that in the back of your head the whole time.
We talk about this because we're going to talk about today, ways to close more deals. So if you get a quote request from somebody, how can you increase the amount of sales you get from those quote requests? How can you increase your increase your conversion rate? And specifically we're going to talk about tactics and principles that you can implement to increase.
The amount of deals that you win as a producer or an engineer or a mastering engineer, mixing into your whatever it is that you do, whatever services you offer, or even if you're in another industry, you're doing photography or videography or graphic design, these principles will still work for you. And [00:15:00] the reason we're talking about this along with proposals is because the proposal is a vehicle in which you can fit all of these things in.
You can't do what we're talking about in a simple email. You need be able to do this in a formal. Proposal, a high class proposal, which is what I'm going to call it the rest of this episode. I have to say this. This is super annoying. It's not from blue suede shoes. You thought you was her. The class is from hound dog.
I messed that up. Wow. Had to get that into my brain. I apologize. Everyone. Cool man. This is Paul from our Facebook community. I'm not gonna use last names here because our Facebook community is private, but this is from community member. In that thread that I talked about when we're talking about proposals, this is from Craig.
He says, the level of professionalism, a high class proposal communicates is amazing. Artists come in with a lot more respect and preparedness because they've read through a professional process. I also tend to struggle setting a higher rate, but the formal proposal kind of backs me so I can be more confident when I send the higher rates to the clients.
I had a client recently say that the proposal was the part that got her over the line. So again, this is just [00:16:00] one person in that thread. Go back to our Facebook community. Join it if you want to read more about this proposal stuff, but today's episode, we're going to talk about six powers of influence, our six principles of influence that you can and hopefully should implement in your next proposal or in your overall proposal template so that you close more deals.
Chris, you want anything to that pitch or is that a pretty strong pitch? That's a super strong pitch, so I would add this to it though. We've mentioned this book influenced by. Dr Robert chia. Danny? No. You've never said that name, right, but do you know how to say it? I never will. It's one of my, you know how to say it.
You know how to say Cialdini? Yes. You know how to say it? Cialdini. Okay. Dr Robert Cialdini wrote this book called influence. One of my early business mentors was like, dude, you've got to read this book. This book is terrifying. It's about psychology, and it's about how human beings work. And we have to preface this episode.
You could use some of the information in this unethically. We are not [00:17:00] telling you to do that. If you do that, you might close a deal, but it will come back and bite you. So as always, six figure home studio advice is have integrity. Man. Like your best longterm strategy for longterm business growth and for doing what you want for a living, for the rest of your life is to do right by everybody always.
Yeah. So one other side note to kind of piggyback off of that is there are six powers of influence that are covered in that book. You do not have to use all six of these and nor really should you in most cases, but. A few of these are going to be naturally lending itself well to you and your situation in your background and what you're doing in your studio right now.
So just focus on those. Don't try to like make up things out of thin air just to follow these principles because that's when he started going down this weird. Unethical whole of like making shit up just so you can close more deals, which is now over trying to get you to do here. We're trying to say do the right thing, but if you have a Grammy award, make sure you're fun.
That shit is all we're trying to say. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. Like you've got to be leaning into this and you've gotta be open and [00:18:00] honest about, Hey, I'm good at this. There has to be a little bit of a vibe of just being open with that. Most people don't struggle with the ethical approach. I think most people struggle with having the confidence to do these things and not just knowing that they should do them, but knowing where to do them and the proposal, the high-class proposal is the perfect place in which to do these things.
Let's actually move into these principles because I don't like prefacing things too much because we haven't taught anything. We could really just tag a lot of this conversation at the end once everyone knows exactly what we're talking about here. I know there's so many people that listen to this episode and heard like could use it unethically.
That's fascinating. Let's learn more. Okay, so our first principle of influence right here is something called scarcity. Chris, do you want to explain what scarcity is before we get into the tactics of how to use it in the proposal process? So scarcity to me blows my mind. So when I was first starting, Chris Graham asked reign if somebody wanted to work with me.
Now this is like super green. I'm really young, I have no idea what I'm doing. And I would get anybody on the [00:19:00] phone that was interested in working with me. I would keep him on the phone for like two hours. I would be like, don't, don't let them go. Just keep talking. Just keep talking. Don't let them go. And what I found was often like, there's a great saying in sales, make the sale and then shut up.
Stop talking once you've made the sale. I think they drop an F bomb in there. Usually they do, but I censored it for our audience for some reason. But yeah, make the sale and stop talking. And one of the things, when I read this book years ago, this is like 10 years ago, I read it and I read the part about scarcity and I was like, you know what?
I guess it's silly that I talked to people for that long. I'm pretty busy. I'm in the limit. My phone calls to like 10 minutes with a potential customer. I started doing that and just be like, Hey, you know, I've got another session starting. Sorry. I always did. I've got to go. But if you want to proceed, I'll shoot you an email with details and under proceed or whatever.
And when I started limiting my availability, that was creating scarcity. People wanted more and my [00:20:00] sales went up. Yup. I couldn't believe it. It was one of the most amazing things. Like levers I adjusted where it was like, I'm just gonna be a little bit assertive about, Hey, I have to go right around the 10 minute Mark in the phone call.
I still do that to this day. It was wild to me. How much differently it framed me in people's minds versus like, yo, yo, let's all keep talking for the next hour cause I don't got anything to do which says, cause I'm not in demand. Right? Yup. And this is my note here. Busy people close more deals. And so this is kind of a catch 22 because if you don't close enough deals, then you're not busy.
And if you're busy, you don't need as many deals. But that's kind of the power of this. If you need the gig. It is instantly more difficult to win the gig. It's almost like I go back to dating a lot, but one of the things about dating is the more desperate you are, the more unattractive you are. So true. It took me, this is so funny, like I didn't really put that together when I was dating in my younger years.
It was like right before I met with my [00:21:00] now wife to ask her out that I finally was like, I'm okay with the no, I'm just going to do this and I'm going to have fun while I'm at it. And my pitch for why she should go on a date with me was a million times better, but it was because I was okay with the no, like being okay with the, no.
