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What’s up everyone? Welcome back to another brand new episode of electronic dance money. I’m your host Cristian besito. And we’re pretty much just going to get right into it today. I mean, not a whole lot is going on with me at the moment. Just working a bunch trying to get you guys good episodes. Good guests. I’m currently working on last episode was awesome. I really hope you guys enjoyed it. That conversation with Dennis was incredible. If you guys don’t know, who knows no face records is go look them up on Spotify. Look at who they’re releasing. look them up on beatport. They have some of the biggest artists in the whole world getting released on that label. And they continue to sign artists who are really I mean, they’re nobody
A lot of the times, and I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s pretty awesome that a label that has so much influence and power is actually wanting to give back to the community and lift up all the smaller artists. Today we’re getting more into the business side of the industry. And this episode’s gonna be a little bit more focused on those of you who are wanting to actually run a legit business, whether that’s mixing and mastering,
selling sound packs, doing lessons, vocal processing, whatever it is, this is gonna be geared towards you. As the title says, this is a piece of software that I mean, the most successful businesses use if you want to be a successful business. This is software that you’re going to be using every single day. There’s free versions of it, there’s not free versions of it. You can kind of decide what you like, what you don’t like which ones you like and which ones you don’t
Like, but regardless, I’ve also been thinking of how you guys as producers could also use this piece of software, because there is a use for it as producers, there’s not as much of a value to it. If you’re not running a business and you’re just doing production, you’re just releasing tracks. But regardless, there is still a use for it. So where are we talking about today? We are talking about CRM. CRM stands for customer relationship management. Now customer relationship management software is basically what the title says it’s, it’s a piece of software you use, you connect your email to it and you can track every one of your contacts or leads that comes in through your email. You can put them in different categories of what type of lead they are, whether they’re cold lead, hot lead, qualified, there.
Interested in your services, you can completely take them down the chain of what type of lead they are. You can track everything on their profile, add in notes of conversations you’ve had, you can add in call logs of conversations you’ve had, it logs every single email response that you guys have gone through. So any email you’ve sent any email they’ve sent to you, it tracks that all within this one piece of software, where you can look up let’s say you have a client or customer, you can look them up in here. And you can see everything you guys have ever talked about all the notes you have on this person, where they’re currently at in the pipeline as a lead. It is single handedly one of the most important aspects to running a business that you could possibly have. And it will make you so much money in return.
However, if you’re pretty new, if you don’t have any clients if you’re not really running that big of a business
It might be too much of a hassle to actually get involved with a CRM. For me, my biggest use for a CRM is just the follow up process that is involved with it. Any one of my clients that comes in through my doors, any lead that comes in through my doors, any type of contact information where I’m talking to someone, like I said, I can put notes on that person have the conversations we’ve had the personal conversations we’ve had.
And then I can set up follow ups as well. So let’s say for me, again, I do mixing mastering so let’s say I have a client, a potential client that comes in I’ve got a lead, and they’re talking about hiring, hiring me for my services, they’re working on EP, they think there’ll be ready in two or three months. Well, I can set up a follow up, I can, you know, talk to them within my CRM be like okay, yeah, that sounds awesome. This is what the process looks like. Okay, you’re going to take this on. All right. I’ll follow up with you in a month or two, and I can see
Set up a follow up for specific date specific time, I’ll get a note of notification that I have to follow up with this person. And then I can follow up with them and work on staying Top of Mind and making sure that they still want to work with me.
If you’re getting into the mixing, mastering realm, doing that service type work or really any service type work, the follow ups are the biggest part about making money, you will not make money if unless you follow up. This is the same case as producers, sometimes with record labels. If you’re trying to get a track signed to a record label, they don’t respond to you and you don’t know if they’re, they’re looking at anything you’re sending or you’re trying to collaborate with someone or you want to add them to your promo list you need to follow up. The follow up is what’s going to get them to respond to you and give you an answer. So if you aren’t following up, you’re not going to stay top of mind you’re not gonna win that lead. It’s the same case for me I have to follow up. Sometimes it takes three four or five or even
Six times I have to follow up over four or five month period before they say, Yeah, let’s do it. And half of the time, they don’t even respond to those.
