I was reading an article by Doug Fleener and it reminded me of what happens when we let the small things slide. Tim always says its not the big things that separate Good from Great; it is the small things. As I apply that to our studio operations, I think it is true as well that the big things are not where the experience lies; no, it is in the small things.

What did we used to do for our clients that we have let fall by the wayside? Where are we not providing a consistent experience? Whether we let something fall because it is inconvenient or because of expense, in a tight market, we really cannot afford to let anything slip! There is just too much competition for clients and we must make the effort each and every time to provide a full, consistent experience. Sometimes, we don’t even know we have slipped on some things. They just don’t get done and then, one day, you stop and realize that you haven’t provided this or that for a long time. Drifting…

Consistency in experience is one of the greatest tools we have for success. Clients expect a consistent experience or they will go somewhere else. I am like this when we go to a new restaurant. The first visit sets the stage and gives me a yardstick to measure each and every visit after that. If I get hot rolls oozing with butter within a couple of minutes the first time I visit a new place, I want the same thing each time. If they slip up, I may let it go once or twice, but after that, I will leave and never go back. Why? Because they violated my expectations. It would have been better for them not to set their standards that high and be able to deliver service in a consistent manner, but they drifted from the original experience.

We know, at our studio, that we cannot serve every client just-baked cookies, warm from the oven, every time they walk through the door, so we don’t do it! We don’t want to disappoint our clients the next time by not having the time to bake the cookies or maybe we didn’t get to the store to buy the dough. However, we can provide, on a consistent basis, hot coffee with the Keurig one-cup-at-a-time coffee maker and we can have chilled soft drinks and water ready all of the time. You need to know your limits and be able to repeat them time and time again without fail! We know our limits and we don’t let ourselves drift!

So, what did you used to do for your clients that you have gotten away from? It takes diligence to keep everything on track. Make sure you stay diligent and consistent in everything from the refreshments you offer to the packaging of the orders-your clients do sweat the small stuff! Don’t drift!

Have a great week everyone! Bev

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You MUST develop your own style and carve your own niche to gain recognition in the marketplace.

Adding the “E” (emotional) factor into your photography, marketing and sales will elevate your studio in every way including sales numbers!

Perception is more important than reality and will become your reality. In other words, “To be successful, you must look successful!”

Telling the stories of others with your images is a win-win situation in the marketplace. Behind every face is a story!

Marketing integrity in all of your literature, whether printed or electronic, is a must for the true professional.

Partner with other like-minded businesses in your community to elevate both and cross-market.

Hire your “perfect client” as a marketing director to help you create new ideas and implement them in your area.

Give back to your community by offering your talents in an area of need.

Create a buzz in your area with new and exciting products that the “digital” world has opened up, but be selective in what you choose.

Don’t be surprised if your next staff member is a graphic artist.

Have a great week!  Bev

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Our journey in understanding this principle started in our previous studio 15 years ago after I read the book, “The E-Myth-Revisited” by Michael Gerber. The sentiment that caught my eye was that whatever you perceive yourself to be, others will perceive as well. Perception is more important than reality for it will become your reality. We’ve all heard the saying, “To be successful, we must look successful.” It is absolutely true!

Even in the biblical account of the 12 spies (Numbers 13:32-33) that went into the promised land (which was then occupied by the giants), we see this principle at work. “So they (the spies) gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.” Wow, every time I read that I am amazed that we do have the power to change perception by changing how we perceive ourselves! By the way, they lost the promised land because their perception of themselves as grasshoppers in other’s eyes! They just gave up!

After I read “The E-Myth-Revisited”, a major change took place. We started to see ourselves as successful to attract others that were successful. Our clientele changed from those looking for a deal to those looking for art, which was another perception that we were working to change. We became artists, not just another photography studio that took “pictures.” In fact, we changed our vocabulary as well, watching every word we said to make sure it sounded successful. Pictures became portraits or images and we still use those terms today.

We started working on our studio to make it look like an art gallery instead of a photography studio by removing clutter, small images, proof portfolios and signage. We even made the hard decision to hang just a few larger images in magnificent frames rather than a bunch of smaller wall images. Choosing which few would get the honors…that was hard! We replaced carpet and then bought a pricey oriental carpet for the front room (on payments) because we didn’t have the money to be doing all of this at that time. After talking to a carpenter, we decided to add crown moulding to the main floor which was unheard of with commercial dropped ceilings, but it looked beautiful! Specialty lighting was added, wall colors were changed to a deep, rich eggplant color, custom drapes were made for the front bay window area and we were almost there, but there was still the furniture.

