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Lesson Info

Show and Sell

When we left our last segment, we were talking a little bit about some of the ways that we work on our website with generating that ability to introduce hybrid to clients. We also are talking a little bit about the X's and O's numbers about, Oh, how we're gonna sell clients, hybrid products and one of the things by the way that we left with that. I wasn't as complete as I wanted to be with was we, uh, we made a little ah process, a little example of when we have say, Ah, client that comes in that has a nice big family They got some little kids and we shoot the family photos and we know that we want families to buy a nice, big framed photo, and that's what they're there for. So, of course, we want to up sell them into the nice frame size, but we don't want to over sell them to right. We don't want to sell them a 40 inch sprint. If they don't have room for that in their house, right, we want it. We want to make sure it's appropriate, of course, but we do run into a problem that sometimes...

the E products can take away from print sale product, and we talked about a little bit of a little bit about that. But there's one thing that I failed to mention that was brought back to my attention. Let's let's go back just for a second say that a person comes in and they're spending $700 on a framed print and we decide that we're going to make an E product and we show a pocket portrait of their cute little kids and the kids see it and the kids show it to Mom and Mom and Dad See it? They go. That's great. How do we buy that they go? That's $399. Well, then, all of a sudden, Mom's calculating Oh, we're talking $1000. Well, that's the magic price point that we have to work on his $1000. A person has to be committed to decide, you know, Are we really gonna go past that? Are not going to go past that weaken tell to as trained are trained salespeople, certainly, Comptel, that when somebody really doesn't flinch when it's $ then if it's not an issue, and we are in the city. Chicago. So we do have plenty of people that don't have to worry about spending $1000 a pictured. Of course, there are other people that there's no possibly they're gonna spell that. Spend $1000 in a picture. But we don't want the E product to take away from expanding that sale to 1000 or even beyond $1000. So what we talked about was, if you're able to go from that 699 or 799 sale point into a larger print, that's going to carry you over the $1000 it'll allow you to get the e product for only $99 were great. Well, sometimes if people decide that they want to go with a larger size print, what if that backfires? What if we show them the They come in on the portrait session, right? Say $400 portrait session and we automatically sell them on on $800 picture. They're going to sit there, gonna spend $800. Well, then, what happens if we show him the product and then all of a sudden they love the product better than they like the picture. And what if all of a sudden they say We spent $ to come here to get a picture taken? And now all we want is the $399 E product? We don't want the print. Is that possible? Well, it is possible it has not happened tow us yet. But of course it is possible, and it takes away the ability of that potential $ sale. Ultimately, we would like to have the customer in Chicago, because the way that we position and market ourself is we're not the cheapest place in town and we don't want to be. We want people to come on in who appreciate what we do. We like ah, customer to be attracted to our business by our product, right? They know when they go on our website, it's really clear we shoot a lot of black and white. We do shoot color, but we should A lot of black and white ah prince are framed, their framed to actually three different ways. What you you don't see here and in fact, what Patty's gonna show you what she pops in here in a moment is that we have our standard way of framing and because we we frame just one way, then we get to have really good pricing on that framing, and that's terrific. But that does affect our E products sales as well, because we don't have any big, super great volume of E products that allow us to drive down the cost of that when we talk about the numbers and sense of an E product we're talking about, sure. Ah, lot of shooting time. We're talking about editing time. We're talking about the delivery time and cost. That's really not all that expensive. So when we divide out the X's and O's of the E product, that profit margins are huge, much, much bigger than they are for Ah, studio portrait. Now, when we take into account that we've got to photographers here, one that's got your own office right, you don't really have a studio per se to do a shoot, right? But it is an office. I do have a studio, rather large size studio. I've got to pay for that. You're a mobile photographer you're working on the goal. If you wanted to get in the business of selling big studio prints, it's gonna be hard to sell those mobile because you're going to be have to travel with large prints. Because, my friend, the only way to sell large prints is to show large currency. Yeah, there's no way around that. That's right. In fact, we show prints. Sometimes they're a little bit bigger than they're supposed to be because we want people to buy the next size down. So if we want, if we think that our work really speaks at 16 20 or we're going to show prints larger than that. And on purpose, we're gonna have a right next door so that people say that's a little too big. But boy, that one sure is the right one. We're going to do that now when we talk about the dollars and cents of photography we've got to look at. Of course, overhead is a fixed cost. We have to learn. Look at education, which is also a cost. We also have to look at equipment what's going to do it there, too. Now, if you're gonna move into hybrid photography, for the first time, which, of course, Chris, you're moving in there, so sounds like you're