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The Ordering Process

Lesson 27 from: Senior Photography: Break the Mold

Blair Phillips

The Ordering Process

Lesson 27 from: Senior Photography: Break the Mold

Blair Phillips

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Lesson Info

27. The Ordering Process

Next Lesson: Custom Collections

Lesson Info

The Ordering Process

share with you guys. All of the products that actually helped make us a lot of money. Ah, lot of times people just say, yeah, What? We sell this and we sell this and we saw this and this. Well, I decided, You know what? Instead of just telling you about it, I'm gonna bring everything here, and I'm gonna show you about it so that you can get a sense of exactly how we do things and how we use them to elevate our profits. And, you know, again, we're only as good as the lab that you use. And I'm a prime example of that. You know, I'm very, very confident in every product that I have every product that I have. I can't wait to deliver to my client because I know that when it comes in, I don't really even have to unwrap it and look at it and inspect it, because I know it's gonna be spot on. I know that. So my friends and family H and H color lab were nice enough to get all of these goods here. And I said, look, if we're gonna get him here, I want to make sure it's all the stuff that I use wit...

h my designs and my wife designs. And we're gonna show you exactly how we do it and gonna teach you and show you how not to work for free anymore. No one wants to work for free, right? Anybody want to work for free anymore? That I wouldn't? I wouldn't think so. So post such session education when you're done with a session, Have you ever had those clients come in and just say, if you do in an order appointment or if you're someone that post images online, Have you ever had those clients that just say, Yeah, I'm just I'm just not ready to order today or they say, Well, I know we had this day set and I'm here and I looked at all the images, But is there any way you can just post them online for me? And because my husband, he really would like to look at him as well? You know what that means? That means two different things. That means I don't really want to make this decision today because my husband will kill me if I spend this much money and it also means if you post them online for me, sir, I promise I look at him tonight. Um, and the $1000 order that I had will probably diminished to about $200. You have to get him in that state when they're in the most emotional vulnerability that they're in. And I don't mean that in a bad way again. We have to make money. As a photographer, we have to use all these tools available to make money. We would never go to our clients job and say, Hey, you know what? This week is there any way that you could work for half of what your wage normally is? So why are we letting our clients do that? So you have to educate a great sale starts from the very first phone call. If you're having clients that are like, Well, I didn't know. I didn't know it was gonna be this much Or what's how what is? Oh, no. I don't know that I can afford that or oh, I don't know. And we didn't do the proper education leading up to that. So what I do when a client comes in for their session before they leave before they leave, we go over the ordering process. So there's no confusion, no confusing whatsoever. And when they come in and they're checking out, I say, Listen, we need to make an order appointment Time for you. I don't say a viewing session or a time for you to come back and look at your images. I say we need to schedule an order appointment time for you. And I follow that up by saying this will be the time that you're gonna come in. You're gonna place your order. All the money that is due will be paid that day. So what I want you to do is I want you to bring any decision maker that you can think of if your husband or your spouse or your boyfriend or your neighbor, your mother, father, grandparents, anybody that needs to be here. Let's schedule it on the day that they can be here because we're gonna go through everything with a fine tooth comb. I'm gonna make it really easy for you to make your decisions. It's gonna be one of the easiest sales processes you've ever had in your life. And I followed up by saying Listen, and it's not gonna be one of high pressure deals where I'm like, Oh, if you buy this, you do dio none of that. You're here. You spend your money the way you won't. We're gonna make it easy. So people like the fact that we are communicating with them so they know what they're getting themselves into. It's just like you guys. You submitted a video. You knew what you were getting into. Maybe not exactly with me. But you knew you were gonna sit and learn. Now, it would be really awkward if you came in And you thought that we're gonna be going out on location and shooting for three days and you're like, Wait a minute, we're going to sit here like and learn. And I didn't realize that would make it awkward. So communicate, communicate state consistent. What I do. I issue parents homework. So if a senior, a senior mother not seen your mother, that would be kind of awkward. Wouldn't a seniors mother? I issue her homework and I say, Listen, you've got homework to do, and this is what I want you to do. I want you to take this thing right here and I want you to take it home, and I want you to peel the back of it off and I'm gonna actually send you a video that's going to reiterate all this. So I'll say Tell him what they do with it. It's got all the instructions of what they do, and I've got a video that will explain it. So I'm not gonna kill everything now. But what they do is they take this piece, they peel the back of it off and they stick it on the wall. Now share with you in a minute. What we do with it, this comes from H and H. This is a wall clean, and it will not tear up sheet rock. We do large like 30 by forties that are all designed with beautiful