I have been the main salesperson for Walden’s now for the past 6 years or so and wow, I have learned many lessons in the sales room. What I wanted to share today are some things you can do to work on your skills. You MUST be the most friendly, outgoing, people loving, hugging, conversationalist the world has ever known.

1. Friendly and able to make a friend instantly.
This requires you to find common ground and quickly. If you are a mom and your client just had a baby, relate your memories of that time. If you are a sports enthusiast and your client loves sports, get the conversation flowing in that direction. We feel comfortable, which is a key to a successful relationship, with those most like us. Likes attract and different often shunned. People often feel they know us after they have seen us on PhotoVision and they will come up and talk to us at conventions. I love that! The ice is already broken for both of us.

2. First impressions must be positive.
This point has to do with your facility, but also with you. What clothing do you wear when you have a sale? Are your shoes polished, is your pedicure nice, are your fingernails polished, are your clothes pressed? All of these things and more form a first impression that must be positive. If it is not, it will make the sale much harder and create a tense atmosphere. On my sale days, I dress up more than other days. Most of our clients come in casual clothing, and by dressing up a level, I gain authority, a subtle but powerful point. I make sure we have refreshments set out in the sales room and have nice music playing. We put scent on our rings (on the light bulbs) on our sconces so it smells good. Lights are dimmed and one of their images is projected onto our screen. We don’t keep people waiting! Everything is clean…I am telling you, from a woman’s point of view, clients do notice everything and they make the decision on how much money they will spend with you in the first few seconds as they cross your threshold and walk through your door. Details do matter, so sweat the small stuff.

3. Adapt your pace to your client’s pace.
This is a great thing to learn to do as it creates the atmosphere of friendship and trust. Every client has a tempo they do business with and you must understand their tempo. They will give you visual cues, but you must be alert to catch them and adapt. If you talk too much to a person who is analytical and slow to speak, you may overwhelm them. If you are too quiet with a quiet person, though, things can also be uncomfortable. It is a fine line to walk. To comfort your clients, they must feel similar to you; they must buy you. If you don’t mimic his pace, he may feel you don’t understand him and he will tune you out.

4. Make your clients feel like they are the only people who exist while they are with you.
People like to feel important! Period! Have you ever walked into a store where the employees are conversing among themselves and don’t ever acknowledge your presence? That makes me so angry! Why? Because I want them to make me feel important! This is a basic trait of humans; we crave respect. No matter what else is going on in your business, when that client walks in for a sale, treat him with utmost respect and attention for a successful sales experience! For that period of time, nothing else should matter.

Finally, I will close with the five magic words, according to Harry Beckwith in his wonderful book on sales entitled “You, Inc.”
“Thanks.”
“Welcome.”
The person’s name.
The names of the person’s children.
“I’ll get the check.”

A quick commercial here…if you haven’t joined our Coaching Community yet, why are you waiting??? The price is going up August 6th to $25.00/month (it is a subscription). Right now, it is $20.00/month. So, get in on the action and join us.

One of our new members, Joe, says, “Tim and Bev .. just got your “you better subscribe or else” email and I mulled it around for a couple hours and decided to pull the trigger. I have to say, I can already tell you that this is the best 20 bucks that I have spent in A VERY LONG TIME. Not only are your technical articles terrific in the Knowledge Library and Image Studies, your Template Club has some great stuff in there. But the RAK and links into Bev’s Blog are simply amazing. I missed you guys here at Texas School last year, but I think you have a new fan and I am looking forward to meeting you guys in person.

Have a great week, everyone! Bev

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In the Sales Room…Experiencing vs. Explaining

We often ask photographers as we teach, “How much time do you spend in a typical sales appointment experiencing the imagery versus explaining your finishes, sizes, packages, etc?”

What is usually said is 50/50 or 40/60. We are looking for experience to vastly outweigh explanations, so the answer for us is 90% experience and only 10% explanation at the close to validate the purchase.

