Ten Tips for Maximizing Portrait Sales Part I
Categories: Preveal, Sales & Pricing
Chris Scott and his wife Adrienne are creators of the Preveal sales tool, an iPad app for professional photographers. Today Chris shares 5 tips for making the most of your portrait sales. Check back next week for the other five tips for maximizing your portrait sales.
1. Set expectations
The most important thing you can do for your sales, from the start, is to set your clients’ expectations on how much they should prepare to spend on your photography. You can do this by showing a “packages start at…” price on your website or in email responses to inquiries by telling them up-front that your “clients spend and average of $1200 on a portrait session”. This is incredibly important, as it filters out those who cannot afford you and helps ensure that you don’t waste their time and vice-versa.
2. Educate your clients
Along the same lines, after you’ve pre-qualified them and they’ve decided to continue working with you, it’s your job as a professional photographer to do more than just press a button and hope they like what you created enough to buy something. It’s your job to help them figure out what they should buy, what size it should be, where they should display it and in what format it should be displayed. This is your passion, your livelihood, it’s what you spend every waking hour thinking about; why not take the passion and direct it toward creating an incredible client experience by sharing your knowledge of photography with your clients. They want you to lead them and they deserve it. Do your job.
3. Price Profitably
You can’t have a conversation about profitable sales without discussing profitability in your pricing. We are big fans of Professional Photographers of America’s Benchmark Survey (you’ll need to be a member to access it, but seriously, you should be a member anyway). By following the suggestions within the benchmark, you can be sure that you’re pricing your products in way that leads to a profitable, sustainable business (and it has nothing to do with saying, “well, EpicChicVintageBoutiqueCouture Studio down the street charges $35, but I’m better than them, so….”). Here’s the basic breakdown for guess-free pricing:
(Total Cost of the Product + Total Cost of your Time) X 3 or 4 = Product Price
(x3 will give you a Cost of Sale of 35%, x4 a Cost of Sale of 25%)
4. Know Your Numbers
Continuing along the same thought, once you’ve figured out your Cost of Sale on your various products, you may find that you simply cannot charge the prices that the formula suggests (for example, if you do it correctly and count in all of your time involved, your 8×10 will come out to around $150). This is when it’s incredibly important to know all of your numbers. By this I mean, know which products you have a high Cost of Sale on and start pairing them with low Cost of Sale products in order to average out to an acceptable Cost of Sale (the benchmark suggests a COS of roughly 25%). There’s so much more to say on this topic, but they are entire blog posts in and of themselves. We’ve got a few planned for the Preveal blog, so swing by sometime and check them out.
5. Find your Carrot on a Stick and Use it
For us, the carrot on the stick is the disc of images. Most of our clients want the disc and we’re more than happy to sell it to them, as long as we hit the average sale that we need to hit in order to run a sustainable business. For that reason, our a la carte price on the disc of images is set at exactly the same price as the bare minimum we’d like to make off of each sale. If you do packages for your seniors, place the disc (or whatever your carrot is) in the lowest priced package that gets you your goal average, or in the package that you want all of your clients to get. In our wedding business, we sell almost all of the same package using this strategy.
Thanks for taking the time to read through these, please leave any questions in the comments section and I’ll check back to answer anything as it comes up. And go check out Preveal, it’ll change the way you sell wall portrait, for serious.
Chris Scott
@preveal
Latest posts by Chris Scott (see all)
- Tips for Maximizing Portrait Sales Part II - March 4, 2013
- Ten Tips for Maximizing Portrait Sales Part I - February 25, 2013
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