Stop Selling Your Story
Nobody hires you because of who you are. They hire you because of what you noticed about them.
Here's a pitch I still see constantly, and one I used to send myself.
"Hello, I am Bren. I am an experienced podcast producer who is used to delivering on time and using my own initiative. I am an award winning producer who has worked with big brands like RTE, BBC and MTV."
Every word of that is true, and none of it gets you picked. A story about who you are asks a stranger to trust you before you've given them a reason to. What actually gets read is proof that you already understand their exact situation. So here's what that looks like, not as theory, as the actual lines.
Find the thing you actually share
"What part of Ireland are you in? I'm based in Dublin myself."
"I noticed you're recording out of Cork. I edited a series based there last year."
"I saw you're on Riverside. That's what I edit in day to day, so there's no learning curve on my end."
None of these are small talk. Each one gives the client a reason to keep reading the next line.
Common ground gets you noticed. What keeps them reading is proof you've solved their exact problem before, not just something adjacent to it.
Point your experience at their situation, not your career
"I've worked on podcasts exactly like this before. Here's a similar two host interview show I cut last year [link a sample]."
"You mentioned you're trying to get clips out faster. I ran into the same bottleneck with a client last year. Here's how we fixed it."
"I also came from a broadcast background before going freelance, so I understand why you want this polished rather than raw."
This only works if it points straight at something they actually said. A general highlight reel of your career is just the awards pitch in a different outfit.
Sometimes the strongest proof isn't a story at all. It's an opinion.
Show them you actually looked
"I had a listen to your last episode. The audio's clean. The one thing I'd tighten up is the pacing in the first five minutes."
"I watched your intro. Here's the one change I'd make if I were editing it."
A real opinion, even a small one, proves you spent time on their work before you asked for any of yours.
For the ones worth the extra ten minutes
"Hey, I'm Bren. Thought it'd be quicker to introduce myself this way. I've just been looking at [project], and I can see you've already got X, Y and Z in place. Here's the one thing that might help."
You're not performing confidence here. You're showing them you did the work before they even replied.
There's a version of this that goes further than experience. I was listening to the sales trainer Andy Bounds on a podcast a while back, and he put it more bluntly than I ever have. Nobody cares what you do, he says. They don't care about your job title. They don't care about your deliverables. What they care about is the after. Nobody wants a sales consultant, they want their sales up by twenty percent. Nobody wants an accountant, they want to pay less tax. Nobody wants a podcast editor either. They want to stop thinking about audio and start thinking about what to say next.
He calls the other half of it stories, and it's worth being clear that's not the story I opened this post with. It's not a highlight reel of your career. It's evidence of an after. Proof that someone else was better off once you'd finished. That's a completely different thing to a CV, and it's the only kind of story worth including in a proposal.
Lead with what changes for them, not what you'll deliver
"After we worked together, you stopped worrying about sound and started worrying about what to record next."
"Clients I've worked with have gone from missing uploads most weeks to never missing one."
Nobody's paying for the hour, or the plugin, or the process. They're paying for what's true after it's over that wasn't true before.
Lead with what you noticed and what changes for them, not with who you are. Save the story about yourself for later, once they already want to work with you. Keep the story about their after close at hand instead, because that's the one that actually gets you picked.
