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

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…]

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

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…]