images and design work. And kids are actually sticking these on their bedroom wall because it's a poster that you can put on the wall. You can peel it off and it doesn't mess up the wall so I can cover two things. I could be for the parent and say this won't therapy wall and I could be there for the child saying, Listen, you need to talk your mom into this because it's gonna look awesome in your room. So again, peel it off, stick it on the wall. This is part of their homework. It's got all the instructions on it of what I need them to do before they come back for the order appointment. Now, as of yesterday are my been day before you got to solve that. We do a lot of video marketing, right? Lots of video marketing. So do you think I'm just gonna talk to my client and say, Do this? They're gonna take this, stick it in their pocket book. They're gonna go outside, get in the car, and they're gonna forget everything that we just talked about. So when they get home, nestled safely in their in box is going to be what video? Exactly. It's a video of follow up video of exactly what they need to do. Is this redundant? Of course it is. But they're gonna watch this video and recap more than they're going to sit there and listen to me of what I just told them. You can basically explain it until your blue in the face, but again, breaking down the community, the communication barriers. Having a video for every aspect of your business, to me is very, very important. Very important. So to take a look at this next video, this is me explaining how they're gonna use this wall cling and what they're going to do with it. And then we're gonna talk a little bit further about why we do this in just a moment. All right, So your session is done, and first of all, very, very sincere and genuine. Thank you for coming in. We really enjoyed working with you guys and look forward to seeing you again sometime. So from here, this is the part that you're gonna come back and do your order appointment. That's where we're gonna walk you through everything. Make it really, really easy to make your decisions. Kind of Just lay it all out on the table for you. The next part is turning it over to Adam. He's my right hand man. He's gonna make everything really comfortable for you. Show you all the options and basically just walking right through it. So again, thank you very much for coming. Hey, guys. I'm Adam with Blair Phillips. Photography were Thank you again for coming in for your session. Blair, I know you're absolutely gonna love your photos, So your order points coming up in a few days, and we want to make sure that we prepare you as best we can for so first things first. Whenever you lift, you were given one of these. Now, you might ask yourself, What's the purpose? Well, basis is kind of like your homework before you come back in for your quarter point basic. What we'd like you to do, find 3 to places in your home that you think a wall portrait look great. You mean your bedroom living room hallway that's completely up to you guys. So find three or five places, clear the wall, and this is basically a stick. Now, don't worry. It's not gonna take paint off or anything like that. It's meant to be on walls, so simply pill the back off, place it up onto the wall. Step back as far as you can. 10 feet. Great. If you can't work in 10 feet, that's perfectly fine, too. But step back. Take a photo with any digital camera. Now this can be a regular Nikon Coolpix, or it could be your smartphone. Whatever is more convenient for you, So simply take a photo with this on the wall of each of those 3 to 5 places. E mail those photos to us. You can email at Blair at Blair Phillips Photography, and we'll get these and income times your order appointment will be able to shave exactly what different photos will look like in frames over that in those particular areas in your house. It's a great way to really help you choose what wall portrait work best. I'm sure you're wondering about packages and how those work when it worries we have something that's really awesome. We call it a custom collection. Now, in most places, they normally have preset packages where you choose Package A, B, C or D. Now, that's all well and good, but we don't like doing that necessarily for a couple reasons. One. You're not really in control of what you get. You might get stuck with 15 8 by tens. If you don't want 15 8 by tens, you shouldn't have to get him. So what? We have our custom collection is a great way for you to customize your package. It's basically build your own package. You can choose what signs wall portrait you want. You can even choose different types of albums, different types of gift France, eight buckets and smaller and even wallets. You choose the amount and you choose what poses. It's really, really nice, and I'll go into it a lot more detail when you come in for your order point. All right. Lastly, your order appointments in just a few days. So one of main things we really want to make sure you guys understand it. Be sure that any decision makers who will be either making decisions on what type of photos you get or even the financial decisions we want to make sure they're here at the War Department. Now, this could be parents. This could be grandparent's or any other sort of guardian. Make sure they're here, and we'll definitely get you guys fixed up with your own package. All right, well, thank you guys so very much. We really appreciate it. We can't wait. See your photos. You know, they're gonna look amazing. So if you have any questions feel free to call the studio. Our number here is 7048553656 You can also email us at Blair at Blair Phillips photography dot com. Or you can hook up with us on Facebook, Twitter, whatever works best for you. So once again, we can't wait to see you guys have an awesome day. Should there be any reason that a client is not prepared when they come back for the order appointment? Not at all. If they're not prepared after that, there is a serious problem. And that's