heading that way to you. Want to get in with minimal amounts of costs, Which is great. Also would love to see you gracefully step into hybrid photography and allow it to pay for itself. I'd like you to make dollars with hybrid photography that will allow you to buy the equipment that you need and by the education that you need in order to pay for it by itself. And that's where I'm hoping we end up at so slowly. But surely we have to realize that every time we have a happy hybrid customer, we find out that they're gonna show and they're going to sell that piece, aren't they? They're gonna be selling that for us. Every time Those real estate agents show that e card pro that they get from us. People are gonna ask where they get it. Of course, At the end of it, there's used a little little Chicago portrait dot pro at the end of it. That's great, too. They're glad they're quick to tell folks competitors, Maybe not. But other folks Yeah, more importantly, when we have a pocket portrait, will have a cute little kid. At the end of that. You're going to see that there is a Chicago portrait. Right? Right there. We're gonna have that logo inside there. Never have we had anybody asked to take that branding off, which is really interesting. I don't know. Maybe Patty has a different story. I'm not quite sure, but we have a ways on our website in which we're gonna help people get ready for the cell. Right? Because I want to make sure that I give my salespeople all the tools they need. And I tell him this all the time, said the my production people and my sales people, which both happened to be the same, right? I want to make sure that the three core people that are in my studio right there's me. There's Louis. There's Patti, have other people around us there, too. But those three core people, everybody needs to know everybody else's job. Yeah, I need to know. Not very good. Whenever good sales person compared to Patty, I need to know how to sell. I need to know how to collect the data on the IPad. on the Wufu in order to make that happen. I need Louis to know that too. I need Patty to know how to import the photos in tow. Light room, just in case. Louise, not there is not available. I need Patty to know how to change a roll of paper on the each jet printer. In case Louise not around. To be able to do that, we all need to know each other's job. And you know why that's important. Because they're going to be thinking that while course if one's out, we can replace him, Of course. But they're going to be thinking of Hey, what's maybe a better way? What's an easier way? What's a smarter way to do that? Or war? Now that they know what everybody does? Inventing new ideas like we had this morning, great ideas are possible because I've got Patty thinking about things. Hey, you know what? Maybe Louis could automatically do a no update of two in the morning by this piece of software that I fell into over here. Hey, Louis, check this out. This might save you some time. Hey, bad. This is a great idea. Thank you. Appreciate that works Hillary with me, too. I ask my staff all the time to please tell me if I'd have an interaction with a customer. If you think I could have done a better job, tell me what I could do there that would work better. We do have that kind of relationship. It's kind of fun. I noticed that lunchtime here at Creative Life. I love. I love the lunchroom idea here they bring in really nice food and people chitchat. They talk about personal things and they talk about work things and they mixed them up. You know what? We do that in my place all the time, too. Sometimes on busy, busy Saturdays. It's tough to be able to do that, and in fact we have to eat in stages, right. But we have the ability to communicate those ideas back and forth, and we do spend time doing that. It's very important. I hope other photographers that are lucky enough to be in the position that we are have the same thing. Well, let's go back to that really important page that Patty Bradley uses for us all the time, and that is the E card for business page. I'm going to zoom back out so you can see up on top here this soon. Petty, I think May later today have this on the the brand new website. We know we've got some changes to be made on this here, but we showed earlier. What is an e card pro? I'm gonna show you something that's even cooler than that. A second I did show you that we had the online form that gets the whole ball rolling. That's extremely important. Then, of course, when we talk about when you're going to be a e card, pro customer or any type of customer, for instance, we want people to be able to have tips. So after Patty calls them right, you know it's his pages. In order at the top, they're going to say, Well, what the heck is this e card pro that I'm getting myself into? And it describes what it is. Great. Use it. Great. Next. It's going to say I need you to fill out a form because we need the data that's going to go in your Ekkehard probe. Terrific. Next, Patty closes the deal, closes the deal and says Okay. Got you. Now I got your information. This is terrific. You're going to pay now. You have to pay in advance. We don't do that. I don't want to do that. Don't scare anybody away. I want them to pay when they get there. I want them to feel comfortable on that, Right. Okay. But I want them to have to tips on how to make the best of an e card pro. Then we're gonna talk about price and process, but notice we're gonna do that in order, aren't we? Might show them tips just to make sure that this is totally cool of them. Right. So let's take a look at the tips video. Do you like to make the most out of your e card session at Hauser? Town Studios? Great. Me too. As you can tell, I'm kind of comfortable in front of a camera here. Right. I've done a lot of lives speaking. It was a little bit of television. Of course I got that radio voice thing going on, too. Don't. I want to be able to help you get your message across to your target audience. Whether you want to be forceful and maybe even