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The Dumbest Questions You Can Ask Your Photography Prospects

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As a new business owner, your mind is filled with every last detail of your business. And with so much to learn, you probably don’t spend a lot of time mastering each piece. In many aspects, that comes along the way.

So you jump right in and do things as they happen. When a prospect comes in, you have an honest conversation. You tell them your opinions, your attitudes, and how you really feel. You ask questions and provide the answers you think you would like to hear? What’s wrong with that?

Yet in sales, if you ask the wrong questions, you may not only turn a prospect away, you may alienate future customers as well. Here’s why.

Smart questions build up the relationship you are forming with a prospect. Dumb questions fill a customer with doubt and self-questioning.

Smart questions make a prospect think about the answer and how you fit into it. Dumb questions leave everything open, guaranteeing they will turn to someone else for solid answers.

Here are the dumbest questions you can use to bring in photography clients and why they are dumb. [Read more...]

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If You Are Selling A Photograph, Tell Me You Are Selling A Photograph

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Have you ever been a part of a leads or referral group? Leads groups are different than networking groups. In a networking group, you simply visit on a regular basis, hang out with the people there, and chat with a variety of people to hopefully find someone to do business with. With a leads group, you meet regularly – usually once per week – with the same people from different industries, provide your “1 minute commercial” over and over again, and hopefully build strong relationships with the members so they will find referrals for you. Leads groups are more time intesive, yet the rewards can be phenominal.

We’ve belonged to a leads group for close to 10 years now and love the results.

Yesterday I attended a meeting and one member in particular stood out.

She got up for her 1 minute commercial. For one minute, she talked about having a Facebook page and how they are trying to build up their fan base. She asked if everyone in the group would friend her and possibly drop a testimonial on her wall.

1 minute.

She never said what she did. She never asked for any type of new client. She never stated how she’s looking for new business or what we can do to help her.

In 1 minute of time, she spoke to 30 other members and a handful of guests, asking them to follow her. Then the other 30+ got up to do their 1 minute commercial.

How many people remembered to friend her on Facebook? How many did it?

Yep, I’m betting the answer is zero.

A more effective 1 minute commercial may have been: (we’ll assume she was a photographer)

“Have you seen the spring trees and flowers? How would you love to incorporate them into a family portrait? If its been years since you’ve photographed your family and the photo hanging on your wall shows your now 17 year old when he was 10, its time for an update.”

That motivates you. It allows you to “see” something and think of who fits that description. Or maybe you could say:

“Who here knows a high school junior getting ready for his last year of high school? Senior portrait season is from May through September, and the best dates go fast. If you know a high school junior, send them my way.”

Again, its specific. We know exactly who you are and what you are looking for. It also allows me to quickly go through my list of contacts and think about who I know. Images can quickly come to mind and I can easily pass along the information. [Read more...]

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Is This What You Are Doing Wrong With Your Sales?

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Are you wondering why sales aren’t where you think they should be? Are you wondering how you can get more people to your site who won’t just look, but will actually buy?

Its hard not to fall into the trap of entitlement. If you look around you, everyone talks about the overnight success stories, and the businesses that have grown from $0 to $1 million in a matter of days. Just yesterday I was emailed a story about a company that is now making $600k a month, though they were almost bankrupt a mere six weeks ago.

Entitlement is a part of our culture. We watch a show or movie and we movie from concept to solution in under two hours. Entire serial killer mysteries can be played out in less than one. So why shouldn’t we be able to build a business in a matter of weeks? We’re entitled to it, right?

The problem with entitlement within our business model is we lose site of what is truly important. Our thoughts drift to:

  • I have the most amazing product/service ever
  • My services deserve attention
  • Nobody is doing anything like me
  • I’m charging less so I should fill up twice as fast
  • Its [insert whatever you choose] fault, not my own [i.e. the economy, my parents, my spouse, my lack of education, etc]

Yet none of that is the real problem. The real problem is we bring all of our focus internally instead of placing it where it belongs … on the consumer.