And the scarcity idea. These are very tightly connected. Yup. Having a busy schedule, you can't just go out and do that. There are other ways to implement scarcity into the process. Specifically around closing. Sales says this is the specific step in the process, and there's different places in the sales process or in the sales funnel.
If you want to talk about sales funnels every step of the way, you can add scarcity into their equation in some way, shape, or form. But. In the process of actually turning a quote into a customer. The proposals are, go ahead and do this. And the way I tell people to do this is to add a kill date on the proposal.
So this proposal or this quote is only valid for 30 days or 60 days at the most. I don't think there's many situations where 60 days. She'd be the, the normal sixties to me is crazy. That's too [00:22:00] long. 30 days is the norm and this allows you to do a couple of things. One is there is a definite cutoff point to where that quote is no longer valid and that forces them to make a decision, and I've talked about this in the podcast many times in the past, but if the person fails to make a decision, meaning they're just like waiting around the quotes out there that they know how much it's going to be and they're waiting to get their shit together in order to commit if they're just waiting around.
A non-decision is always a no. So if you forced them to make a decision. Then sometimes you'll get a yes until they make a decision. It's always no, keep them on. It is always no until they make a decision. So by putting a kill date on the proposal or on the quote, it forces them to make a decision. And sometimes that decision they have made is a yes.
Most of the time it'll still be no. For a lot of people. Some businesses have higher close rates than some, but some will say yes and then they will pay you instead of just waiting around one day for them to finally get their shit together. So kill date or a expiration date on the proposal is a huge thing.
The other thing it allows you to do when you set a 30 day expiration [00:23:00] date on the proposal is it allows you to follow up and actually have something to talk about. So day one, you send the proposal day. X day. Why Daisy? All those things I've talked about in the followup guide. If you go to follow up.guide, I have an entire 60 day followup guide, but one of the things that you can talk about is, Hey, I see your proposal is expiring in a week.
Are you guys still interested in doing this? It allows you to actually have something that you are working towards in the process and to actually follow up about, well, and here's one place that you could use scarcity. Let's say it's 27 days later and it's about to expire. And some other bands have reached out and I'm trying to schedule with you.
That's a great opportunity to be completely honest, which is the way I think that scarcity is best used is like, Hey, you've got a couple other bands that are looking at the same dates you guys are. I'm getting ready to send them proposals, but wanted to touch base with you guys before your proposal runs out.
If you guys want those dates, we need to lock those down because other bands want them. That's scarcity. I use that so many times, not even really understanding it. I think intuitively, you [00:24:00] know, like if another band wants dates than another band has asked about, I'm going to let them both know so that I get those dates close by one of the two bands faster.
It will always speed up the timeline for somebody if that's the only set of dates they can do because of a tour or because of an album release or whatever, and you have another band that wants those dates. That's going to speed things along really quickly. Yeah. And you can, to some degree, facilitate that happening in this book influence, I've mentioned this in the podcast before, but I remember I read it and we were.
My wife and I were just dirt poor at the time. We had three cars, none of which worked, and we've decided to sell. You'd never mentioned that in the podcast. Well, we had three cars. We had a Honda accord, a VW. We don't know something. This is Gearson. Let me tell you. Okay. All right. So what the book said to do was if you want to sell a car, schedule a time where you're going to have people look at it.
And when people get there at that time, the first person that arrives, we'll start looking at the car and if [00:25:00] somebody else shows up at the same time, which is ideal, you say, Hey, you know this guy first come first serve, or if he's looking at the car, why don't you guys just sort of hang out? Once he's done looking at it, if he doesn't buy it, then you guys can buy it.
And that's exactly what happened with this piece of crap Honda accord with like a million miles on it that we had. And this guy shows up. He's looking at the car and this, you know, other car full of guys showed up. I asked him politely to wait. And the guy finishes looking at the car and he makes me a low ball offer.
And I said, just like Robert does in the book. I said, Hey man, you know, I'd love to entertain the offer, but there's other people waiting to see the car. You know, I can't flex on price and I'll never forget it. He said, okay, any send me the money? And I was like, yeah, it was a cheap car. When they hand you the cash right there, it was $500 it was a $500 car.
It was a piece of junk. Yeah. All right, so what are the next things you can keep in mind about scarcity? And this blew my mind as well, is right around when I think my oldest son was about two, I decided that I was going to [00:26:00] start taking the whole weekend off Saturday and Sunday before it was like I would usually take off a Saturday and I started to create this boundary where I would tell people as part of my autoresponder, if you emailed me, and if I was like in the middle of a project with somebody, I'd be like, you know, I'll be out for the weekend.
And it created this boundary for my own health. For my family's health. I was shocked at the response from customers because they saw that as like, Oh, he must be doing pretty well. He must be kind of a big deal because he won't talk to us on the weekend. That's kind of dope. That was also scarcity. It wasn't trying to be scarce here.
I was just trying to have a healthier home life, and the hilarious response of that was I was more likely to close projects on a Monday then I had been before because it was, Oh, cool. That's awesome. Way to go, man. That's it for scarcity. There are other ways to use scarcity, but that's all we're going to cover right now in regards to proposals.
The second thing here is reciprocity. This is the second key to influence, and there are a few ways you can do this. In order to turn a quote [00:27:00] request into a customer. Chris, why don't you tell us what reciprocity is here. So reciprocity is an interesting thing. It's how humans work. If you want to understand it, first of all, you have to rewind in your mind and think about what it would have been like to be a caveman.
10,000 years ago, but Chris humans have only been around. Let's talk about that on our other podcast. Creation. True or false? So, uh, so the idea here is that for years and years and years, humans lived in groups of 150 or less. And this idea is called Dunbar's law. And basically before technology, and before, you know, society really came together.
He couldn't really hold together a tribe of more than 150 and so what would happen is there were certain things that work really, really well and a tribe of 150 they, because we did it as humans for millions of years, that software still runs in our brain. And one of these things is called [00:28:00] reciprocity.