The funniest thing happened when Tim came in and said he wanted all of the front room furniture gone…out…now! What we had at that time were wing back chairs in mauve (this was the late 80s) and claw feet end tables in dark woods. We replaced that furniture with sparse benches and columns to hold sculptures. Very sparse…very artsy! Our gallery was finally taking shape and we felt we were looking successful! In fact, a doctor came in for a business portrait not long after we made these changes, and as he stepped through the front door, he stopped and said, “Wow, I am going to be spending some money in this place!” We knew then we were on the right road!

As a final move, we decided to separate the galleries by style, so the entire main floor was dedicated to our newly introduced Relationship black and white portraiture, all in the same white mats and simple black frames. We moved the Color Studies to the lower level and our Sales Room became the Color Study gallery. We didn’t have Studio B or Beau Visage at this time.

When we moved into our current facility, we remained true to the lessons we had learned in our previous studio. We knew we wanted to look successful, to be a place where art was purchased, and we wanted our clients to have a grand experience. When we were talking with our contractor, she asked why we were wasting so much space on the front gallery when we could use more space in the office area. We told her that just the opposite was true…a large gallery that had the WOW factor was never wasted space! We put in dark cherry floors, separated our galleries physically within the facility (just like before), put in specialty lighting and installed Tim’s dream, a waterfall.  We don’t exhibit any small prints and we keep clutter away (all lessons learned before).

Today, Walden’s Photography has a grand presence in the community and our clients are wowed as they walk through the door. So, back up, take a look at your facility and see what you can do to improve. As you perceive yourself to be, so are you!

Have a great week, everyone. Remember to check out our Coaching Community and join! We are already having so much fun on the forum with topics that are so interesting to discuss (and there is so much more to see, learn and do).  Bev

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We are in Philly and between getting ready for this trip and working towards the Coaching Community opening next week, I am postponing a new blog until next Monday:-(

Have a great week everyone!  Bev

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This week, I want to talk about injecting emotion into the sales process. Of course, we have the best profession for that! How many products out there on the market can evoke such deep emotions?

We first learned the value of this principle when we started the Relationship Black and White portraiture 15 or so years ago. When a dad caressed his newborn son or a mom hugged her toddler with her eyes closed, we could actually feel the love coming out of those images. Before we started Relationships, we were doing mostly Color Studies which were beautiful in their own right, but the emotional punch wasn’t there without adding a parent or two into the mix where we could then capture those intimate moments in time that happen so quickly. When you add parents loving and hugging their children, celebrating their love for each other, that is emotional to the 10th power. So why wouldn’t you use it in the salesroom? It is simply completing the equation.

Actually, with our Relationship Black and White portraits, the emotional  journey begins in the Design Appointment. That is where we start scripting each client’s portrait according to the story they want to tell. Instead of asking which prop or background, we instead ask, “If this portrait were a chapter in a book of your life, what would the title of this chapter be?” Instantly, we are going into deeper water than they have been in at at photography studio and it changes the expectations dramatically. Now, this is no longer just a “picture”, but a capturing of something much deeper. After that, we play a beautiful AV show which has parents talking about their children along with showing emotional imagery. Our entire Design Appointment sets the stage for the next session, the photography session.

If you recently purchased the Relationship Pose Guide, you will see some of the most striking and intimate posing I know of! It takes some practice to get the hang of doing Relationship imagery, but it is still our most popular format of photography after 15 years. That says something!

OK, now onto the Sales Appointment which is our topic today. How do you make the sales process more emotional and why is it important? Let’s talk about importance first. When you have an emotional component, clients relate much more strongly and the desire to have the product is much higher. After all, it is intimately connected to their minds, their history, their memories and their lives. Remember the MasterCard commercials which tell a story about how much things are and then say, “but some things are priceless.” They are using emotion to sell their credit card! Really??? But it works!

Emotion also adds value. We are selling art pieces, so to speak, and they must be as valuable to the client as an oil painting from an art gallery. We punch up the perception of value with emotion. We add more emotional value with our Journaling pouches that we add to the back of each wall portrait which have special papers enclosed for the parents to write letters to their children. When they give that child their portrait at a much later date, how important and emotional is that letter they wrote when that child was two or three and is now an adult? Very impacting!

I also play emotional music during the sale using Pandora radio. I select a station with haunting, soft music like the Celtic Women or a soft, classical station. Pandora radio is awesome and it helps set the stage! If you like lullaby music, an old CD by Olivia Newton John called Warm and Tender is also great to use!