A few months ago I chatted with a woman who lost her job and was trying to build up her photography business to replace her income. Her goal was to build up a portrait business that consisted of boudoir, maternity and baby portraiture. She had some great work and had a huge potential to make it grow. Where she was lacking was in marketing and sales.

So we began talking about the best way get her work out there into her community. After a little work we decided her best bet would be to get her work on the walls of a local doctor’s office. She sent off a letter and after a week … nothing. To say she was put off by the whole experience was an understatement. She was ready to throw in the towel on the whole project. Until I asked her a few questions. [Read more...]

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Focusing On The Wrong Question Could Cost You Millions

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Let me ask you a question. If you could ask five million-dollar business owners a question about making your business succeed, what would you ask them? I’ll bet its something like this:

How do I make more money?
How do I find more clients?
How do I get my website more traffic?
How do I make Facebook work for me?

These are detail questions. And while they are important in the overall success of your company, they are leaving out one very important question that most struggling businesses haven’t deciphered yet.

You see, most people start out a business knowing they love what they want to build their business around – photography – yet haven’t thought the entire business strategy out yet.

Facebook. Pinterest. Mobile media. Email campaigns. Search engine optimization. Shopping cart systems. Hosting. Tablets. Smartphones. HTML. WordPress.

I could go on for hours with the buzzwords that can literally leave you breathless and overwhelmed at the end of each day.

But the key with each of these is they are details. There is no way you or I will ever be able to conquer and stay current on each of these items. As soon as you start using one, another jumps on board. Or changes. Or morphs into something new. [Read more...]

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The Photography Sales Funnel Part Four: How To Put Your Sales Funnel Into Action

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In the final chapter of this series on the photography sales funnel we look at how you can begin putting what you’ve learned into action for setting up your own sales funnel. If you haven’t read the first three parts of this series please do so now:

The Photographers Sales Funnel
Generating Leads At The Front Of Your Sales Funnel
Long Term Profits Through Referrals

The Potential Is Larger With A Niche

Once you realize the potential of a sales funnel, which I hope you do by now after following along in this series, you should consider implementing one for your own business.

When you first get started, don’t look at your business as a whole. Instead, look at it in individual pieces, or in niches. Maybe you photograph weddings, events and family portraits. In this case you could look at your business in three distinct ways through all three of your niches.

Each niche will be considered unique because you will be approaching customers and referral sources in different ways using different materials and tools. While they may all require you to have a website, how you move them through the site will take on different approaches for each of the different niches. For example as mother looking to book a family sitting may love looking through wedding images, but she won’t be able to “see” herself in your work. She wants to see other families and how you pose, choose your backgrounds, create packages, etc.

Planning Your Sales Funnel

Once your niches are determined and you are confident you want to bring in a lot of clients in those niches, you can begin work on your sales funnel.

Your main focus should always be on the needs of your customer. When I begin planning out my sales tools, instead of thinking of my niche as a whole, I think of one customer in particular. Don’t think of a “generic” customer. Instead, think of the best client you’ve ever had, the one you would love to have in your studio all the time. Then ask yourself a series of questions.

  • What did you do to attract her? How could you improve on that process?
  • What did she buy? What more could you have sold her?
  • How did you communicate with her during the entire process, including in the present? How could you communicate with her now and into the future?
  • What more could you sell her?

I’m sure just by reading these questions, ideas are popping up. Don’t stop the flow of ideas. Let them come and write them all down. This is how you will build your sales funnel for the future. [Read more...]

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The Photography Sales Funnel Part Three: Long Term Profits Through Referrals

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Now we head into the robust part of the sales funnel. This is where you build up a system that allows you to make big profits. If you haven’t read the first two parts in this series, make sure you catch up by starting with the Photographers Sales Funnel and a look at How To Generate Leads.

In part two of this series, I discussed the top of your sales funnel and how it helps you capture attention of people desiring what you provide. Potential customers are called “leads”. Leads ultimately convert into paying customers. Depending on how well you do with both marketing and sales, your ultimate goal is to bring in more qualified prospects as time goes by so that it becomes easier to convert them into paying customers. The greater the ratio, the more your “system” works, and the less time you’ll invest in working with prospects. Which means you’ll have more time to work with your clients AND to perfect your system.