And it's this idea that when somebody gives you something, there is an overwhelming desire for you to also give them something too. And as a caveman living in, you know, 10,000 whatever. BC are all over the place. On the timeline here, if you're living back in the day that this was actually really good for a caveman society, it kind of created these ties that bind and in many contexts today, it's still a really great thing.
You know, to have a friend that you exchange Christmas presents with, it's great to exchange Christmas presents. You know, whatever. During Christmas. The problem is if you don't have these presence during Christmas and the people have presence for you, you feel bad. If you don't reciprocate Ooh, Christmas without.
I worked so hard for that, Ryan,
you guys can't see his face, but it's approval. He's beaming with approval right now. Anyways. Okay, [00:29:00] so reciprocity, let's dive back into this. Reciprocity can get perverted in modern society, and that's where you start to run into trouble. So the idea here is when you do something nice for someone, they will want to do something nice for you back.
And knowing that this is sort of the base programming of 99% of humans. It's youthful, it's good, and it's something that you can use in your proposal process. Brian, how do you use reciprocity in your proposal process? So this isn't necessarily in the proposal process here. I'll get to that in a second, but the first and most obvious one is far as turning quotes into customers is.
Offering a free sample of some sort of free sample mix free sample master. And this allows you to give value before you get value. That's really the key behind reciprocity is giving value before you get value from them. So by offering a free test next or test master Toastmasters lend itself better because test mixes are so damn time-consuming.
Test. Yeah. Chris, you built your entire business off of a free test master. Yeah. So one of the things that's great about that is if I do a [00:30:00] test master for somebody and hopefully do it quickly and hopefully it sounds great. I like took the time personally by myself to do my craft for them, and I'll find a lot of times I was amazed by this, but I find a lot of times people would be like, Oh my gosh, thank you so much.
We're going to pay you. Wow. That was so kind of you to do that free sample for us. It's been kind of weird, but I definitely have felt that energy as I've done free samples for people that a lot of people, especially if they've never worked with a mastering engineer before, are just like, Oh my gosh, this is awesome.
Like we owe you. For hooking this up on a free sample. Now we're going to hire you. It's not intentional, but it is sorta how humans work. And I've got mixed emotions about it. Honestly, like all of these sort of influence things, man, if you are a real asshole, you could use them in some pretty nasty ways, but they're still important to know and it's important to think about these things and to understand that this is how humans work and that we work this way because we're in [00:31:00] modern society now.
We were in like a Hunter gatherer mode for a very, very, very, very, very long time. You're chatting today, Chris. I'm excited to see you. I'll say this. It was really, really weird to not have our like ritual of recording the podcast, but still having people reach out every day and like talk about the podcast with me, but not seeing you.
It was really weird. I didn't like it, but I did like it, but made me miss you. So there's that. Okay, so let's get back to the actual proposal process because if you were surely someone would reciprocate. No. If you had said something, you've been my cohost long enough to know that there is no reciprocation with this shit.
Like I said, 99% of people
back to the proposal process reciprocity. Here's something you can actually add to the proposal. To show that you are willing to go out of your way to be helpful for them, and that is to add a section and like to put this under. There's a lot of sections that go into proposal. If you want to know more about my [00:32:00] proposal process, you can actually see my template in action.
Just go to high-class proposal.com that's high class proposal.com or your vote stop. Got a head class, proposal.com you can see my proposal template. You can get it for yourself in there. I have a section talking about what they get. For hiring me and one of those areas is they get feedback on their tracks before I even start to mix them.
I'm a mixing engineer, so feedback on tracks are really helpful so that they're getting the best possible, and that is kind of preemptive reciprocity. It's saying, I'm willing to do something for you that maybe isn't something that's. Normal for a mixing project. Let's be honest, in mixing and mastering Chris, you know better than anyone that most mastering is in ears.
They want to get the files. They want to get paid. They're going to send that shit off to them. They don't want to talk to their clients. They're not going to help their clients at all. Usually it's like, I'm going to sit in a cave masking engineers. No offense to any messengers out there, but you are friendliness.
Not. What we're known for. Yeah. And so adding [00:33:00] something like this to your proposal helps break the tension that a lot of people might have around hiring a stranger across the pond. You know, someone in another country, in another state, another city that, especially for remote mixing or remote mastering, help break that tension that is like, are they really going to do anything to go out of the way to help me adding something like this to the proposal is.
Going to ease that tension of money being exchanged in hand. So this is a form of reciprocity you can put into your proposal. I love this. Mixed consultations, mastering consultations, any things like this are going to help. Yeah, when you're doing it, just be kind. Just be nice to them. Just treat them the way you'd want to be treated and that will help your business a lot.
It's true. A whole lot. All right, so next on our list is a influence principle called. Consistency, and I'll sum this one up, Chris, and then you can add anything to it that you want. The principle of consistency is just basically that people are more likely to make big commitments if they make small commitments first.
Yeah, this is an interesting idea. So when you are talking with somebody, I [00:34:00] think we've seen people do this all the time of like they'll send like a quote over Instagram DM. Right off the bat. They're really aggressive. They move really fast. Yeah. They're not letting the relationship develop and the thing you've got to keep in.
That was my story for years. Like same. Yeah, it's toxic. Cause I didn't, if I didn't know you, I didn't really care. It like I almost had the opposite approach of like, instead of a lack of confidence, I had too much confidence. And I was like, I don't care. Here's the quote, take it or leave it. Like that was my approach to it and it was, that's not good, Chris.
It's terrible. You guys got to keep in mind that wise men say, well, live fools Rouge in Buddha, man. I like stored that one up, man. That was like a, I revved that. I was waiting for that for minutes. That was not bad. Come on. That was so on topic. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. Chris, we're talking about consistency and this idea of.
[00:35:00] Asking for a small commitment from them before you just launch right in. There's $5,000 pay me right now and we can start working on your record, dude. Seriously. That was literally my approach years ago. I swear to you, man, like so many studio owners are successful despite themselves. That was like my story for the first six years of my career, like I was successful, but it was despite my best efforts to get up.
