7 Easy Steps to Great Sales Averages – Without being a “salesperson”

1. 1. Show all of your products at or before the shoot, and tell the clients which are your favorites and which are the most popular.
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3. This sets the stage for what you are selling and what modern photography is all about. When clients come in, they don’t know what to buy. Showing them all the options and letting them know what is most popular sets expectations for everyone.
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5. 2. At the end of the shoot, send your client home with your sales packages and a la carte items – TELL them which package is the best value and which one is the most popular.
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8. Great way to display samples (image from ProDPI)
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10. With every large purchase, we always spend more than we expect to. Think back to when you last bought a car, house, furniture, whatever. Did you spend more than you expected to? Of course. It’s the same with photography. Give your clients a chance to go over the price list at their home before the order, let them justify the benefit to cost for themselves.
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12. 3. When they leave the shoot tell them “OK, so at the proofing session, you’ll choose your favorites and decide what products you’d like to order.
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14. Make sure people know what to expect coming into the session. Make sure they know that this is the time when they are going to pull out their credit card and make the order. It’s better that they know this before coming than at the ordering session.
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16. 4. When they arrive at the ordering session, give them: something nice to drink, the price list again (point out the most popular and best value packages), give them some albums to look at and point out the difference between prints, canvases and anything else you offer.
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18. This is a twofold tip. Giving people something to eat or snack on is just the nice thing to do. Make your guests comfortable. Putting albums in their hands reminds them of the value of the album. Walk around and let them touch the canvases on the wall. Talk about the sizes of your samples. All of this adds value to the products and allows the products to sell themselves.
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20. 5. Say, “OK, now let’s choose your favorites and decide what to do with them.”
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22. Here we set expectations again. You need to let your clients know what is coming next so that they can begin looking at the images with the end goal in mind – placing the order.
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24. 6. Go through the proofs and have them choose their favorites.
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26. You can do this with a projector and any program, like Bridge, that lets you tag images. Or you can just use printed proofs, like I do, from ProDPI. Labs will print the file names on the back of the images, or you can use Image Brander to put the file names on the front for you. Just have them make a stack of their favorite images.
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28. 7. After they’ve chosen, say, “OK, we can use all of these and go with package one or you can take a few out and go with package two. What would you like to do?”
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30. It’s important to have a maximum number of images for each of your packages, or albums. This allows you to ask this question. Then it makes it an easy question. It leaves the choice up to the client and you don’t have to do any hard selling.
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I hope these tips help you achieve more and more success.

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Fundy