Two Ways Of Building Profits

In small business marketing, there are only three ways of bringing in the sales.

The first way is to attract and bring in brand new prospects. That’s the most expensive way to market your business and it takes the most amount of time. This is the process of working your top or the front of your funnel.

But once you get people into your funnel, you’ve attracted them to your business and they’ve begun noticing what you have to offer, you move to the second phase. In this phase, there are two ways of building profits:

Selling more to each client that comes through your door

Selling to one client again and again, year after year

Selling More To Each Client That Comes Through Your Door

In order to sell more to each client that comes through your door, you have to build your packages in such a way that you can offer more to each client. In other words, they can’t be all-inclusive. You can’t offer everything they’ve ever dreamed of purchasing in one package deal. Instead you have to break it up, offering truly the most important aspect of what you do in each “sale”. For example, many wedding photographers offer a package like this:

An engagement setting

  • An 11×14 signature board for your wedding day
  • Unlimited photography on the day of your event
  • All images on copyright-free CD
  • 40 page bridal album
  • 20 page parent album
  • 16×20 Portrait Print
  • Online gallery of your wedding photos to share with friends and family worldwide

When you see a package like this, what else could a bride ever want? She gets her engagement images, she will receive an album and a wall portrait, her mom gets an album, her friends and family can view the images indefinitely online, and she gets the CD – which means no one will ever have to order from the photographer – she’ll simply order through her local discount store when family and friends approach her about wanting an image. [Read more...]

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The Photography Sales Funnel Part Two: Generating Leads At The Front Of Your Funnel

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In part one of this series on the Sales Funnel, I related my story of how a photographer needs to look at the entire sales cycle in order to give it strength and work to grow a successful company over time.

The sales funnel is a systematic marketing process where you filter your prospects into customers, then refine them into raving fans that refer you again and again. But before you can build your base of raving fans, you have to attract high quality prospects at the top  of the funnel. This is where your marketing can really shine.

See You At The Top

The top of your sales funnel is the one area that requires the most experimentation. It’s the area where you can try different things, achieve different results, tweak it, and start all over again. There are limitless possibilities when it comes to how you can attract quality prospects, limited only by your imagination and your resources.

For many photographers, they immediately start with the more traditional ways of marketing: business cards, sales brochures, postcards, phone books, magazines, newspapers, etc. You can also dip into the higher priced marketing methods, such as expos, tradeshows, displays, billboards, etc

Thanks to the Internet, you can also find many methods to market and capture leads in the online world. Many people stay with the “free” concept, which can work. Things like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter can all work well if you have the time. Yet the Internet is filled with opportunities – most of which are a lot less expensive than traditional methods. Banner ads, ezine placements, pay per click advertising, blogging, podcasting, guest posting and many other Web 2.0 tools.

The method you use to drive prospects is optional. Yet your ultimate goal is to attract and qualify people that may at some point purchase from you further down the road – down your sales funnel. At this stage, you goal is to drop as many people as you can into the funnel, then use other mechanisms to qualify them and continue them down the path. [Read more...]

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The Photographers Sales Funnel

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Fundamental to the success of your photography business is the concept of the sales funnel. The sales funnel is key in defining the strategies needed to find prospects and turn them into clients over time. It also defines an effective referral program that keeps people coming in at all levels of your business.

Basic Sales Funnel Structure

When you are building your marketing and sales strategies, your ultimate goal is to bring in paying customers. Yet in order to do so, you have various steps in order to accomplish your goal.

The sales funnel begins by capturing the attention of prospects out in the marketplace looking for what you have to offer. Some are intrigued and want to learn more. Some are just starting the process and have no expectations. Some are ready to book and become clients. And a little of everything in between. The purpose of the sales funnel is to allow a prospect to “drop” in at whatever level they are currently at and provide them with what they need to go to the next step.

By the end of the process the funnel has successfully captured the ultra-responsive customers who have purchased from you again and again, love what you do, and enjoy sending you other clients as well. This is where great businesses make the majority of their profits – they find raving customers that love what they do and are willing to promote you to everyone they know.