Yeah. So when it comes to like building these relationships, I think this is like a real youthy thing. Some people, they do rush in. So like, I was trying to be hilarious ish with that Elvis quote, but Wiseman say only fools rush in. It's the lyric and Elvis song, but it is super, super duper applicable. So start by building the relationship slowly start by, you know, sending like, Hey, could you meet for coffee at three o'clock on Friday?
Sure. They show up. Boom. Like being consistent, showing that you are going to be where you say you'll be by. When you say you'll be there, showing that you'll do what you say you'll do by when you say you'll do it. I [00:36:00] can't tell you how many projects. I closed as a mastering engineer. This is how I'd used it.
I'm gonna give you away. Like one of my best secrets here is I would email people that wanted this sample and I would say, I will have this sample for you by tomorrow at 5:00 PM and then I would send them the sample by tomorrow at 5:00 PM we pushed back on that. I think that's just doing your damn job.
I don't think that's necessarily, that's having integrity. That is not the consistency principle. The consistency principle is the act of them sending you the sample to be mastered. Makes them more likely to mastery because they are. Here's the thing about the consistency principle. It is me as the customer, I'm taking a baby step that is more likely to make me take the big step.
This is true just to make this crystal clear to everyone's head. The example I use in the book is they went around, I don't remember the exact situation. You probably remember this better than I do Chris. They're trying to get someone to put like a billboard on their yard for. Like the environment or something.
I don't remember the example, but don't know where I'm going to tell the story. Because they wanted people to put a big billboard in their yard so they, they're out in the neighborhood knocking on doors, asking everyone to [00:37:00] put a big billboard in the yard and like surprise, like nobody did it. Nobody wanted to put a big ass billboard on their yard, even if it was for like the environment.
So what they did, and this was the consistency principle in action, they went door to door and ask them to put a little sticker on their door or a little sign in their window, something very small. For this exact same cause and no surprise. More and more people did that than the giant billboard on the front line.
So weeks after they went door to door and ask people to put this small thing in their window or the small thing on the door, then they went back to them again, asking them if they could put a billboard in their yard, and now it's probably no surprise to you. Those people were much more likely after taking the small step.
They were much more likely to take the giant leap of putting this massive, probably ugly billboard in their yard because they had said yes to the small step. I think it went from like. 0% to 37% yeah. Crazy different. So listen, back to closing deals to turning quotes into customers here. One thing you can do, and this is has nothing to do with proposals.
We'll [00:38:00] tie this into proposals in a second, but one of the things you can do is have them come in and tour the studio. This is them coming across town. And making time to show up in your studio. That is a small step that only are they making the small commitment. They are also getting more comfortable with you.
So there's a twofold thing there, and it helps build the relationship, which we'll talk about another principle in a second. So let's talk about the proposal now. How does the consistency principle align with the proposal? One of the things is if you can get them to agree that these terms that you've set, either in a phone conversation or through email or any sort of back and forth conversation you've had.
Because by the way, let me sidestep here. In our community, a lot of people said they send the proposal after they've had a one on one conversation, either in person or in the studio or even through live chat if some site, like a Facebook messenger or whatever, they have a conversation first and they nail down all the details.
That part of the process is extremely important because once they've agreed to details. Then the first part of the consistency principle that is taking a small step. They've agreed that these [00:39:00] are the terms, we love these terms. Now send us the proposal. So just that right there is one small, tiny little step that you're getting them to take.
The second step is them actually signing the proposal. So if you use the software, I recommend they can actually sign the proposal right there on the browser or from their phone, and that is the second little bit bigger, but still small step in the process of getting them as a customer. And then straight after that, then you are taking their deposit, which is the big leap that you want them to take.
Now the consistency principle is you've had a conversation, you've gone over all these details. You've gone out of your way to give them the time to make them comfortable, and they've agreed these terms are what we want. You've sent them the proposal. That was a small step. They sent the proposal, they've read through it all, and then they sign the proposal.
That's this, the moderate step. They sign their proposal saying, this is great. We're signing it. And then they take the deposit. That is a good flow here for the consistency principle. Instead of what you were talking about before, which was what I did for years. Oh, you want to record the mate? Great. Here's all the details.
You pay me or you don't. [00:40:00] There is no consistency principle in that. Well, and there's an idea here, I would call it an avalanche of yeses. The way an avalanche works, one rock starts to fall down the mountain and then it two rocks and then three, and then four, and then five. Then all of a sudden like.
Destruction when you're doing a deal landslide. Landslide. Yeah. When you're doing a deal like this or when you're trying to date someone, you don't just go right in for like who you want to like move in together. That's super weird. Don't do that. Yeah. Just start swiping on Tinder and then like the second you match someone, Hey, you want to move in together?
Let us know how that works out. Start with a small yes. Work that into a bigger, yes. Work that into a bigger, yes. In a bigger, yes, and a bigger, yes. It's not manipulative. It's how everybody wants to be treated. There is nothing that turns me off more than someone that just launches right into their pitch of Idaho.
You want, you want to do this thing? Let's do it right now. Come on, man. Look, you know one thing that turns me off more than that and that is, Oh yeah, Pines. I'm giving you the silent treatment right now. [00:41:00] I agree though. The consistency principle, the avalanche of yeses. That is the consistency principle.
Inaction is small yeses leading up to the big win. Yes. Avalanche. Okay. Yes. The land, no. Yes, and lanch. That sounds like an animal in a dr Seuss book. That's actually a great animal name for a doctor. It is a great animal name. A yes and lanch. It's kind of like a, like a goat. But he's real fat and he makes avalanches on the side of the mountain all the time, and then he goes, every time he creates the weirdest thing I've ever said.
Let's move on to our next principle here. That is social proof. I offer this one. What is social proof? Social proof is something that you feel every single day of your life. So let's say you have a crush on somebody and you got a small yes, which is, let's go to dinner and you were deciding where to take them to dinner.