when I would take offense and I would say, Look, you gotta lock this down. We've done everything. We've texted you the information we've emailed it. I sent a singing telegram to your to your house. I didn't do a singing telegram. Let's talk about order appointments. This is where a lot of people really missed the boat and let's talk about your area and you're set up. What do you have? Do you have you all of your products out from people to see H and H Color? Lab, in my opinion, has the most spectacular array of products available, and they make it so easy for me to have all these tools available to make money, so if you don't have it out, they're never gonna buy it. It's just like the check out counter. Put all your goods out so that they can see it. Now talk about the layout of your room. These are 24 by thirties in your area. Don't put eight by 10 11 by 14 16 by 2020 24 Don't don't do that thing where it lines them all up where someone can pick what they want. Because every single time that I was will gravitate towards the middle and you have that client. It'll come in and say, Well, I want I want a really big 11 by 14 and you're like, OK, first of all, that's not 11 or 14. So the way that we sell large images is really, really easy. We have 24 about thirties and 30 about forties framed prints, and it's very strategically done. We have full body images, we don't have face shots. We have big, large full body images. Pull back so that people look small, so it takes a large image to make them look bigger. So in that space where they thought they wanted to let my 14 they really don't know it. But they need, like, a 24 by 30. So if you show larger prints, they'll say, Well, I like that. What size is that? I'll say. Well, ma'am, you know, you were thinking about let my 14 but that's actually 24 by 30 0 wow. Well, that's what I need to fill that area. Yeah, exactly. So you have to have that visual. Another thing. All right. Use IPADS for your sales presentations. I used to do everything on paper, everything on paper, a little catalogue, basically, for every single line. What made me mad was my clients would come in and say, What can I have? Three or four they used to take to some friends. I have a complex system. I don't want to just throw everything out there. I want to talk to people about my pricing. So I would be Yes, here. That was $3. I got mad at that. I was cheap. So went to I went to apple and eyeball the refurbished IPads. All right. And I put our whole entire sales program on the IPads, and we did it in a J peg form. So you loaded up as images and the people just scroll through it. There's no recurring cost. What if I want to change my prices? My fear of having to buy 500 more of those things of those paper. I would not do it so I would keep. My price is the same for a year, basically until I ran out of him. But with this, there's no recurring calls. None whatsoever. I can change my prices any time. And people really like technology. They're liking it. So in the sales room, I have three IPads. I have one for the parent, one for the other parent or the child. And then I have one for the little kids that come in that run around and drive Mom absolutely crazy and wreck my cell. And we put them some little games on. And I say, Look, you coming, buddy? Won't you sit down over here and I want you to get up on some angry birds? Okay, that's what we do, and it really, really helps because moms get frustrated and they locked down because their kids over there tearing something up. And they say I just I just can't do this today. Blair, can you Can you just post them online? I'm gonna wreck your sale by doing that, can you just post them online? And you've lost all that work that you tried to do? I want to talk through the whole process of how we handle in order appointment. What about? What do we do from start to finish to ensure that every single client that comes in, we reward them with awesome prints and they reward us by paying us what we feel like that were worth. And again, it feels so good going to work now that I have a confidence sales system that I'm going to share with you guys, that is so bulletproof, There's no way that it's not gonna work. There's no way prime example. When I first started in photography, alright, my average was $320. That's what I gave. That was like one of my highest packages, $320. Well, people would feel that package and it left him nowhere to go because they say, Well, I'm already got it I don't need any more. Figure out a way to let the client be in control, but they're really not. And check this out. Here's the process. When they first come into the theater room we have on the screen, we have one of their graduation announcements. It's pre design, and it's on the screen. While did we have a graduation announcement already up? Because they don't know that we offer them. But through H and age are awesome. Lab. We don't just have, ah, plain Jane type thing here. We've got designer announcements that we can offer with lots of images. Pearl paper. We've got different types of designer cards that we create announcements out off on the back. And you know what? You know how we sell these? We say, Look, do you know how much more money and how many more checks you're going to get if you send these to your family versus that one you're gonna get from the school and quite frankly, these air actually cheaper than the ones that they get from school and their custom designed, but they don't know that we have them available. If I don't present them to them right, So we've got several different templates that we use for that as well. Now we show everything through an emotive so we load all of their images into an emotive which is an awesome slide show maker. You load it, it does. The music hits it to the beat. It's amazing, awesome product. So they sit down and they watch a video of their images. And then from there we pull up pro select, which is how we sell. That's our selling software. And then from there, once we