But I will tell you most of the time, they’re appreciative that I kept following up because a lot of people are forgetful. And that’s kind of the key component of having a CRM is the fact that it lets you not forget about money you’re leaving out on the table. One of the coolest parts about CRM is the fact that you can.
One of the coolest parts about CRM is the fact that it will tell you when someone has opened up your email. This is single handedly one of the best things ever because your email won’t tell you if someone’s open something up. So if you’re a producer listening to this right now, hopefully you’re on the same wavelength as I am when I’m thinking about how a CRM can be useful for a producer. This is my thought process for using a CRM as a
producer.
Let’s say you have a track that you’re wanting to get signed to a specific label. Maybe you send the track to 234 labels, you can send you can you can set up these record labels in your CRM, add them as contacts, add them as potential leads, put all their contact information in there, send them an email. With your demo through your CRM, you can see when they open up that email. Some of you might not have SoundCloud Pro, so you can’t see if they played your SoundCloud link. Maybe you send them a Dropbox link, or whatever they require you to send them. The point is you can see exactly if they’ve opened up your email how many times they’ve opened up your email, and you might be able to get an idea if they’re interested. And if they haven’t emailed you. In weeks, they haven’t responded but they open the email you can follow up with them. You can set up reminders to say I need to follow up with this record, label and move on from
They’re not only that, but if you set up these record labels in your CRM, you and you later on in six months or maybe even a year, you have another track that you think might fit for this record label, you can go back to your, your entire chat log that you’ve had with this record label. And you can decide, well, is it better than the track that I sent before? Because you don’t sometimes do you might get to a point where you’re like, I know I sent a track to that record label but I don’t remember what track it was. You can go back through your records and say, Okay, I sent this track now. Now you can compare the current your current track to that old one, NC cross reference them What do they sound like?
One of the biggest things to when you’re following up with these record labels, and you get a response where they say no, it doesn’t work is to just like you would in in a job interview. You ask them well, why? What could I be? What disqualified me What can I do better to get the tracks signed?
Or get a tract sign in the future? What are you looking for? Exactly? And sometimes they’ll be able to give you a straight answer. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes it’s just an answer, it doesn’t feel right for this label. And that might just be more of a stylistic opinion than anything else. But I mean, you can quickly see how a CRM can actually be very useful to you as a producer, especially when you’re sending out a bunch of demos to a handful of different record labels. You can do the same thing if you’re either wanting to get signed up on a record labels promo list or you’re trying to get another artist signed up on your promo list. You can see when they open up your email, if they made in you know, sometimes, I know you guys have done this, I’ve certainly done this. You open up an email that you want to respond to but you forget about it, you you don’t do it in that moment, a day goes by it gets lost and drown out throughout all the other emails and they forget and that happens with a lot of artists.
Sometimes they need to follow up. Sometimes they need four or five follow ups for them to finally respond and say Yes, okay, I’m down. The point is with the CRM, you can set these reminders for yourself to check back and see if they need to be added if they’ve responded if you need to respond and follow up. So CRM software can actually be used as a normal producer as well, not just a business. But if you’re running a business, this is like number one thing you should be implementing a lot of the a lot of the CRM have, like two way mail, interception. So basically, if you send an email from Gmail, it’ll get logged in your CRM and vice versa. If someone sends an email to your Gmail account, it’ll get logged in your CRM as well. So you’ll have like two points of entry where the email is going through. Some of them don’t have that like I know HubSpot is a free one. And they and I used to use HubSpot, and it sucks.