So what do you do? [00:42:00] You get on probably Yelp and you start looking up restaurants, and what are you paying attention to? If you're like me, reviews, I'm looking for a large number. Of high reviews. If I see more than 105 star reviews, there is a pretty good chance that I go to this restaurant. If the restaurant has no reviews, it does not matter.
How good the food looks, how awesome it sounds. I am not going to go. I tried that in Los Angeles one time at a smoothie place and I got food poisoning for two weeks. Yup. It was a terrible idea. You had to call the squad twice and go to the hospital is terrible because no one knows what this squad is.
Move on. Okay. Whatever. So the idea here is social proof is when you're like, Hey, that looks cool. Your initial reaction because you're a human being with the psychology thing going on is to be like, it looks cool. Oh, does anyone else think too, it looks cool. Who looks like they do? Okay, let's do it. That's how the human mind works.
So you want to show off. If a lot of people [00:43:00] think that your service or business or whatever is cool, you want people to know that other people think it's cool. Yup. I can tell you this, after five weeks of travel, you'd be passing a restaurant. You just do walking around and you pass a restaurant. My wife would say, Oh, that's cute.
And I would say, Oh, yes it is. And then I would say, let me look it up on TripAdvisor or Google or whatever. It would have 2.5 stars and I would have said crisis averted. I'm glad we didn't go in there just based on the appearance of it. Social proof is powerful because it helps us make decisions, not based on mistakes, but on everyone's experiences as a whole.
And that saves a lot of time, effort, money, heartache, disappointment as a whole. So when it comes to your studio. We've talked about the power of reviews. We don't have to go into this really any more. If you go back to episode four, way back in December, 2017 how to get more online reviews for your studio, that is still relevant today.
It's still an incredibly easy way to get reviews for your studio, but as it stands for this topic of this episode of how to [00:44:00] turn quotes into customers, highlighting your reviews in your proposal is something I have not seen anyone do. That is having a section of here's why you can trust us and your proposal.
It can be a separate page in the proposal and having a list of reviews, which we just talked about. There's a reason why you should have for you, Chris, you have over 105 star reviews on Google. You have a comparable amount of five star reviews on Facebook and just having a screenshot, two screenshots of each of those reviews, like I have a tons of reviews, five stars on Google, tons of reviews, five stars on Facebook.
Those two things alone put into a proposal is. A great place to put those because here's the deal. We've talked about the consistency of print. We've talked about all these things. So far, everything we're talking about is greasing the funnel, as we call it. We've talked about the sales funnel in the past.
If you don't know all about that, go peruse our episode list and look for sales funnels or things about sales or whatever, or join my email list and get on my autoresponder about sales funnels. This is about greasing that as much as possible. So if someone's reading a [00:45:00] proposal that you prepared for them, this is the closest they can get to hiring you.
Without hiring you, this is the final step in the process and for you not to have your reviews front and center showing off how much you are loved as a. Whenever you are mastering engineer and mixing engineer restaurant, which doesn't make sense for proposal, but a videographer it does or it graphic designer illustrator.
It shows that people trust you and they can say, if a hundred plus people went out of the way to give Chris Graham five stars, he's probably good enough for me. Yup. One of the things you get asked yourself, and I think this is important as you guys explore, let's learn about things. Let's be enlightened.
Let's gain knowledge and let's grow. Is asking yourself the question, well, why does social proof work. You got gotta again, rewind a 10,000 years ago and you're hungry and you're walking along and you see 12 people from your tribe eating berries off a Bush that you've never seen before, and then you see another Bush with a different type of Berry with [00:46:00] nobody eating from those berries.
What berries are you going to eat? You're going to eat the ones that everybody else is eating because guess what? Pretty good chance you won't die to make a more relevant example here. Not that I didn't like your example of, Ugh, who will eat the wrong Bush and probably die and that's natural selection.
That's all fine. We're talking about like say in your situation where you don't have reviews or you're not an area that has a lot of reviews and we did this a lot in Thailand and Cambodia and Vietnam were, we just came back from some of the best restaurants, have no reviews over there. And that's because the best local restaurants are only filled with locals and not the people that leave reviews on Yelp and Google and TripAdvisor.
And so if you want the best experience with food, you have to go based on where the crowds go in the local areas. And the only way to know how to do that is. The old school social proof, which is, which place has the lines in which place is dead at lunchtime, the dead places at lunchtime. I don't want to touch those.
The places that have a liner on the corner of only local people, that's where I'll stand in line for 30 minutes to get far in Vietnam. [00:47:00] Amazing. By the way, I did get for as far different than ramen. I'm so mad that you asked that question. Yes, Chris. It is so different from ramen in every conceivable way.
First of all, ramen is Japanese and is Vietnamese. Second of all, the bras are different. What you put into them is different. The way you prepare them as different than noodles are different. What else can be different? Chris, what were you getting at with that though? I had ramen and when I was out in LA with Andy and it was amazing.
I had ramen twice and I had two different vegan Reuben sandwiches. And I was completely converted to Ruben vegan Reuben sandwiches and ramen roaded story. Chris, there's no point to this at all other than like, wow, that was really good. Went to urban Robyn, right? So that's what social proof is. Anyways, that's a good way to use it in a proposal, which is highlighting your reviews on a separate section of here's why you can trust us.
Totally. Let me add one good point to this. If you are just starting out, or if you're a veteran who has no social proof. This is an [00:48:00] invisible force holding your business back. If people cannot readily find social proof that you're legit, your business probably isn't going to work. Do not underestimate the power of social proof.
It's crazy strong. And another way to do this if you don't have a lot of reviews, cause my business is not based on reviews, I don't really do reviews for mixing metal bands. But testimonials, yes. Testimonials from clients. Who look like your ideal client. That's a note you put Chris, and I actually agree with that.
