What Ted Lasso can teach you about making placements

Somebody at a television network looked at Ted Lasso and decided he had run his course.

He had done his job. Two adverts, made to sell NBC's new Premier League coverage to Americans who did not watch football. Funny enough. Twenty million odd views between them. Then the character was retired and everyone moved on to the next campaign.

A couple of years later, Jason Sudeikis and two co-writers finished a pilot script built around him.

They shelved that too.

It sat in a drawer while all three of them got on with other work. Bill Lawrence only came into it because he happened to play pickup basketball with Sudeikis a while after that. The series premiered in 2020.

This August, season four opened with nearly 300 million minutes watched in its first two days. A new opening record for Apple TV.

Nobody chased it during the drawer years. It was not dead in there. It just was not finished.

You retired somebody this year

Open your CRM and you will find them.

Live in June. You had a good call. There was a role coming, or a budget going through, or something to pick back up after the holidays. Then July got busy, August went silent, and somewhere in the last few weeks you stopped thinking about them entirely.

You never sat down and decided to give up on them. That is what makes it so easy. In your head they have quietly moved into the folder marked "wasn't serious", and you would swear that was their doing rather than yours.

Most recruiters who generate real interest abandon it long before the prospect was ever going to move. Not through laziness. You will happily make forty calls to complete strangers this month. You will not make a fourth attempt at someone who has already told you they are interested, because the fourth one feels like begging.

So the warmest people in your business get the least attention from you. And in September you open a clean spreadsheet, go hunting for brand new leads, and walk straight past the ones already sat there.

NBC at least did it on purpose

Someone was in a room when Ted Lasso got retired. There was a meeting. A decision. He had served the campaign, the campaign was over, and they let him go with their eyes open.

You do not get that. You have never once decided to write off a prospect. It happens to you, in the gaps between busy weeks, and by the time it is done you have a story ready about how they were never going to buy anyway.

Most owners I speak to have no shortage of leads. What they have is a burial problem, and the burying is invisible even to the person doing it.

That is where the year leaks away. Not in the leads you never got. In the ones you got, warmed up, and quietly buried two touches before they were ready to talk.

Shelved is not the same as dead

Silence is a status. It is not an answer.

A prospect going quiet tells you where they are right now. It tells you nothing about what they have decided, because in most cases they have not decided anything. Six months of nothing is not a no. It is a not yet, from someone whose situation keeps changing while you are not in the room. You are reading a timestamp and treating it as a verdict.

The reason the fourth attempt feels like begging is that you have nothing in your hand. Turn up empty and ask if they have reconsidered and you will feel like a nuisance, because you are being one. That feeling is not telling you to stop. It is telling you that you are arriving with the wrong thing.

Once an owner sees it that way, the whole business changes shape. They stop opening the month at zero. There is a back catalogue. Conversations they had half-forgotten start reopening on their own, and meetings get booked before they have even thought about where the next lead is coming from. That is what Opportunity Harvest™ does once it is properly in the business. The attention you have already paid for stops evaporating.

One owner we worked with had no shortage of leads either. His problem was everything after the first conversation. Interest would spike, go flat, and he would move on. He changed how he stayed in front of people, and a fintech CEO who had been silent for six months, a man he had long since stopped thinking about, came back with this:

"I've been meaning to get back to you. Your emails have been so helpful. Let's talk."

Three touches over a couple of months. Not one of them asked him for anything.

That conversation became a $30,000 search fee. His close rate tripled inside a year.

He did not find a better lead. He stopped burying the one he already had.

What changes

Before, every month starts at nothing. Your pipeline is whatever you can manufacture in the next three weeks. The good conversations from spring are gone, and if I asked you to name six of them you would struggle.

After, the month opens with warm conversations you did not have to create. People come back at the point they are ready, which is a point you were never going to guess correctly anyway. Among the owners we work with, one campaign into a list they already had produced 26 new leads.

Same market. Same list, sat in the same CRM it was sat in last week.

One thing to do this week

Count two numbers.

How many conversations from the last six months have you decided are dead.

Then, of those, how many did you touch more than three times.

The gap between those two numbers is your year. Don't try to fix it yet. Just look at it properly.

How many of the prospects you have written off this year actually told you no, and how many just went quiet?

If this is the sort of thing you want landing in your inbox each week, subscribe. It tends to be about the part of the business owners would rather not look at.

Sudeikis said later that the years in the drawer gave them a bit of space from it, and the timing came good on its own.

Your prospects do not need space. They need you to still be there when their timing comes good, and right now you are not, because you filed them under wasn't serious in the last week of August.

That is what we work through on the Fast Track to More Placements call. Thirty minutes on your business, the conversations you have buried, and which one moves first. You will come off it knowing what your dormant pipeline is actually worth, which for most owners is more than their next three months of new business.

Book your spot at makemoreplacements.com/call.