Let me show you how it works.

The Sales Funnel

If you’ve been online for awhile, or even studied marketing, you have probably heard of the sales funnel. It has a variety of ways of looking at it, depending on your industry and how you wish to attract clients.

When we first started our business, we knew we had to reach out to clients in a variety of methods. With wedding photography, very few brides and grooms think about wedding photography until the moment they become engaged; then they are thrown head first into a whirlwind of planning.

The top of the funnel isn’t meant to sell to a prospective couple; instead its meant to educate them. Websites are the perfect marketing tool because you can provide as much content as you can and leave it up to the couple to decide how much they need. Some will spend 10 minutes going through 10 pages; some will spend 10 hours going through hundreds of pages.

While photographs are great – you are a photographer, what else would a prospective client want to see – remember they are in it for the education as well. A prospective wedding client has never planned a wedding before. They might not be thinking about sunset times for their 7pm wedding in October – and how you really can’t capture detail when the ceremony is outside in the dark. That’s a perfect thing to educate them on.

Or how long it truly takes to photograph formals. If they have large families and want a lot of groupings, it will take far longer than if they rely solely on photojournalism to capture the moments. [Read more...]

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Photography Is Emotional: Make Them Laugh, Make Them Cry

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People hate being sold to. But they love to buy.

People don’t buy with their heads; they buy with their hearts. All decisions are based on emotion. If you use emotion to sell what people want – not what you think they want – you’ll have success every time.

Yes, all of this is actually true. And in reality it’s the heart of being an entrepreneur; master this thought process and you’ll run a successful business.

We all fundamentally make our decisions based on emotion. We don’t NEED the new pair of pants or the new television for the living room. Yet when emotion kicks in, we can talk ourselves into anything.

“I’m going to interview for the new job and my old pants are worn out. This pair will make me feel more professional, and more importantly, look more professional. I HAVE to have them to get this job.”

Yep, its all down hill from there. Once your emotions start kicking in and you begin reasoning with yourself on why you need something, you may as well hand over the credit card.

While I’m sure you can think of dozens of examples where you played the emotion game with yourself, its not something you alone play. Its actually one of the greatest strategies a sales person can learn. If a business owner markets without emotion, he will undoubtedly fail every time. But when you learn to develop just a few methods of selling with emotion, you’re sales rate will increase. And you’ll have a lot more fun in your business. [Read more...]

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3 Trends You Should Be Using In Your Own Sales Techniques

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Its no secret that people are less accepting of more traditional types of sales methods and marketing. How many people truly use a yellow pages anymore, or trust an ad they see in a newspaper? The percentages are dwindling rapidly.

But one thing will always remain true.

People hate being sold to. But they love to buy.

Because they hate being sold to, its more important than ever to use current marketing methods that will give your potential customers exactly what they want; without feeling like they’ve been speaking with a used car salesperson.

Attract in great numbers, then focus on filtering

When you’re in business for yourself, its easy to fall into the trap of wanting to “book” every person you talk with. Yet that isn’t reality. If you book every person you talk with, you’re actually doing things wrong. You’re prices are definitely way too low. And you probably haven’t defined your product enough to make it exclusive so that you attract a certain kind of clientele.

Yet through all of your marketing methods, it is good to drive a large amount of traffic to your business, then selectively choose the ones that are right for you. Its called funneling your prospects.

Dig Deeper: The Photographers Marketing Funnel

Funneling can actually work in two ways.

First, through all of your marketing, you can drive customers into a marketing pattern in which they learn more about you. It may be through a marketing campaign in which you mail out postcards regularly, or online as a part of a drip campaign with email marketing. Only a select few will really like what you do, calling you to book a session.

Second, once you have customers in your business as a paying client, you can funnel them to other areas of your business. A business portrait client can turn into a baby portrait client, and from there a family portrait client. You simply move them from one part of your business to another by keeping them in the know of what you do.

In either case, its all about focus. Bring people in; then focus on how to convert them into clients. Again and again. [Read more...]

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