My ideal client looks a lot different from Chris Graham's ideal client. So if I have a section in my proposal on why you can trust us, Chris grans would look like this. Boom, screenshot a hundred reviews on Google. Boom. Screenshot 75 80 reviews on Facebook or whatever you're at now, Chris, I'll throw over a hundred Brian.
Gosh, whatever, man. Boom. Testimonial from an audio engineer who. Sends me tracks to master all the time. Boom. Grammy nominated Grammy winning [00:49:00] audio engineer who sends me tracks to mash all the time. That's Chris Graham's type of customer, and it looks a lot different than my type of customer, which is.
Band dudes who are early twenties and who wear all black clothes and play in heavy metal bands with really low tunings that are beyond belief of how low their tunings are. That's a completely different kind of customer. A completely different kind of testimonial to what Chris Graham is trying to get for his business.
So understand that it needs to be a testimonial from a customer. That you want, not a customer that someone else has. Yeah. And so one of the reasons that works so well is our caveman brains go on a website and if you see a testimonial from someone that's like, you know, this website's awesome and you look at the picture and you're like, that guy looks like he'd be one of my friends.
He looks like my people. He's similar to me, which means I would probably have the same experience he did with this business. That's a big part of social proof. And it's been proven by a ton of guys that are obsessed with conversion optimization on websites. If you've got the little round circle [00:50:00] picture of people next to the testimonial, and if those little circle pictures, usually you want to switch it up.
So there's a couple of different looks to the people. You're going to want at least one dude, at least one woman you know you're going to want for someone that's thinking about hiring you to look at those testimonials and be like, Oh, there's someone like me, and they liked it. That's so powerful. It seems so simple, but this is a huge lever in every business on the face of the planet.
So let's move on to the next principle of influence. This is our second to last one. So we're wrapping it up here. I know this episode's going along. Now this one is called authority, and this is very close. You can confuse this with social proof, but Chris, tell him what the differences between authority and social proof.
So authority is that gatekeepers approve of you. Social proof is that the mass is like you, that a lot of people like you. So one of the things that you could look at with authority and authority is a little tricky in our industry. But if you went on my website, I'm planning on doing this in the near future, and I showed you all the companies that [00:51:00] endorse me, you would look at that and you'd be like, Oh, I dunno.
Maybe Chris Graham. I don't know if he'd be a good, maybe he'd be a good match as a mastering engineer. Oh, this company thinks he's awesome and they give him free stuff. Oh, that company thinks he's awesome. If he's good enough for them, he's good enough for me. That's authority. Yep. And so an easy example, at least for me, is I would have, and I should, and I don't have logos of the labels I've worked with.
I do. Yeah. You talked me into that. I talked to you into, I was just talking about this. It's so much easier to give advice then and take your own advice sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. You talked me into that. It would have been not this past name with an end before that, and I did it. And there was a monster shift in my conversion rate with the quotes I was sending out Nam 2019 when I got you to do that, we were sitting in the hotel room and I remember he had pushed back or not a little bit, but yeah, I mean just the principle here was, Hey, I've worked with a lot of really big, respectable companies you've heard of.
I'm going to put their logo on my website and then here's what happens is when someone comes in your website. There's what you [00:52:00] call the cave man test that you can use. I got this from Donald Miller. He wrote the book StoryBrand. Does he call it the blink test or does he call it something else or the, he calls it caveman test.
Caveman test. Okay. Yeah. There's different thoughts behind this, but the idea is the same. You glance at a website and there's a piece of your brain that's just constantly on the lookout for danger, and you have to get that piece of people's brain to be like, this looks cool, keep going, and then that's when your cerebral cortex, those smart part of your brain that can do math and stuff.
Then that part of your brain takes over. So when you put these logos of, you know, big labels you've worked with, or you know, notable companies that endorse you, when you put those on your website, the caveman part of your brain says, look, he looked like he good at this. Many people say he good. He must be good.
Like it's two seconds. It's a glance at your webpage and people make a decision. It's the same effect of social proof. It's just a different type. And again, we're talking about proposals here. If someone has asked for a quote from you, your website is largely irrelevant at this [00:53:00] point. They've already probably been through your website or senior Instagram page or whatever, and they've reached out for a price and you've probably already discussed a lot of the details.
Now again, we're trying to grease that final step in the funnel before they hand over their hard earned dollars. And this is where, again, you need a section on your proposal that talks about why you can trust us reviews. Testimonials and then we've also worked with these labels, or we are supported by these sponsors or these endorsers or whatever you want.
I don't really know the endorsement side. Like Chris to you, your customers are audio engineer, so if you had like we're endorsed by. Big name one API gear, sled alert gear, sled alert, three auto engineers might respond better to that. Yeah, that's true. My clients don't give a shit about anything to do with gear or any of that sort of stuff, so they would care more about, they've seen me work with all of this specific heavy metal labels.
All that sort of stuff is much more relevant to them. And so having that right there potentially seconds before they're about to hand me [00:54:00] over thousands of dollars, that is a powerful time to remind them. Of how legitimate you are as the mixing engineer or as a mastering engineer. Well, and I've been thinking about this a lot because I had a weird experience a couple of weeks ago.
Bounce Butler is alive. He's out there. I've monetized it. People are using it all over the world. We've done something like, by the time this episode drops, it'll be something like 19,000 bounces that bounce Butler has managed for people. If you don't know what it's Butler is, it's an app I made. If you've a bunch of bounces to do at the end of the day and your studio, your hand in a bounce Butler, he does them all for you while you go do other stuff and he texts you when he's done.
It's awesome. We finally are at a spot where he's super stable and recharging money for him and I, I sent an email to the people that have signed up for bounce Butler and I got one. I've only ever gotten one like really. Hater response, and this guy got back to me and he was like a mixed engineer that had had a lot of success a long time ago, but not a whole lot lately.
And he was like, you're greedy. Like he called me greedy in an email. That [00:55:00] was his opener, basketball, there's a subscription. And I was like, Oh geez, what this guy's being really mean. Who is he? So I went on his website and he had all the companies that he's endorsed by on his website, which are all companies that offer subscription products as well.