start selling, we obviously make money. Right now. Go back to that graduation announcement. I used to never really sell graduation announcements because I didn't advertise him. But what we do is we showed that at the very beginning, and we say, Hey, listen, plant a little seed for you. We're gonna go back at the end of all this, and we're gonna go ahead and just design you one that you really, really like that we will have it on file. But we'll get to that later. So we go ahead and do that with these senior card templates. You know, you can spend hours upon hours designing stuff But if you have a core group of templates that you can use and manipulate, and you just drag it in and that's all you have to do, you don't have to do anything else. Nothing else. So, as a result of that, we had a big demand of people saying, Can you help me design these five by seven designer cards here? Can you help me with that? Have a template available for that and we're doing everything half price. So check that out. That's on our workshops page. If you struggle with templates, we got you covered. No need to worry about it. Some moving back to the an emoto we say I want you. Mom. Listen, I want you to sit back, Relax. I'm gonna dim the lights and I want you to look at the fruits of my labor and the fruits of all of your labor and just enjoy it for a minute. Don't worry about making decisions. I want you just to watch it. And we put together an example. This is an actual example of video of what the client sees when they first come in. The very first thing we cut the lights out. We cued the video when we get ready to play it. So let's take a look at this video here, and you'll get a sense of exactly from a bird's eye view off what a client sees when they come to our studio way. And this cheese I used to be, Oh, cheese, cheese, The way you talk about the time process, the process of how we show the images, What are we doing? How are how are the people seeing the images to buy them? We're using Pro Select. It's a great selling tool. It's a It's a system that's been designed by photographers, four photographers to sell their images. So this is basically what the client sees when the images, Whenever the an emotive slide shows over, we say, All right, let's get down to business here. This is what they see, and then this is what we see so we don't show them the back end. Now what? What it allows you to do is if you look at this next slide here, there's a yes, a. Maybe in a no category. We'll me out. We only use the yes and the no because this is pretty definitive. I'll say, Look, if it's if it's a maybe go ahead and throw it in the throw it in the Yes, because I want to make that maybe into a yes. So I said, If there is just something that you see that you just like, Whoa, that's terrible. Say no, if you remotely like it to say yes and all we do is we go through when we just scroll through the images really quick and she says, Yes, we hit number three. No Number five, Yes, three. Yes, yes, yes. Real, Real simple. I don't want her to sit and contemplate over for a long time because I don't want to feel like she's getting rid of a lot of them, either. So she'll say no to only a select handful. But now is the time when we say, Do you remember that homework that I gave you? Do you remember the homework? Mom? The reason that we gave you that homework is because now we're going to show you this new feature that it's called a room view, and this is going to allow us to start selling larger portrait, and it allows me to show you exactly what it's gonna look like in your home. Whatever size you want it. And it's going to show the frame. I can show it unframed. I can show a horizontal vertical upside down inside out whatever you want. So now they have a visual. It's a custom, like a custom designer for them now. So that client it comes in and says I want that really big eight by 10. Oh, yeah, you do home. Okay, let me show you just how stupid that's gonna look. Okay, That's what you're a about 10 is gonna like your wall portrait. Obvious. I would never say that to a client. This is for teaching purposes, but I'll say may I mean, are you sure about anybody? Instantly. Just show you. You know that. And this is why we put these into place So you don't make a big mistake here. Now, let me show you what it looks like If we would put at least a 24 by 30 you know, personally, I would probably go a little bit bigger if I were you. But I already see that you're a little apprehensive on that. So I want to give you what you want and what you think fits best. You know, I'm not a professional. I don't do this every day. You do? Obviously, I don't say that either. So if she is just set on eight by tens, then you can still sell her eight by tens. So you have to have a backup plan for everything. If she says no, I'm an eight by 10 type of girl. Okay, that's fun. What about? I'll sell you a group of eight by tens. So in my cells process, I'm never settling for one. I'm always going after more. So instead of selling one, I want to sell more. And I say, you know what? We'll sell those groupings. And what design? Let me design you some eight by tens as wall art. When we put together some wall art, they say, man, this is This is actually going pretty good. Now what I'm doing is I'm pulling more money for my studio. But I'm also designing something They're going through design course with me or with Adam and they're making it. I'm making it really simple form. I'm making it so easy for them. Toe opened up their checkbook and be able to write a check. If you don't put all this technology out in front of you to give you the tools to make you confident and to make you appear that you know what you're doing, then you know you may not get there. You want to instill that confidence in your client that this guy was state of the art. He had a gun. He showed me what it looked like on my walls and everything.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Senior Posing Guide
Blair Phillips Discounts

