Generating deal flow

- Let's talk about winning deals, pitching clients, when you don't have an agent or manager. When you have one of those, things are a lot easier, you have a partner who can help you navigate the business side of things and source deals for you. But assuming you don't, how can you go about professionally approaching brands cold? Is there a way to do that? Is it even possible to do that? - A hundred percent. You know, I am a huge fan of cold pitching brands for several reasons. You know, first of all, if you learn how to properly craft your pitches, the types of partnerships that you can forge are extremely lucrative. And if you establish direct relationships with brands rather than intermediaries, it's just a much higher chance that you're going to be able to forge longer term partnerships because you don't want to have all these gatekeepers between you and the brand, it's going to be a major obstacle for you to kind of accomplish that. I have a very specific pitching methodology that I teach in my course called the ROPE method. And R stands for relevant to a campaign that the brand is actually already working on. O is for organic, meaning that you can tie your pitch back to organic content that you've already posted. P is persistent, where you're actually following up with the brand regularly about your pitch, even if they're not responding to you. And E is easy to execute when they actually respond and say, yes, let's do this. And so when you start crafting your pitches with this mindset, because what do most creators do? They reach out to a brand and, you know, DM 'em on Instagram or reach out to their press email on the brand's website or find someone on LinkedIn and they say, hey, I love your brand, I'd love to collaborate. Like, is that interesting in any way? No. Is that making the brand feel special in any way? What you're actually doing is you're telling the brand, hey, you do all the work, ball's in your court, think up a way in which we can collaborate. Is that really what you want to say to the brand? No. You want to say, hey I have loved your brand for two years. Here's a post where I talked about your brand two weeks ago. It's actually one little kind of next level strategy that I teach is like, hey, you should actually, in your organic content strategy, when you're planning out what you're going to post for the next month, you actually pre-plan the content that you're going to make that you can actually utilize in your pitches. So you say, hey, I'm going to be pitching Samsung or I'm going to be pitching Walmart, or this local Philly cheese steak shop or whatever in my city. And I'm going to go eat there, I'm going to post about it on my TikTok and then when I pitch the brand next week I'm going to include that, right? So it requires being a little bit more strategic about the content that you're posting normally on your platforms because how much more compelling is it when the brand sees that, they're like, oh my gosh, this person is an authentic fan of our product or our business or our software. We actually want to like, think about this partnership in a little bit more detail versus the 10 other creators that are trying to pitch them for a deal, oh, I love you, like, let's collaborate. Right, so it really does require being more strategic because what happens is that when you're not strategic and you do a little smattering of pitching here and there, you get discouraged as a creator because you think, ah, cold pitching doesn't work because your pitches suck. I'm sorry to say it, that's why they're not working. But when you are very intentional, you spend a little bit more time, you're strategic about the things that you're posting organically on your feed and you're using those in your pitches, your response rates are going to skyrocket. I guarantee it. I have had creators who have made tens of thousands of dollars that went through my course like doing this methodology because they're just more thoughtful about how they're crafting these things. - I absolutely love that tip about thinking a few steps ahead, creating some content today that you can then share with the brand when you pitch them two weeks from now. Hey, look, I'm already doing this organically. Look how many views I got. Look how much engagement there is. You got to make it hard for someone to say no when you're cold pitching and that applies across the spectrum. You want to really get to that question of why. Why should they choose you? And it's part of your ROPE acronym, make it easy. Those are just people working on the other side, at the agencies or at the brands. If you can make their job easy, they're going to want to work with you. If you tick every other box and it's all kind of, set up for them, it basically becomes a why not. - The other thing too, I think a lot of it comes down to, look, I understand that if you've never reached out to a brand, it might be hard to muster the courage or the confidence to do that, right? Or maybe you're concerned that the brand won't think that your platform or your portfolio is good enough or whatever, right? But in my experience, a lot of that has to do with imposter syndrome, right? What you do is valuable. The content that you create is valuable and there are brands out there who will agree. - Yeah and it comes down to you being very thoughtful about who you're approaching. Are you a good fit for them? And you know yourself better than anybody else does. So you know, what are you already using? What products are you already talking about organically? What products are maybe featured in your videos incidentally, that people are seeing and you're giving impressions to that brand for free already. Thinking strategically, being thoughtful about who you're reaching out to. Obviously if you're a beauty influencer and you reach out to a video game studio, that probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So it's about finding that lane first, which we talked about, and then really knowing that lane and knowing the players in that lane who are potential sponsors for you.