There is a saying, “People buy with their heart first and then justify the decision with their head.” We live and breathe that mantra in our sales appointments. We hit hard on emotional aspects of our imagery and stay on it throughout most of the hour and do a quick rundown of more factual items at the end.

What clients are buying is experience, emotion and memories. What clients are not buying is paper or canvas, bubble texture or linen texture, 16×20 or 11×14…this or that!

If there is too much talk about the details and not enough about the emotion, it switches the brain from right to left, from emotional to factual. You are asking them to think and all they want to do is feel!

What we do to combat this is a two-pronged approach; simplify everything and pre-educate the client before the sales appointment.

Years ago, we realized we needed to simplify, simplify, simplify! We started taking things off of our price list, eliminated packages (too hard to explain in a short amount of time), took off finish choices, combined sizes for one price (ie: 8×10, 5×7, 8×8 are all one price) and took the Session Fee down to either studio or location.

I cannot stress this enough; you need to offer less and really strengthen the items you do offer. Look at your price list(s) and try to fit everything on one 8.5 x 11 page. If it doesn’t fit, take off items until it does. This process took us years to do, so don’t do anything you feel uncomfortable with…keep working on it every year.

The second thing we do is to pre-educate the client through phone conversations, discussions at the Design Appointment, letter we send and then we follow up with PDFs. Every time and through every medium, we say the same things over again. We find that redundancy is a HUGE factor in our success. Clients don’t often get the details the first time, so the repetition is crucial to sharing the information they need to know.

What this does is allow me to focus on the emotion during the sale and then briefly hit the factual items at the end since they have already been told everything throughout their time with us.

So, my question to you is this…”How much time do you spend in a sale explaining versus experiencing?” If it is too much, how can you change that scenario?

Have a great week everyone!  Bev

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Today, I’d like to talk about a topic I am learning more and more about, and that is telling stories. What does this have to do with business? Everything! In the book “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel H. Pink, a quote is stated that goes like this, “Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.”   Roger Schank, cognitive scientist. Where do we, as photographers, have the most trouble getting clients to understand the value of photography and how they can use it in their own homes? I would have to say in the Sales Room.

The Sales Room is where I have learned how valuable stories can be in promoting understanding, both of our photography and its value. For instance, when you have a repeat client who purchases wall portraits each trip, how are you going to handle it when they say they don’t know where to put any more wall portraits. Or you have a client who says they just don’t have much wall space. When I hear this, I instantly think of a story my good friend, Sarah Smith of Kent Smith Studios, told me. She said this, “Art will always travel the home, just as an art museum puts up a featured exhibit, but then moves it as a new featured artist comes in.”

What does that mean to you? I will tell you what it means to me in a story. We have two daughters, grown now, but can you even imagine how many wall portraits we have of them? Each portrait is valuable, depicting a special time in their lives, so why would I want to remove them from my walls at home? The answer is I don’t, but I do move them around, just as a museum might do with a featured artist’s exhibit. Let’s talk about the rooms in a home. Here is where I always ask them what is the primary wall in their home where they could see and enjoy a portrait the most. Many times, the answer is over the mantle in the den or family room. Bingo. I say to my clients, “That is where you will always display your most current portrait, just as an art museum would display its featured artist in the main area of the museum.”

Then I go on and say, “Now, what about the portrait that is already there? What do you do with it? Well, let’s think together about a secondary spot in your home where a portrait will still be seen, but maybe not in the top prime spot.” I then give the example of my home as my story continues…the secondary spot in our home is actually in the kitchen where we have a sitting area and we are in the kitchen all of the time. Surely, anything there will be seen very often. Then I ask them to tell me their secondary spot. You see, if you can give examples on your own home, it helps them visualize theirs. We then go on to the third spot we might consider moving a portrait, the forth spot and so on. I give many examples of where I hang portraits in my own home through STORYTELLING. It helps them visualize cold, hard facts in context and with emotion of me telling them about our girls growing up and how quickly that happens.

