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My new website, marymckitrick.com, has launched!

Marcia Yudkin gets it right – again!

When someone contacts me about my voiceover services and immediately focusses on price, I've learned to take a step back. It has been my experience that there’s an inverse correlation between the price they want to pay and the degree to which they will turn out to be a pain in the neck. So when I received Marcia Yudkin’s weekly Marketing Minute this morning that addressed this very issue, I was amazed at how well she nailed the problem and was very interested to read that there are actually statistics available about it. If you’re a voice actor or a business person of any kind, you owe it to yourself to walk away from this kind of client. With permission, I’m reprinting Marcia’s words verbatim – and I will be checking out Holden & Burton’s book!

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According to Reed Holden and Mark Burton, authors of Pricing With Confidence, 79% of business-to-business companies serve any customer they can get.

What's wrong with that? Typically, they explain, 20 percent of the customers account for 225 percent of the profit, with 80 percent causing the firm to lose money. And that statistic doesn't take into account the extent to which the unprofitable customers increase your worry wrinkles and gray hairs.

Being choosy about customers benefits both the bottom line and your sanity. Consider sending away those who:

* Always press you for discounts

* Need or demand an exorbitant amount of handholding

* Previously requested refunds

* Are unpleasant to deal with, nitpicky, abusive, frenzied, uncooperative or irrational

* Threaten to go to the competition

* Never pay on time

* Represent where your company used to be rather than where it is going

"It's simply better for you that unprofitable customers are served by your competition," say Holden and Burton.

After shedding the undesirables, develop a clear picture of who you want as clients and pursue those. You'll then have the positive energy needed to land them!

From The Marketing Minute, 18 February 2009, by Marcia Yudkin. Reprinted with permission.

Snark: It’s Mean, it’s Personal, and it’s Ruining Our Conversation

This is the title of a new book by David Denby, New York Times film critic. I became aware of it when an interview with Denby was aired on Morning Edition on NPR this week. Although the book doesn’t get stellar reader reviews on Amazon, his point got my attention – that there is a lot of mean-spirited, anonymous prose on the internet these days, posing as meaningful journalism. His thesis is well summarised in a [more favorable] review in the Los Angeles Times.

The interview got my attention because I was recently the target of a somewhat oblique snark attack myself. I received an email from an anonymous person asking if I had done any voice-over work for a certain radio station. I wrote back that I hadn’t yet, and I asked the identity of the emailer. He/she wrote back with only a link to a blog post he or she had written (anonymously). I read the post, which was about the person who reads the sponsors’ ads on this public radio station, and how robotic she sounds and how much the blogger hates this voice and wishes he/she knew who it was. A lot of commenters piled on to agree. Then one of them piped up, “I watched Forgotten Ellis Island this week and there was a voice in it that sounded just like that woman. Mary McKitrick’s name was in the credits – maybe it’s her voice on that radio station.” The blogger agreed that it might be, and then came back later with “No, I spoke to Mary McKitrick, it’s not her”.

By “spoke to”, this blogger meant that he or she had emailed me under cover of anonymity and then went back to his/her audience to report.

Of course, it isn’t worth a minute of my time to lament having my work on Forgotten Ellis Island compared to the voice of an announcerbot, but I admit it took my breath away. I mentioned the incident to some of my voice-over colleagues and was gratified that a number of them raced to the schoolyard and confronted the bullies – rather relentlessly actually – to the point that the blogger finally pulled the plug and ceased accepting comments. I thought it was amusing that they allowed so many mean comments but couldn’t handle the ones that sang my praises (admittedly, my colleagues were kind of rough on the anonymous blogger :).

In an earlier life, I was a biologist, and writing reviews of other people’s work was a constant part of my life. Book reviews, reviews of articles that had been submitted for publication, reviews of grant proposals. In the case of grant proposals and some of the reviews for journals, anonymity was required. In those cases, I always wrote as if I were going to sign my name, and in cases where a signature was allowed, I always added mine. I have never allowed the cloak of anonymity to affect my writing, never wrote anything in those reviews that I wouldn’t have said to the person’s face, and I don’t understand people who hide behind that cloak. I think David Denby is right – it ruins conversations and it’s spoiling the internet.

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly – what in the world has happened to people’s manners?

Note: if you'd like to hear one of the passages I read for the documentary, Forgotten Ellis Island, go to the shockwave Flash part of the FEI website, click on Patient Stories, and click on the right arrow twice to get to the story about Ormond McDermott.

Be Great

This video of a Thai coffee vendor was displayed at the Serious Eats blog today. It reminded me that, no matter what you do for a living, you can be great if you put in your time to become so.

MCM on PBS tonight!!

A last minute reminder: check your local listings for the more-or-less national broadcast premiere of Forgotten Ellis Island, airing tonight in most markets at 10 pm on PBS. The film was directed by Lorie Conway, narrated by Elliott Gould, and has historical voices by Mary McKitrick (that's me!) as well as Bruce Miles, Fred Keeler and Drew Hadwal.