uplifting. Or if you just want to be gentle and soothing, let's work on intonations. So don't freak out when you have a little problem or your practice in the mirror and you get yourself worked up. Listen, it's okay, Let me coach you through the process. Sometimes people are best to write it all out, memorize it, and then just speaking into the camera, other folks need to read it so they can hear it. And then they're able to just jump into the camera. Me, I'm more of a sound kind of guy when I have a big shoot to do when I've got a lot of text. Or if I have a client that needs me to speak precise terminology, I'll use an ear prompter, a wireless ear prompter, and I record my own voice so that I play it back and then I speak it with a little bit of a delay. That's pretty extreme, and if you've got a major piece of text that you need to work on, we could go there. But I gotta tell you, you're probably not gonna need it when it comes to E cards. Please show up with a spare shirt or blouse. Maybe a change of jacket if you're gonna wear a jacket tie. Great. Bring a little go bag with some hair care products, maybe even a toothbrush and toothpaste. Then when we get you in there, we're gonna get you all comfortable. We're gonna shoot the photo. We're going to shoot the video, allow your photographer to decide we're gonna shoot color. Gonna shoot black and white. Really? That we do these things every day. Allow us to help sculpt that to make it look as impressive as possible. Then when you sit down, for instance, the e card pro that has two segments the introductory and then the specialty segment, right? When you look at my Ekkehard pro, you see that it's Hi. My name's Will Crockett, and I'm a hybrid photographer. Right? All right. Say you come in and you go. Hi, My name's Mike and I'm a real estate developer. Right. I may help you speak that so that you'll just remember the sound of that in your ear. You'll hop on there and speak it the way you want to. Typically the way I help you coach you along is super simple. Let's say Let's go back to Mike there. I'll tell Mike. Hey, Mike, we're going to do the introductory segment. You're going to say Hi, my name is Mike and I'm a in and then they speak it. It pops right out. Really, it's super simple. Now. We don't use any flash in the studios. Don't have to worry about all the lights and stuff flapping around. Our studio is the most state of the art that you've ever seen. That makes photo sessions fast, really good, and our clients say that they're painless, right? I love that. A painless photo session, so we'll have no particular order on whether we shoot photo first or video first. The toughest part is going to be the specialized section of the video. Typically, for most folks there, you're going to probably do a couple different variations. Then you'll speak. Oh, my specialty is whatever, or I specialize in whatever. Then, instead of sitting down and looking through five or six video takes most of the time, we just tell the client Hey, you know what? We think we got it figured out. Let us choose the right one for you. Off you go. If you don't like the choice, we need to make a change. Terrific or fat doesn't sit well with you. That's okay to what we can do is we can take the video clips as well as the photo clips. We can put him up on an online gallery just like this. We do it every day when we shoot family portrait, then you can play them as many times as you want to see which ones you like. Mark the ones that you like. Off you go, we'll have edited and done. It takes about two days, depending on how busy we are, by the way. Sometimes it can take three, but it's usually two days in order to get your video turned around and installed on the My E card platform. Now this really is a terrific and simple way for you to get your message across and be thinking that you may want to rotate your message two or three times per year, depending on what you're doing. Now. If you want to get kind of crazy and bring in your own video, we don't do that very often. Now it is possible. If you kind of know what you're doing and you bring in some really good quality video, that's great. But be planning on us shooting the video for you, right? We're professionals. And even though we don't charge a whole lot for these products, they really are broadcast quality HD. So make sure you have all the stuff that you need to look terrific so that you feel great. Then come on in practice on the way over, Go ahead and speak your lines into your windshield. Don't worry about how you look when you talk, right, forget about it. If you look into a mirror production monitor, you'll never be able to get it right. Also, we don't like the whole use of a teleprompter. Write the text going like the news folks do. You're probably not going to need that now. Some folks are and we have all those tools here at the ready. You're gonna find out this is easier than you think and wait to you see your client's reaction when you show him your e card pro whole. You know, I've actually done entire photo conferences where I've spoken on what these products are and how I shoot them and how I put them together and been able to hear the response from people who see these first time. It's pretty pretty magnanimous. Okay, if you have any other questions, please hop onto Hauser Town. Get in touch with Patty or Louis. Or course you can get in touch with myself If you'd like to come and see one of the e card sessions before you actually commit to one. You could do that if you like to to. So give us a shout. We love to take care your best we can. Thanks. Now there is a perfect example of having your website cell for you because that is now helping your customer understand that they have confidence in use. The photographer. There's the photographer. He's telling me all the things I want to know. Am I gonna need a teleprompter? What am I going to do about clothes? So I trust this guy, right? It's kind of funny, right? Some people think they want to bring their own video right. Hey, I