Projection Appointment/Order Appointment
Remember the form we filled out during the initial telephone call. We now are to take this form and review it and make sure the customer gets what he wants while at the same time enhance the sale to its maximum. You have to determine before hand what is it exactly you want the customer to buy. My goal was always to sell at least 1 wall portrait. Not that you can’t make a reasonable profit selling 8x10’s and 5x7’s. We make most of our money selling 8x10’s, 5x7’s and 11x14’s. I’ll always sell the client what they initially called for and then do an up sell. Do I want to sell a wall portrait or a collection? One thing we have to be careful about is not to sell yourself out of a bigger sale. I’ll explain later on.
Less is more. With digital we are able to take more images than we would with film. Don’t over whelm them with too many choices. A rule of thumb is the law of 20. Don’t show any more than 20 images. This can vary if you are doing an extended family and then individual families, but the customer will become over whelmed if he has too many choice to make, and most likely he won’t make any choice and will say he wants to “think about it” or ” I’ll have to ask my husband”. Edit them down. What they won’t see they won’t miss.
Sell size before pose. It is usually harder to select the pose rather than the size. A trial close I use is “Suppose this is the pose you like. How do you feel about this size? They’ll ask what size it is and we’ll tell them and than quote the price. We also tell them that it can be purchased a’la’carte or within a money saving package. Which ever would be the most economical? I think you know where I going with this. A lot depends on how we merchandise our products. Most times merchandising is more important that pricing. The principal is to “Make it easy to buy a lot and hard to buy a little.” I’ll have more on this with “How to merchandise you product.” Remember I said don’t talk yourself out of a bigger sale? What I mean is that sometimes the order in which we sell things can hurt our final sale. Composites and collections have become very popular with digital capture. We can fall in love with a product and some times we’ll sell a composite for less even if it costs us more to produce; just because we think it looks cool. I’ll talk more about this when we discuss merchandising. My recommendation is that that you sell the basic items first, then offer the collections as “addons” latter, at a discount. Have a list price for the collections, and when a certain purchase level is reached, offer the “addons” at a discounted price.
Remember the form we filled out during the initial telephone call. We now are to take this form and review it and make sure the customer gets what he wants while at the same time enhance the sale to its maximum. You have to determine before hand what is it exactly you want the customer to buy. My goal was always to sell at least 1 wall portrait. Not that you can’t make a reasonable profit selling 8x10’s and 5x7’s. We make most of our money selling 8x10’s, 5x7’s and 11x14’s. I’ll always sell the client what they initially called for and then do an up sell. Do I want to sell a wall portrait or a collection? One thing we have to be careful about is not to sell yourself out of a bigger sale. I’ll explain later on.
Less is more. With digital we are able to take more images than we would with film. Don’t over whelm them with too many choices. A rule of thumb is the law of 20. Don’t show any more than 20 images. This can vary if you are doing an extended family and then individual families, but the customer will become over whelmed if he has too many choice to make, and most likely he won’t make any choice and will say he wants to “think about it” or ” I’ll have to ask my husband”. Edit them down. What they won’t see they won’t miss.
Sell size before pose. It is usually harder to select the pose rather than the size. A trial close I use is “Suppose this is the pose you like. How do you feel about this size? They’ll ask what size it is and we’ll tell them and than quote the price. We also tell them that it can be purchased a’la’carte or within a money saving package. Which ever would be the most economical? I think you know where I going with this. A lot depends on how we merchandise our products. Most times merchandising is more important that pricing. The principal is to “Make it easy to buy a lot and hard to buy a little.” I’ll have more on this with “How to merchandise you product.” Remember I said don’t talk yourself out of a bigger sale? What I mean is that sometimes the order in which we sell things can hurt our final sale. Composites and collections have become very popular with digital capture. We can fall in love with a product and some times we’ll sell a composite for less even if it costs us more to produce; just because we think it looks cool. I’ll talk more about this when we discuss merchandising. My recommendation is that that you sell the basic items first, then offer the collections as “addons” latter, at a discount. Have a list price for the collections, and when a certain purchase level is reached, offer the “addons” at a discounted price.
Nice article Paul. I feel the same way. Giving the client too many images does confuse them. Even with our weddings we limit our images. With digital, just because we can ( shoot unlimited images ) doesn't mean we should. I'll be looking forward to the next article, thank you.
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