And I was like, Oh man, that's hilarious. Oh, the irony. Oh, the irony, but I think he just wanted to get a free copy of bounce Butler, but he can get it for free and try it on the website@basketballer.com what's wrong with this guy? Brian. He should totally have just tried it for free on bounce Butler dotcom.
So what's your point here, Chris? That was an easy way for me to work in my product into our podcast without sounding too slutty. No, you had a point there. Oh yeah. On his website, he had all these logos of companies he's endorsed by, and I was like, Oh, that's actually kind of clever. Like having your endorsements listed on your webpage.
That does make him seem more legit. And I was like, Oh yeah, that's pretty clever. I should do that. But anyways, I thought it was kind of cute. If the companies you're endorsed by are irrelevant to your clients, [00:56:00] don't even bother. Exactly. These need to be gatekeepers. Like someone should look at these endorsements and say, wow, good enough for them.
Good enough for me. If it's like I'm endorsed by saran wrap, I'm endorsed by Kleenex. Nobody cares. Yeah. Well, I care, but all right, so let's move on to our final principle of influence and that is liking. Not like liking a post on Facebook, but the same word, liking. So the gist of this principle is people want to do business with those they like.
And I can't tell you how many times I've seen this play out in my life. Like I'll tell a quick story. I was in Phu Quoc, which is a small Island in Vietnam, Casa pronounce it, fuck walk, which I've many jokes with that I was in Phu Quoc with my wife. It's as a resort on the beach with an infinity pool overlooking the ocean.
Beautiful spot and the sail master starts talking to me. I see him out there. Where did you stay? The chincy resort? What? You don't know anything about that? Why would you even ask? I wasn't at the heartbreak [00:57:00] hotel. And I saw this guy wind surfing and I started up a conversation with him cause I was just curious about his experience surfing and turns out he was the sail master for the resort.
He's the guy that actually gives lessons for windsurfing. And the dude was so damn nice, so likable. I did not even intend to get a lesson, but I hired him to give me an hour of lessons for windsurfing, which turns out. I freaking love and it's a new hobby of mine now, and I'm laying looking up places in Nashville to wind surf, all that to say this dude had such a great personality, like such a likable Italian guy that I hired him.
And this is a powerful principle when it comes to us and closing deals, and this is a good time to talk, Chris, about how we can implement liking in our own studio. How can we be more likable. Yo. All right. Audio industry, hear me now we need to talk about this one. Somebody somewhere at some point told all of us that your [00:58:00] picture on your website should be you with no smile.
Oh dude. Okay. So one of the cringiness things I see constantly is all the old band dude photos, and James will find this. Just Google my children, my bride, which is like my old metal band. I used to play drums in. Go Google our band name, or James, I'll just put photos of this on our show notesPage@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash one 21 that's slash one two one that's the show notes page for this episode.
Every photo is so cringy. We're all trying to look so tough, so mean. Absolutely mean bargain it and like for whatever reason, I don't, I don't know. I have no idea, but I didn't. I don't think I smiled in a photo until my twenties like my mid twenties it's amazing. There is this weird thing where like we all think that we should have like a seventh grade wrestler photo.
If you've ever seen like how wrestlers in middle school pose for their school picture. It's like they put their hands behind their back so their chest puffs out. [00:59:00] And then they stick their Adam's Apple out as hard as they can, and then they don't smile and they're just like, Oh dude, that's every band photo from my history.
So the question here is, does that type of photo make people want to work with you more? No. No, definitely answer's no. No smile, man. This is one quick tip though. In your proposal, make sure whatever photo you have, there's always a section in there about you in their proposal about you or about your studio or about me is what it should say.
Make sure your photo, you're smiling, which is kind of hard to do. I mean, like in all honestly, none of my photos on my studio or stuff are smiling. It's a nice touch. You don't want to walk into a studio of this guy who's just. Completely sad and mad and not fun. Yeah. I didn't understand this when I launched my mastering company, but I remember thinking, I remember sitting at my desk and I was processing, like my mentor had told me like, man, you're really good at mastering.
You can do this for a living. Years ago it's like 2005 or 2006 and I remember thinking about that and I at one [01:00:00] point was like, I mean, I don't know if I could, but if I did, all I would have to do is be good at mastering and being nice and I probably would do pretty well. Just from my, where I sat, everybody was mean and I was like, if I'm just nice to people and friendly, I'm like the world's friendliest mastering engineer.
That's probably enough to be. Successful. So, yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about some strategy behind this too, because you can be a likable person and in no way does that come across in anything you do with the client. So one thing straight off the bat, we've talked about this before, when a quote request comes in or someone's interested in working with you, take the time, go out of your way and get on the phone with that person, with that potential client or a video chat better yet, or even better yet in person, or if you want to make it.
You can incorporate so many of these principles in one, get them in your studio for a tour and to talk about the details of the project. I don't give studio tours just because of the way I do things in my studio is my home and all this stuff. But if you have a studio, you can give a [01:01:00] tour, and I know people that are doing studio tours and they're closing like 90% of the people that come in.
Yeah, I hear that all the time. It really comes down to treat people the way you want to be treated. If you're friendly and you're kind and people like you, guess what? In our industry. Most people believe a lie, and that is you cannot be successful unless you have no emotion. That is not true. And if you display some emotion and are friendly, it is a competitive edge for you because people will think, well, we could record it.
That one really creepy guy's place or that one really framing guy's place, they're going to go with the friendly guy almost all the time. It's totally, I think, underrated. How powerful just kindness is when in doubt, in all aspects of this, whether it's early in the conversation or late in the proposal stage, if in every step of the way you were focused on the relationship, it is so much easier to be liked by that person.
If you focus on the relationship over the profits or over the getting the proposal signed, focus on the relationship and you will be liked by your [01:02:00] clients. Chris, anything else you want to do too before we wrap this up for the liking conversation as far as liking or does this entire thing as a whole, do you want to talk about?