shot my video with my camera. Can I bring this in there and use it? No, no, you can't do that? Uh, no. You could try it if you want to, but let's not do that. Did you have a question? Do you have a question for you? So a lot of times we hear people talk about having this kind of education session with their clients over the phone and having sort of, ah dialogue about it, but pretty much feeding them the same information over and over. Have you found that with this video? Obviously, that's probably more efficient. Tham having multiple phone conversations Have you found that that everything you provided there's enough for people? Or do they still have additional questions? Or is that the process that use just sending them to the video? That's a great question. They're still gonna have questions, and in fact, they still want to hear it from Patty. And this is also one of the differences between men and women, by the way to we find that some of our ladies that come on in lady executives, they would much rather hear about stuff like this from Patty than they would for me. Okay, I got it will visit the photographer. He's the professional. He's the ready to go guy. But you know, Patty, what if I don't really feel comfortable with all that stuff? What's what's going to be? That's what's going to be that. So what we're trying to do is, of course, we'd love to eliminate all the sales problems that we have, but we're not. We're just reducing them. It's all we're really doing. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. Excellent. Excellent question. So we've got one more piece that I want to show you. That's on this page number. This is all on one page. This is R E card pro for business page That helps us define what the e card pro is. How to get the ball started. And some tips for it, of course, but we got to get right down to the bottom line. Right? What's the bottom line? What's this going to cost? How are we going to get this thing paid for And when are we expected to pay? So take a look at this, Maura. About e card pros. Terrific. We shoot them every day in our studio on Western Avenue in Chicago and were also available to shoot out on location. If you've got an environment that you think it worked better. Terrific price is $399. If you order them one at a time, and if you order them in groups of 10 or more, we dropped the price down to 3 49 No matter how you order them, you'll be able to use them on the premium My E car dot pro delivery system. This is the best way to go. We upload the video that we create just for you into my e card dot pro there were going to create a link for you that you can use to send out through text through email, even speaking it over the phone. The reason we use my e card DOT pro system is when we put that video up there. We get that really nice title upon the top. We have the ability to change the background color of that play page. It plays the video flawlessly. Then at the end, it flips over to that connectivity panel where we have your data ready for your customers. The e card prose really are a fine way to get your message across to your clients at any time. Please hop on to house or town and book your e cards session today. And, of course, that is no longer house or town. That's going to be Chicago portrait dot pro. So these are just a few of the tools that we use in order to make online part of our sales process. Remember, it is much more efficient and effective to have 24 hours a day the ability to have somebody reach a website and make make sense and place an order. Start the process of filling out that form and getting that data. Now, when it comes to discounts that we run when we run specials and promotions, we find out that our website gets tons of website hits primarily from folks. That's are saying, All right, I'm getting a discount here. That seems a little unusual. I'm going to go and I'm gonna check out their work. Well, of course we can see what pages they go to, and we can see how long they stay on those pages. Now that data is very important to us. We use a couple of different ways in order to market and advertise our business and one way, of course, is Yelp were big into Yelp course were also big into CEO. Tagging of everything that we possibly can were also really good about joining with charity groups because we find that is a great way to build up a customer base we do use from time to time group on. But we also use a lot of other co promotions with other businesses because we want to be able to be part of a package that seems to work out really, really well for us now. We've used a variety of different tools sales tools, for instance. The only thing that we don't use is any sort of direct mail piece. Once upon a time, of course, that used to be popular, and they used to be one of the biggest things. Forthright. Once upon a time, we used to use yellow pages used to be able to buy postcards, we'd have postcards, sent out two specific areas of zip codes, and we'd be able to get those responses back. That way, you can almost count like clockwork when those would pop through. Well, those no longer working the way they did we do find out. Now that we've made our branding change, we've made some other changes that we do have the ability to draw folks in from traffic, right? We hadn't had that before in the past. Our studio is in such a horrible neighborhood that we didn't want most of the traffic that would come by, right. We'd much rather have a different type of person. So now we're in a neighborhood where we've got the ability to have the front of a building. It's gonna show our photos anytime we want to get the side of a building, that's gonna have the ability to have a nice big sign. We've got a handful of other marketing tools that were about to unwto a leech that we think are going to help us out, particularly with the hybrid thing. Now, best possible way of marketing your business. We all know that is word of mouth. The hardest possible way to develop marketing for your business is word of mouth