Creating an Identifying Prospect Form for Selling Your Screenplay
Identifying Prospects
Contacting professionals in the film and television industry is the first step, and often the complete process, for selling your screenplay. When you are looking to sell your screenplay you have to put together an identifying list of every working professional you know that can help you. Producers, other screenwriters, film agencies, financiers, actors, film studio, film executives, and others need to be scattered around as you make a connection with everyone you can in an effort to sell your screenplay.
To keep these things organized it is important to put together Weekly Action Plans so you know what you have to do, as well as Correspondence and Meeting and Telephone Logs to keep a contact record. Before you even begin working on the logs you have to put together a detailed list of the different professionals you intend to speak with about selling your screenplay. This can be called identifying prospects, and there is an easy format you can put together.
Professional Contacts
One of the best ways to put together a form for identifying prospects is to create little profile boxes for each prospect that you stack on top of each other on several pages. Each profile contains the same information about that prospect so that you can compare them. Include their name and official title as to keep things organized, as well as the company they work for.
Next you want to put a line that indicates the prospect’s buying history as it relates to film and television projects. This can be anything from film purchases, funding, or screenplay purchasing patterns. After this put what they may be looking for in the current market, as well as anything that is specific on their business plate. After this put their preferred method of contact as well as a small bit about how you know them.
Do this for each of your potential contacts and try to be as liberal as possible. You can always eliminate some later once you have begun to itemize. From here you begin adding the different logs once you have a clear list of identified prospects to work with.
This post is part of the series: Selling Your Screenplay
So you’ve written a screenplay? You may think it will be a big hit, but the many producers you encounter may not agree with you. Get some tips and organization tools to making contacts, gaining exposure and eventually being able to sell your screenplay!
