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…]