In fact, I also tell them a story about Tim’s mother and something she once said about her home. She has a small home, but has more furniture, art pieces and beautiful flower arrangements than you could imagine would fit, yet it always looks so put together and striking. I remember she once said that if she loved something, whether it be a couch, a table or another piece for the wall, she would find a place for it. She did not consider, before she bought it, where she would put it. No, her thinking is just the opposite. So, that is another story we can tell in the Sales Room when someone says they just cannot imagine where they will put a wall portrait in their small home.

So you see, you need to arm yourselves with your own stories. I want to end this blog with a quote from the book “Thing That Make Us Smart” by Dan Norman. “Stories have the felicitious capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions…stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context and emotion.”

Have a great week! Bev

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As I have taught sales over the past few years, this is a lesson that seems to need repeating over and over. What is that lesson? SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY! We make our clients CONFUSED, FRUSTRATED AND FATIGUED with too many choices! What brought it back to my mind was a story on one of my favorite shows, “Sunday Morning.” They did a story on decision-making and how we process information.

Let’s get started with this quote from the show.

“Researchers say it’s all but impossible for our minds to process more than seven bits of information at any given time. For a long time people have said that the best way to make a decision is to be rational,” Lehrer said.

“And yet, in recent years, scientists have discovered that the rational brain can only take in a few bits of information at any given moment. So, you start giving it too much information and it starts to short-circuit and sputter.”

This is exactly what I teach about Sales; too many photographers have so many product offerings and packages that a decision by the client becomes nearly impossible to make and you hear those dreaded words, “Can I just go home and think about it and get back to you?” You do understand, don’t you, that this statement is the death of the sale. When a client leaves your studio without making a decision, that sale is literally gone or diminished to the point that you won’t be able to stay in business if they all ended that way. On top of that, they NEVER get back to you when they say they will and it will leave you chasing them for the order. This can potentially create a contentious situation in which they perceive you as bugging them to the point where you lose them as a client forever. It is not a good outcome for all of the effort you have put into the session, that’s for sure!

What would have been a wall portrait becomes an 8×10. In the client’s mind, when they go home and the excitement and emotion is gone, they will revert to the lowest price as an escape route and talk themselves into 8×10s being good enough. They have lost the single most potent factor in the sale and that is YOU! They have also lost the impact of the emotion the image has when it is projected on a large screen in beautiful detail!

Although there is not an answer 100% of the time to fix this, what can you do to avoid it most of the time? I believe the first thing to do is to look at your product line(s) and start eliminating as much as you can to get it down to one 8 1/2 x 11 page. For example, we used to have five different Session Fees; single person or business head and shoulder, two people, group, bridal and location. Now we only have two fees which are studio and location. We don’t count the number of people and charge by that-too confusing! We used to have four finishes a client could choose from; now we have one! Once we realized that we were just causing confusion with all of these non-essential details, we started deleting them one by one. Now we have only a matted fine-art giclee prints for our Relationship Black and White Fine Art line and stretched, framable canvasses for our Color Study line. Done! We did this pruning over several years, so use wisdom in pruning your products. What the client really wants is to know you are the right photographer for them and you will make them look fabulous. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and our clients are so satisfied with our finished product that we don’t need all of the extraneous stuff.

Another way to cut down on too many choices is in the actual number of images you are showing. Can you pare that down some? We use ProSelect and edit, edit, edit the number of images we want to show our clients down to the cream of the crop. What may have started with 80-100 images shot ends up being 8-10 images shown the client as their Suggestion. See our VideoCap on Selling with Suggestions. I have attached a preview below.  I hear some of you gasping right now at that thought. What I show our clients (my number one goal) is the 8-10 images that we “fix” meaning these images are beautifully retouched, contrast is adjusted, they are cropped properly, etc. I do have another group which I am not hiding, just not mentioning as much, and this is the group the Suggestion images came from. This group has about 25 images in it and we do all of our selections from that. However, because the Suggestion images have been properly prepped and are the best ones (in our eyes), they are the ones usually chosen.

“Don’t tell Baskin Robbins, famous for its 31 flavor campaign, but in fact more choices may make an actual purchase less likely, as Professor Iyengar discovered with her supermarket “Jam Experiment.”