Ratings and Reviews

David - Muse 10
 

As an experienced photographer myself, this class was both helpful and inspirational…we're never too experienced to learn from someone. Blair is really a lot of fun to watch and listen to. He has a way of making things fun with his high energy and dry sense of humor. To be completely honest in my review of this class, the lighting and posing sections, while VERY good, have been done over and over again by lots of photographers and didn't offer much in the way of new ideas. The real value was in the customer service and marketing techniques presented here. Blair's use of video as a marketing and communication tool with his clients is very unique and sparked TONS of ideas I would like to implement in my studio. His simple pricing structure and the way he presents it to his clients is also unique and has helped me rethink some of my own methods. "That being said" (Blair should appreciate that phrase) this class is totally worth the price and will continue to be a good reference for me. Some photographers are excellent at their craft but are dry teachers; others are great teachers but their "real-life" work doesn't live up to their classroom presentations. Blair is the real deal and makes this class very exciting.

a Creativelive Student
 

Blair is great. This class is packed full of great info and is a genuine good hearted person.. Really like his approach with high school seniors. I recommend it.

a Creativelive Student
 

This has been my favorite class on Creative Live. I loved how Blair explained exactly how he landed dance and sports contracts. This class was packed full of ideas for marketing and selling products. There was just so much great information. Thanks, Blair!

Student Work

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