Whether or not your family has a history at Ellis Island, I think you'll be fascinated by this beautiful and moving film.

MCM Voices' Guide to Voice-over Postcard Marketing

This post has a grand title, doesn’t it? There are many people who know much more about voice-over postcard mailing than I do – Anthony Mendez is one of them and he has been of tremendous help to me over the years - thank-you my friend!! But this here is my guide, because I’ve just concluded a process that took me a good 6 weeks, which tells you that I can take any simple project and turn it into an all-absorbing, life-sucking event. Maybe I can save you some time by relating how I approached this.

Part I: The reason. The purpose of this postcard mailing extravaganza is to announce to clients, would-be clients and agents the national broadcast premiere of a documentary that features my voice. The broadcast is February 2nd, and although the point of the mailing is not so much to get people to watch it as it is to make them aware of it, I still wanted this card to arrive in time to give them the option. So Part I is to have something worth announcing. If you have such an annoucement to make, a postcard is a great way to do it. It is eye-catching but not disturbing to a busy person, and the busier a person is, the more likely it is that you want to work with them. Plus they can keep it propped on their desk indefinitely to remind them of your existence, which a phone call or an email might be less likely to achieve for the long term.

Part II. Postcard design. I chose VistaPrint for this mailing extravaganza, and their templates steered the mechanical process. See my earlier post about this, and Anthony’s before it. Knowing the format the mailing list itself needed to take affected my choices in editing my database, so I do recommend choosing the vendor early in the process. I was lucky to have a graphic already available for the front of the card. The back was simple: Announce the event, making it sound as important and MCM-centric as possible, and add a list of recent impressive clients along with my contact information. Simple, but requiring considerable thought and care in choosing words. Make every word count!

Part III. The mailing list. I’m not talking mechanics, like what format does the list take and what do you do with it. Rather, who are the recipients? I have a database of 3500 but not all of those are active contacts and of the active ones, not all will get a card for various reasons. I need to maximise my postcard mailing dollars because a huge mailing can run into big money. So how do I narrow down the list?

My database represents 4 years of painstaking marketing. Every one of the names on the list was researched with considerable care, but especially at the beginning of my voice-over career this research was not necessarily done with the optimal criteria for identifying ideal clients. And of course, the definition of ideal is going to be different for a beginning voice talent and for an experienced one, and for every individual voice actor, and one’s goals naturally evolve with experience. My complete database includes companies that looked promising according to their websites, but actually don’t do a lot of work that requires voice-over, all the way through high-end production companies that use voice-over every day. It includes companies that produce ads for a few small local businesses and companies that write and produce national commercials. The process of going through this list has taught me a lot about the kind of company I want to be doing business with in the future and will greatly affect the kind of companies I contact from now on. Simply by focussing on return-on-investment for a postcard mailing, I was compelled to narrow the list to a select number of names, and to refine my criteria for choosing potential clients in the future. This has had a significant impact on my business plan! I set a goal of 600 for the mailing, and ended up with 636, including agents. Not too bad.

In the process of culling, I was also visiting each company’s website at least once in order to review the business and consider the likelihood that we would ever work together. This was also the time to check the contact information and identify or re-identify the best person to receive a postcard and to make sure the mailing address was current. LinkedIn was a huge help here. Many was the time I searched a name in LinkedIn to confirm that the person was still with the company and to see if their title was the same. This entire review process took about a month and a half of intensive work but future postcard mailings should be incomparably easier thanks to this investment of time (and the ease of retrieving data and notes from my beloved Time & Chaos).

Part IV. The mailing. Once the mailing list was complete, the rest of this process rushed to its denouement with dizzying velocity. I double-checked my postcard design (who am I kidding? It was more like the 20th time I had checked the design as uploaded to VistaPrint!), and I uploaded my mailing list. That upload was swift; then VistaPrint mercilessly and unfeelingly announced that about 30 of my entries had invalid addresses and the US Postal Service would not deliver to them, beg them as I might. I checked each one, and in all but 8 cases I found that indeed, there was something wrong and I was able to make the correction. The other 8 I saved to their own spreadsheet for further examination and then deleted them from the uploaded master list. I got all the way to checkout, looked at the grand total dollar figure, and then had a clever idea. I thought, I will just Google “VistaPrint discount codes”and within a few minutes I had reduced my grand total dollar figure by $127! Hooray!! I proceeded to check-out, clicked Submit and the deed was done. I then immediately was shown an offer to have an order of 50 postcards sent to me for a reduced price with no charge for shipping, which I immediately accepted because I knew I was going to think of friends and relatives and maybe a few more potential clients to whom I simply had to mail a card.

There you have it. Perhaps in a few months I will report on the results of this campaign, or maybe I will be under my bed, wailing, refusing nutrition and inconsolable at the lack of results, but for now I'm elated to have finished this enlightening process and full of hope for the future. Comments and stories of your own experiences welcomed!

