Intro by Skip Cohen
Bev Walden hits it out of the park with this recent Tuesday Tidbit email. Here’s why it’s so important – too many of you make the process more complicated than it needs to be. You confuse your clients with too many choices, but it’s not just in face-to-face sales.
As you read Bev’s post, think about your website as well. From too many images in your galleries to policies that would scare an IRS agent, you’re creating stress over a process that should be fun and almost magical. Yes, I used the word magical.
Bev and Tim Walden are two of the finest presenters in the industry and they always talk about what you’re really selling. It’s not a portrait, but a family heirloom and an experience. Your goal is to build trust. If they like working with you and love the images you create, they’ll not only come back but insist their friends check into your work.
So the “magic” comes out in simplicity, honesty, integrity, great images, and fun. And as so many marketing experts have suggested – people don’t buy what they need, they buy what they want. It’s up to you to make them want to work with you and in turn, hang your work on their walls!
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How complicated is it to do business with you? We are constantly working on making it very simple to be our client, from the beginning of the process to the end. When you keep it simple, you can spend your time and energy providing an “experience” instead of explaining your processes.
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic,
but creatures of emotion.”
Dale Carnegie
Sift through these 3 ideas and apply them as they fit you and your business.
1. We do one type of portraiture at a time to keep it simple.
It is pre-determined at the Design appointment which of our three offerings the client will do and we don’t mix them together…Black and White, Color or a Beau Visage painting. This naturally limits the number of images that need to be shown. When there are too many images to show and too many decisions to make, three things happen.
ONE: FATIGUE (you wear them out)
TWO: FRUSTRATION (when it’s hard to make a decision because there are too many, people get frustrated)
THREE: CONFUSION (too much to understand in a compressed time frame)
When these three occur, you have lost the sale! How do you know? Because you hear these dreaded words, “I need to go home and think about it.” May I say here that we have NEVER, EVER had a great sale when this has happened in the past. The good news…it has been years since this has happened, simply because we made these changes.
We edit the images down and show only the BEST ones which is approximately 20-25% of what was shot. We are very involved in the sale and the decisions…and our clients LOVE it. The more confident we are, the more they trust us and what we are suggesting. It is a win-win for all.
2. We keep the emotion front and center.
“People buy with their heart and then justify the decision with their head.”
We live and breathe emotion all through the clients’ time with us…every appointment…every time.
If there is too much time spent on details and not enough on 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!
Our goal is to spend 90-95% of the sales appointment experiencing the images with our clients and only 5% explaining pricing, products, and details. This is why it is critical to keep the sale simple as well as your product mix.
Another way to keep it simple in the sale is through onboarding or sending out information via e-booklets in little spurts leading up to both the session and the sale.
We can get many details out of the way beforehand and not bog down the sale. HOW? We use issuu.com to park e-booklets that I design in Canva (they have to be pretty hahaha) and these cover many details about us, our products, and our pricing. Not only does it get many details out of the way, but it sets the expectations properly before they walk through our doors.
3. Adding context through the ability to hang their portraits on their walls, digitally.
We have always loved projection sales and have been doing it for 40 years. What we use today is one of the best sales tools we have ever had and it is having the client take photos of their home and the walls a portrait might hang and then, we put their images, in frames, on those walls in the proper size for the space.
Finally, we are not just saying they need a larger image for a space, but showing it as well. The digital image, shown through ProSelect shows the image, is framed and in the proper size, for that space. We use ProSelect on all of our sales to accomplish this and it has been a game changer!
