“I don’t want to look like a used car salesman.”
How do you approach sales within your business? 
A successful business owner charges enough to build a healthy, thriving business. They charge what they’re worth. They charge to grow. And they charge based on what they should be getting, not what others around them are charging.
The used car salesman puts the image of forceful sales into our minds. The last thing we ever want to be is seen as pushy.
But there’s a big difference between being pushy, and giving people the products and services they want.
One of my favorite authors is Jeffrey Gitomer, who has written many books on selling. One of his quotes is, “people don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy”.
If you’re good at what you do, and your passion shows through, selling is the easy part. People will seek you out, and make your job of selling easy.
As our business doubled and tripled year after year, I learned several things that have help true.
- Be passionate about what you offer. If you don’t love everything you’re selling 110 percent – don’t sell it. When you speak of your products and services, that passion comes through. And if you’re apologizing for things (lack of experience, lack of quality, etc) your prospects will sense it.
- Rearrange your products and services all the time. Always be on the lookout for finding a better way to present things to your customers. When the majority of our customers were destination wedding clients, we realized a free engagement didn’t fit anymore. Most of our clients never saw us before the day of the event. And we weren’t going to fly to our clients for a free engagement photograph. So we made it optional. Which also added to our bottom line when a few clients took us up on our engagement package!
- Realize your products and services aren’t for everyone. So don’t try and sell them to everyone. If someone doesn’t purchase from you today, it’s usually because a bigger, better client is just down the road.
If you’ve chosen photography as your profession, you are the professional. That alone gives you the power to charge what you’re worth. I like to think of it this way:
It may take one hour to provide you with my services. But that hour has 22 years worth of experience to make it the most beneficial hour possible.
How much is 22 years worth?
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