I speak emotionally. I am EMOTION! During that sale, I am talking about their children in emotional ways, experiencing the portraits with my clients. Every nuance of that baby or child is pointed out such as dimples, eyes, chubby legs, etc. I love people and I love children, so this is natural for me. I enjoy the portraits as much as the parents. If you are not naturally this way, you need to learn or hire a salesperson that is!

Finally, our motto is that we need to spend the majority of our time in the sales room experiencing the images, not explaining finishes, packages, specials, mounting, sizes, options, options, options. Remember last week’s blog. If you have too many choices, the experience goes out the window when you have to kick into explanations and that turns on Left Brain which is logical and not at all emotional. Left Brain judges only on cost. I want Right Brain to be present in the sales room with me and that means keeping the emotion high during the sales process. What can you do in your studio to improve this aspect of your sales?

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I am soooo late in posting the blog today, but with good reason. We are totally re-vamping our website and it is taking up all of our time right now! For awhile, we have not been happy with the functionality of the site and we are always looking for ways to improve it. When we got hacked, it was an opportunity to look at something new, so we got together with Jeremy and he showed us a new layout that is so much better. In fact, he knew we would like it and had already started laying it out.

Some of the new items it will include are a Template Club with monthly downloads (yippee), a re-designed Coaching Community that will now be a monthly subscription, and if someone wants personal interaction and critiques from us, the Coaching Community subscription will be the base, but there will be an added fee for the personal coaching portion. You may not see that part at first, but just be looking for it as we keep adding to the site.

I think you will like the Store area which is much more simple to access and my blog has a more prominent area on the Home page. Overall, a huge improvement. So, if you will excuse me this week from posting my blog, I will be back next week with a great one I already have in mind.

Available on our new website later this week; our newest VideoCap addition, The Design Appointment.” Many of you have asked us to do this one, so here it is. Tim will walk you through how we talk to each client to get them on our team. Listen closely to his wording; he is the master at saying things exactly the right way. At $39.00, it is a bargain and will make your job so much easier in the camera room. Check it out under Products/VideoCaps on our new website later this week.

We will let everyone know when our website goes public, so be on the lookout. I am so excited! Have a great week, everyone!

Bev

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For this blog post, I thought I would talk about our policy of Random Acts of Kindness. It all goes back to my reading the book “Hug Your Customer” by Jack Mitchell. In that book, Jack, a tailor, talks about how much he loves his clients and because of that, he pampers them with over-the-top service and he also remembers everything about them from their children’s names to their golf handicaps! That got us thinking about how we can do a better job remembering details about our clients (I am the WORST) and we started to put these items onto our studio calendar as a tickler to send something. This is really the ultimate one-on-one level of marketing.

So this is how it works. First of all, every client is everyone’s responsibility, so items of interest any of us hears goes onto the calendar. That keeps all of us alert to what our clients tell us. Maybe it’s a client moving into a new home or a son in a final Little League game.Whatever it is, we note it on our calendar, thus the name, the Hug Calender! We have cards on hand for various events, so we may just send a card. However, we also have accounts set up at various places so that we can easily send a gift if we feel that is warranted. The budget for a month is around $100.00 without needing Tim’s approval; anything under that is fine to do without prior approval. I will list the vendors we use at the end of the blog, so check them out. They are great!

My niece, Jalyn, worked in management for many years at Brighton Collectibles and she told me they did a similar thing for their clients. If a client bought a handbag, they would take it to the back to wrap it where they filled it with packs of designer tissue mini-packs as an extra surprise. She called it the Surprise and Delight principle! Another thing they did was to mail a small coin purse a few days after any client made a sizable purchase. The client didn’t expect it and was delighted to receive it. Of course, she always included several business cards!

As all of you know, everyone likes to get a gift. One final thing we do is to provide a Gift Card for a Session Fee to each client when they pick up their order to encourage them to return. We wrap it in tissue and put it into a beautiful box to present to the client. Along with that Gift Certificate, we also include a Gift Certificate for our client to give to a friend for a Session Fee and ask them to refer us.

Here are some of the vendors we use. Tea gifts are wonderful from Elmwood Inn. I used to go to tea once a month at their tea room, but their shipping business grew so quickly that they had to give up the tea room. The owner, Bruce Richardson, is one of the biggest tea importers in the US and also a photographer who has written several books. I have them all! For cookies that are organic and chunk-a-licious, we use Najla’s cookies which can come baked or as dough that you bake (or eat) yourself. As you all know, living in Kentucky, we must have one item that includes liquor, and that is Gethsemani Farms which is a working monastery that sells wonderful cheeses and also fudge with bourbon:-) One final vendor we use that sells chocolate-covered strawberries (yum) is FruitFlowers.