Because nothing would get tracked unless I was logged in to hubs like I would have to log into HubSpot through a separate like extension. And then I’d have to get in my gmail account, then I can start sending emails and I can log everything in there. But I actually moved over to a different CRM that I’m paying for, which is fresh sales. Fresh sales is amazing, I think. I think they have a free version of it. But you don’t get all of some of the fancy bells and whistles with it. But they’re, they’re free. I mean, it’s a two way system. So everything’s getting tracked, no matter where it’s going through. And I pretty much stay with just within my CRM, I open up my Gmail to look up and look at any updates I might have. But most of everything gets just immediately logged and tracked into my actual CRM. And I mean it lays out so many different
aspects that can just
transform the way you communicate with people. If you’re running a service based business, you need to have good communication. This is like growing up as an adult and being in the business world, this is how you get to that point is having good communication skills and making sure you’re on top of these things. Because unless you are just, unless you have the crew, I mean, the memory of a genius where you can, I mean, memorize anything at any given time. You’re not going to be able to manage the amount of contacts you’re going to be going through, especially once you start seeing any sort of remote success. Now what’s really cool about some of these CRMs is they actually have you can actually integrate them with your mailing list software. So like if you’re using MailChimp, anyone who gets added on to your email list, they’ll get added into
your CRM. And not only that is you can tag them as a subscribed, contact or lead in your CRM. And then you could do mass emails from your CRM that won’t get logged as spam. They’ll get logged as being from an email list. And so you can do mass emails. Now, one of the cool things too is if you are, let’s say you’re a mixing or mastering service based business, let’s say you do free test masters or you do free mix tests, you can track all of all those emails in your CRM who’s responding who’s not responded. So if you have a ton of leads, or you sent out test samples, you can
log those in your CRM and do a complete report of who has not responded that you’ve sent out a test sample. Right? That right there is so good
value in and of itself, you and then you can click all those and you can send one email to all them and say, Hey, I noticed you haven’t responded in regards to your test sample. And you have no idea how many people that you can get just from that, who would immediately ask to hire you for your services. It’s the same thing. If you’re a producer, and you want to get people on your promo list, if you see a bunch of people who haven’t responded, you can do one big email that won’t get marked as spam. And ask them if they want to be added to the promo list or send demos to other artists as well. You can organize the CRM in such a way where you have your record labels on one
tag, and you’ve got producers on another tag. So if you have a new track coming out and they’re not on your promo list, you can still send them that track or ask send them the track like we talked about in the promo list episode, send them the track and ask if they want to be added to the promo list.
And have all of your communication all in one spot, insanely useful. You have no idea what this software can actually do for you and being an actual adult in the business world. And that’s that’s what we want to be.
So what are some soft what’s some CRM software that you can get into? there’s a there’s a ton of them if you just Google CRM software you’re gonna get five ads six ad cow pop up for different ones closed.io HubSpot, fresh sales, Zendesk Monday, keep, there’s a whole bunch of different
CRM that you can use. Now, obviously, for a lot of you, you’re probably going to be needing to use a free version. Like I said, fresh sales has a free version. Fresh sales is really good. HubSpot has a free one. It’s
not it’s not terrible. It’s just
It can be a pain to use to be to, you either have to log into that extension every time you get into your email or you just flat out log into HubSpot every single time and just work out of HubSpot. After you integrate your email whether that’s Gmail or Yahoo. Outlook you with CRM, you have to integrate your email account with those. It’s super easy to do. But I know Zendesk has a free I think they have a free version close.io I know they do not have a free version. And they are somewhat pricey, but there’s a lot of really cool stuff. Pipe drive doesn’t have a free version. But pipe drive is really cool because if you are a business and you’re taking someone through, like from a cold lead over to a lead that you’ve went over and they’ve actually paid for something you can, you can click and drag them over into different accounts in different stages and set up reminders for those stages for follow ups. Like if you need if they’re you’re about