Note: Help & advice from Marice Tobias, Anthony Mendez and Elaine Singer is gratefully acknowledged.

Changing Business Model for Hiring Voice-over?

I’ve just come from the “Meet and Eat” breakfast hosted by my Chamber of Commerce, held each December in the ballroom at the beautiful Delaney House. The program this morning was a round-table discussion about the economy and how it has affected our businesses. At my table were a business consultant, a bank executive, a photographer, two insurance company employees and an online advertising exec. As I listened to each speak about their respective situations, I heard less about negative impact and more about creativity – how their businesses are adjusting and rolling with the punches. It has always struck me how resilient humans are, and how the capacity for hope and optimism seems boundless, even in troubled times.

Something of great interest to me emerged before the discussion got started – the gentleman on my right was marketing director for an insurance company and he told me that they used to hire production companies exclusively when they needed broadcast advertising. Now, to save money, they are doing their own copywriting and hiring vendors themselves, at least for some of their productions.

When I first started in voice-over 4 years ago I targeted ad agencies and production companies in my initial marketing efforts, but also reached out directly to businesses. It became apparent quite quickly that the latter was not a good use of my time because businesses usually hired production companies or ad agencies. I still find this to be true, but my breakfast companion made me sit up and think about the possibility of a changing model. If this became a trend, it would certainly change the way voice-over artists market their services. My guess is that it would not be an overwhelming trend without some decline in quality of the work and that it would probably be limited to larger companies that might have more breadth of talent than a smaller business with a smaller number of employees. I can imagine it being a textbook example of being "penny wise and pound foolish" - you pay less for the work and suffer the consequences. If larger businesses are considering these kinds of changes, however, this could create more opportunity for voice artists who offer copywriting and other production services along with voice-over.

Are other voice-over artists seeing any of this happening? Are you being contacted directly by businesses? Comments welcome!

Voice-over Postcard Mailing Hack

I want to send a postcard to all my clients and other business contacts to alert them to a special broadcast for which I provided voice-over. On February 2nd, 2009 at 10 pm, PBS will broadcast Forgotten Ellis Island, a beautiful documentary about the Immigrant Hospital at Ellis Island. The documentary is narrated by Elliott Gould, and I provided historical voices as did 3 male colleagues. Naturally, I want to make sure that my clients have the opportunity to see this – the film has very broad appeal but of course, more importantly, I want them to hear how great I sound!

So, what’s the most efficient way to make this mailing happen? I have mailed postcards to clients before. I had them printed at a local shop, and then addressed them by hand because I thought a personal touch was important. A few hundred postcards. This is not happening again. As soon as I found out the air date for Forgotten Ellis Island, I knew it was a job for VistaPrint, where you can design your postcard, upload a mailing list and have your cards sent out for you.. I thought it was still going to be quite an ordeal, because I have a contact database of 3,489 companies. Not all of these will get a postcard – some of these companies have gone out of business, some stopped using voice-over, some never did. I still keep them in my database so I can maintain a history of my communications with them. I use Time & Chaos software to manage all this information.

It turns out to be incredibly simple. I finally took a few minutes to look into the process of turning my Time & Chaos database into a mailing list in VistaPrint-ready format, and it actually took mere seconds to get the list. T&C will almost instantly generate a report containing any data fields desired, and you can export the report into an Excel spreadsheet that can be then be uploaded to VistaPrint. What I thought was going to take weeks to accomplish will get done in less than a day.

The design process was not quite so straightforward for me. For the front of the card I uploaded a graphic sent to me by Lorie Conway, the filmmaker for Forgotten Ellis Island, after getting her permission to use it for this purpose. For the back, I took advantage of LazyMan Anthony Mendez’ offer of a design template (thanks Anthony!). It came to me as a psd file and opened automatically in Macromedia Fireworks (it will open in whatever appropriate editing program you use for such things). I designed the card and uploaded my front and back designs to the VistaPrint website and that’s when my troubles began. The front design is vertical, and my back design is horizontal. VistaPrint put the front design into vertical format, and then it wanted the back to be vertical as well. Somehow I got the design rotated but it didn’t look right. Finally I downloaded a template for Oversized Vertical Postcards and redesigned the back of my postcard and got it uploaded. I then called Customer Support to make sure the recipients’ names were going to print in the right place, and was told that VistaPrint’s mailing service doesn’t support the vertical format. Crikey! So now the front design has been rotated so that I have a design that VistaPrint classifies as horizontal, and I’m back to my original horizontal design for the back. Note well: if you want VistaPrint to do the mailing for you, your designs must be horizontal. If you find anything on their website that tells you this, let me know!

The postcard is now ready to go. All that remains is to edit that big Excel mailing list of mine and upload it to VistaPrint. It will not exactly be cheap, but there is no way I could send out a mailing of this magnitude on my own and still keep what’s left of my sanity. Nor would I be able to look my friend LazyMan Anthony Mendez in the eye and tell him I addressed and stamped that many postcards myself! :)