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WOW! What a morning getting everything ready to send out on the upcoming Joy to the World WebSummit! I usually don’t do a promotional blog, but this is just too good to not let you know about! There will be 28 speakers teaching for two days via flash presentations on December 28 and 29th on every topic you can think of that will make you more money in 2010. The cost to pre-purchase the recordings as flash files is just $59.00! Where else could you get that much education from so many different (and top notch) speakers for that reasonable price? If you wait, the price goes up, so get in while you can.

We did the TeleSummit event with Sarah Petty back in September and has so many positive responses that we jumped at the chance to join her again in this event. We will be speaking about a very different topic for us this time-High School Seniors. Now that we have re-entered that market, we wanted to share some of the ideas that have made this a financially successful venture. We start with “Before the Session”, then go onto “During the Session” and end with “After the Session.” Each segment has an idea highlighted that has been over the top exciting and brought in more and more business each year.

In addition to the actual educational flash presentation, I put together a graphics package that will knock your socks off! Yes, it took me an entire day to do, but I wanted to give you actual products we sell along with marketing pieces and internal paperwork documents so you would have the entire kit to get started on the road to make more money! It is priced at ONLY $99.00 which you will make back in your first sale! I wanted to keep this price low so everyone that wanted it could purchase it. We all need to help each other out during these times when client’s money isn’t flowing as freely as it once did!

I urge you to check this event out today (or very soon) and get hooked in. Education it the key to success! Until next Monday, have a great week!

Bev

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Branding, or the definition of your company in the eyes of the marketplace, is so important to do, especially in a tight economy. Those that do it well stand out from the crowd. Those that don’t get mixed in the “barrell” with many, many others and have much less chance of survival.

There are two key elements I want to talk about today and that is your logo and your tag line. Let’s get started with your logo. I know you have all pondered the name of your business. Some of you use your name and some of you don’t. Either way, it is critical to get a great logo wrapped around that name in order to stick in your client’s mind. That is the idea behind a great logo!

What does a logo design need to accomplish? There are several things to keep in mind.

*Is your logo strong, simple and without clutter?

*Is your logo bold, making it easy to see and comprehend quickly?

*Is your logo appropriate to your business?

*Is your logo designed in a easy to read font that works well in color, black and white, in a fax, on a mug, etc?

*Does your logo communicate your business and its essence clearly?

These are just a few of the design elements that enable a logo design to do what it is intended to do. Take another look at yours and make sure it is effective. And remember, don’t change it often. It takes a long time for it to become well known in the public. If it needs a “face-lift”, just do a little, but to completely change it on a whim means starting over each and every time!

Now let’s talk about a tag line which is a 2-7 word phrase that accompanies the logo and expresses your business’s most important benefit or message. We sat down with our staff and had a meeting about the words that would describe Walden’s and Studio B, our associate-run division. It was tough! We thought and thought, and after a while, came up with these tag lines. For Walden’s, it is “Images that Speak” and for Studio B, it is “Simplicity. Re-defined.”

Great tag lines need to flow with your logo and present your intended message quickly and clearly. The benefits of taking the time to craft a great tag line are well worth the effort! It helps define who you are and sets you apart.

Creating a great logo and tag line are critical in creating a brand that is memorable in the minds of clients. After all, there are many competing voices out there and we want potential clients to hear our voice loud and clear above the competition!

Have a great week everyone!  Bev

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We had the pleasure of traveling to Ireland last October to speak at their photography convention and while there, we met another speaker who really impressed us! He talked about motivation and positive thinking and one thing he said has stuck with us all of this time. We even made it a point to run our staff meetings by this principle…what is it? It is so simple, but profound! This is it…NEVER, EVER SAY YES, BUT…instead, say, YES, AND…

With this one word change, your thinking changes right along with it. For example, in our meetings, if someone says we should try this or that new idea, we are not allowed to say, “Yes, BUT that won’t work because blah, blah, blah!” NO! Instead, we encourage each other to say, “Yes, AND when we do that, blah, blah, blah.” Do you see the profound change this causes in thinking about ideas?

What happens now in our meetings is that more creativity flows because we are not afraid our ideas will be struck down. What we do instead is to follow the ideas with a positive attitude and then, in the end, if it really is an idea that won’t work, we all agree and move on. When you have brainstorming meetings, this environment is much more conducive to great and creative ideas!

So, remember, YES AND…to get rid of that negative thinking and let’s all make this week a great week!

Bev

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