To win them as a lead, you might want to follow up more consistently and more aggressively rather than when they’re cold lead, and they’re just not ready yet. I know fresh sales has the same process too. You can set up deals like what which point in the deal, are they and you can customize that entirely. It. It’s super, super useful. I know Salesforce is another really big CRM, I’m not sure if they’re, if they have a free version or not. But you know, if you’re wanting to get with go with a free version, I think fresh sales would be a good one. I think they have like a 21 or 20 day free trial as well. So you can check out some of the extra features. And then after that, it’s something like, I don’t know, 10 or $12 a month. If you’re actually doing business stuff with it. It would be it would be useful. For producers maybe not so much maybe HubSpot is just a good one to use for you. But the point is, is if you’re wanting to have a good follow up system, something you can sync your calendar to you
See how busy your you’re gonna be in like, if there’s someone you’re trying to integrate, or maybe you’re doing a collaboration with someone. That’s another huge reason why a CRM could be so useful you for you producers, just being able to see your entire conversation trading for collaboration all in one thing, rather than scattered throughout Facebook Messenger text so you can set up follow ups, you can set up goals, you can set up meetings, for when you’re actually going to work on something together. Whatever it is that you want to set up, you can set up a whole deals process for where you’re at in a collaboration and visualize where you’re going, what the what the next step is. Now you can move forward. We talked about this in the whole
track promotion episode and also getting more streams
is setting up a promo plan. This is something you could do in your CRM where you could set especially if you have a collaboration, you can set up a whole
pipeline of what the promo plan is looking like what you need to do. And you can move the marker from point A to point B,
and have this setup. So you can look in your CRM and be like, okay, where am I at in the promo plan right now? What’s the next step, you can visualize everything which can be so damn powerful for you.
You know, I know with fresh sales, you can integrate a ton of different apps that can help you out with workflow management and visualization.
With the types of with what we’re talking about right now with like the promo plan and setting up pipe drives.
We’re getting kind of rambley here, but the point is, is check out some CRMs I think they can be super useful if you figure out how to use them in a different way than normal for producers that can be very, very valuable. And let me know if you do think of other ways that can
that it could transform the way you actually are talking to people as a producer. You know, one thing I actually didn’t mention is that you could do this if you’re trying to set up some sort of little tour or you’re, you’re emailing promoters, that’s a huge one. If you’re emailing promoters, you can set them up in your CRM software, what type of lead they are, because that is a lead. Think of think of the promoter as a client you’re trying to get you’re trying to win them over you can be have their entire conversation, they’re what you’ve asked for, which is important to in what you’re offering them that enough. two very important things when you’re trying to get a show is how are you providing value and and are you asking too much before you’ve provided enough value? Are they a cold lead? Are they hot? are they about to book you for show, are they not? You could set this up with different venues outside of the state are outside of your state outside your city within your city? in your local scene. You can use this
In so many damn different ways that it would blow your mind. All you need to do is think of the people that you talk to as a producer, and how you interact with them. And how that could be integrated with a CRM.
You’re talking to venue owners, you’re talking to promoters, you should have them in the CRM, you should be setting up follow up, you should be putting them in your pipelines to see where they’re out. Are they a cold lead? Are they more qualified now? Are they interested? Are you about to win them over as lead aka you’re about to get booked for a show.
You can do this with record labels. You can do this with other producers that you’re collaborating with producers you want to add to your promo list venue owners, promoters. There’s a whole vocalists there’s a whole lot of different ways you can actually implement a CRM as a producer, they’ll save you time money, and make your overall relationships with these people so much more professional and so much better.
That’s pretty much it guys go ahead and head over to Envious audio.com slash Episode 27 to check out the show notes. Again, if you want to get included into this mixing and mastering lesson giveaway, it’s a value of three over $300. This mech mixing and mastering lesson with me is valued at over $300. All you have to do is leave a review over at Apple podcasts and I will select a winner next month that’s coming up actually, it’s like probably doing it sometime in July. But I’ll be announcing the winner on here all you have to do, again just leave a useful review. You can check out there that link is in the episode show notes and we use audio.com slash Episode 27 join the Facebook community electronic dance money community. That’s pretty much it. Thank you guys so much. I’ll see you next time. Take care