In one display, she put out six samples of jam. In another, 24.  Result: Shoppers mobbed the table with 24 varieties . . . BUT they were 10 times more likely to buy jam when they were staring at only six.

“Everybody wants to go to that store that offers you a thousand options, and that’s the best recipe to walk into that store and walk out and buy nothing,” she said.“

Are you ready to prune yet? Stay tuned next week for a follow-up blog on why we need to inject more emotion into the sales process. Watch the preview VideoCap on Selling with Suggestions below, purchase it (of course) and have a great week!  Bev

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As we are rounding the corner from winter into spring, I thought it would be helpful to refresh a few sales principles that help us every day. With high school seniors firing up and spring portraits increasing, we need to make the most of every sale, especially in this economy. So, here goes…

1.  Be positive, positive, positive.  Talk about your imagery, what’s happening in your clients’ lives, their kids and everything else with a positive attitude. Words do create atmosphere and if you are negative, your client will be too. I always point out the wonderful characteristics of their children as we are looking at their images on the screen-that is the most joyful thing you can do with a parent. They love their children and compliments about their children relax them and creates a bond. Of course, really mean what you say. They can see through insincerity!

2.  Be passionate!  Passion goes a long way in creating the best outcome of a sale. Of course, we are in a passionate business, so it should be easy! Be passionate and excited through both your words and your body language.

3.  Be relaxed. As much as possible, relax in the sales room and enjoy the time with your client. Focus on them, listen to what they say and help them with any questions they may have.

4.  Be the pro your clients expect you to be.  Suggest what you think are the best images and what size they will look the best. You are the expert. Clients value your opinion and will listen to you, but you must have confidence. Always suggest up, never down. At the end of the sale, don’t forget to suggest future sessions and get them on the books if you can. Have your sales room set up with samples of sizes and your products so clients will understand what they are getting. We have the top three sizes (in both black and white and color) sampled on opposite walls so they can see the same image in those three sizes and understand how it affects the head sizes and impact.

5.  Listen. When clients reveal details about their desires, taste, needs, etc, write it down. If they talk about what future portraits they want, write it down and transfer later to your system for reminders. Stop thinking about what to say next to them and really listen with all of your “might!” You’ll be surprised at what you learn. Check out Bob Poole’s book “Listen First and Sell Later” to radically improve your sales skills.

6.  Be thankful!  Hand write a note within 48 hours, thanking your client for their purchase. Be personal; mention details you talked about and be positive. End the sales journey on this positive note.

Hope these little reminders help you. Can you believe 1/4 of the year has already passed? WHEW! Let’s all make the rest of the year a great one and have a great week!

Bev

P.S. Hope I don’t sound like I’m trying to pitch a product here…BUT…my Sales Audio teaching (mp3 that is downloadable) is really good and if you need some help in sales, I think it would be a great purchase at $79.99. You will make that and more back very quickly!

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When we first started doing Black and White Relationship portraiture, we were printing the images in the darkroom and the largest size we could print was 20×20 (since we only offered them in square format). This created an issue when a client needed a larger image to fill a specific space in their home, so the idea of selling in groupings was born. We could sell four 16×16s  or three 20×20s and that would take up quite a bit of space. The other factor that we didn’t count on was the added ability to sell those “heart” images which may not have been a main purchase, but as part of a group, were validated!

We started calling the main image the “Anchor” image and it was often the family portrait. The other companion images that would hang with the Anchor image were named “Abbreviations” since they represented parts or abbreviations of the Anchor image. This was a huge success 15 years ago and is still the way we offer our Relationship portraits.

In the camera room, we have learned to specifically shoot images that will format into Anchor and Abbreviation imagery for the sale, knowing that it will make our job much easier if we keep this in mind. The other factors that make this work so well; all of our Relationship imagery is always black and white which makes our groupings look much more cohesive plus we only print in a square format, making beautiful groupings without the hassle of trying to make both verticals and horizontals work together.

I hope this little lesson will help bring up your sales totals…have a wonderful week.

Bev

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