Sales Room Training
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