Well, I think for a lot of people, especially on the liking one, again, I'm going to. Be shameless and self-promote here for my app. I think a lot of people are like, man, I don't have time for that. I don't know if Tom to build a relationship with people. I'm hustling. I'm making money. What I was shocked to find in my own business, I started out as a nice mastering engineer and then the business grew too much, too fast.
Then it got a little grumpy. And then I started to create systems, and once I had those systems in place, I had more time and I was astounded at how much more friendly I was to customers. I had time to talk to them on the phone, which in turn led to me closing way more projects. And the business grew a lot and I was blown away at how that impacted sales.
But then also as I had more time, because I had systemize my business, I also was happier while I was working. And guess what? That made me a better mastering engineer. I improved more [01:03:00] as a mastering engineer after I started to heavily systemize my business than in any other point in my career. And most of it was just emotional.
Yeah. It's like, it's interesting how being happy helps your business in so many ways. The least of which I've seen is when people are unhappy, they tend to lash out in, they're the type of people that tend to rant on social media, and when you rant on social media, all you do is ostracize those around you, and those people don't want to hire you for anything.
They see this grumpy guy who's like posting about how the world's coming to an end and everything sucks. Don't do that. And they're like, I don't want to hire. Tony. He's such a Debbie downer. Tony downer. Not hiring him for my mastering work. I'm hiring Chris purple shirt. Graham. Always happy, always telling terrible Pines.
That's the guy I went for my mastering. Well thanks man. But yeah, I think the big take home I would recommend here is if there are ways for you to save time that you can reinvest into relationships, that is a good thing for your business. So if you're spending a lot of time balancing, check out, bounce Butler, bounce bolo.com you can download it and it'll manage [01:04:00] your balances for you while you do other things like interact with humans.
You know, I think the other thing I got to give, obviously Brian a shout out to with file pass. If you're spending a lot of time in revisions, file pass is going to cut that in half at least. Have you seen any of my ads yet, Chris? We ramped up the apps for file pass. No, I haven't seen any file pass ads.
I'm pretty excited to, yeah, check those products out. Those are going to help you be happier and more productive and that's going to impact every facet of your business. So just one more reminder real quick. Listen to this episode. Again, we are such an advice buffet podcast and although these influence.
Principals are not necessarily nearby. Advice, advice, buffet, like these are all things that are proven to be things that are effective. You can make an a device buffet because you probably shouldn't try to implement all of these into your business, at least not all at once. Which of these makes sense for you?
Like for example, if you haven't worked with any labels or have any sort of like authority type indicators, don't add authority to your proposals or to your website. But if you have really good clients, add testimonials. If you have a lot of reviews, [01:05:00] add the reviews to your proposal and to your website.
These are all things you can pick and choose what makes sense for you. But at the end of the day, how can you improve the process for turning quotes into customers? And I think this episode has a lot in there for you that you can start to tinker around with that and start to improve your conversion rates.
Because again, we're trying to grease the funnel here, and this is the final point before, someone's don't have to hand over their hard earned dollars. And especially again, if you're using better proposals, they have a system in there. If they signed the proposal, it immediately pulls up the deposit for them to put their credit card or PayPal info in for the deposit, and you can take the deposit immediately.
So if you have not properly greased the funnel to that point and implemented some of these influence tactics into your proposal and the entire process, honestly. If you haven't done that, it's going to be a lot less people. They're going to pay that deposit right then and there, but the second you get that deposit, you can guarantee that the remaining balance is going to come out.
I've had maybe two or three clients in my entire life, not pay the remaining balance and lost their deposit. So it's very, very rare for that to happen. So again, these are things that should be done in your business [01:06:00] in some way, shape, or form. Just don't try to do all of them.
so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. If you made it this far in the . Episode. You should be convinced that a high class proposal is something that you want to at least look further into. If not, try out for yourself. If that is you, just go to high class proposal.com or the six figure home studio.com/proposal and you can see my high-class proposal inaction yourself and I have also partnered with better proposals to bring our audience.
A few bonuses that you cannot get anywhere else. If you want to find out more about that, just go to high class proposal.com here's why I'm so obsessed with better proposals. It's not just the high class proposal thing that is incredible in and of itself. It will help you turn more quotes to customers and it's a fantastic vehicle in which to implement all the stuff we talked about in the podcast today.
The reason I really love it though is because of [01:07:00] all of the cool things it enables you to do. Emma talk about four of those really quick. The first one is instant notifications. As soon as someone opens your proposal, or as soon as someone views your proposal, you get an email. You also get a full history.
Of everyone that's viewed your proposal, how long they viewed each page so you'll know exactly when you need to follow up. The second awesome thing that allows you to do is live chat with people as they are reading your proposal. So you get an instant notification in email. It allows you to go and check your live chat because you can chat with them as they're reading their proposal to ask them if they have any questions or they can initiate a live chat with you.
On the proposal and that message would go directly to your phone so you can live chat with them if they have any questions as they're going through your proposal. The third thing they love about better proposals is that it allows you, once they have signed the proposal to actually take the deposit immediately, they've read through your proposal.
They love it, they've signed it. They can actually pay the deposit via PayPal or credit card, or they even [01:08:00] have a bank transfer option and you don't have to go off and send them a invoice later and then have to chase them down and follow it up until they actually pay the invoice. And the fourth thing, and the final thing that I'm going to talk about in this is, the reason I love better proposal so much is all these things have.
Only your custom branding on it. You can change the URL where it's your studio's URL. You can put your logo everywhere. All the emails have your branding in it. It is completely, as they call, white labeled. All the better proposals. Branding can be removed and that just adds to the professional nature of the high class proposal.
So if you want to check this out, I highly encourage you to go right now if you've ever considered this. Um, I have a few bonuses that will expire by March 15th. I've partnered with better proposals for a few things that you cannot get anywhere else. So if you want those, it's going to high-class proposal.com for more information about those and take advantage of it before that expires, submitted this far into the episode.
You're my favorite person. Until next time. Thank you so much for listening and happy hustling. [01:09:00]