You Are Not Your Market
Post Excerpt:
Pricing our photography services and products causes us more headaches than trying to read in the dark. It sometimes feels as though we’re in the dark, too. To do it properly actually takes a lot of effort, much trial and error, and a degree of personal detachment.
Pricing our photography services and products causes us more headaches than trying to read in the dark. It sometimes feels as though we’re in the dark, too. To do it properly actually takes a lot of effort, much trial and error, and a degree of personal detachment.
Don’t Lower Your Prices:
Imagine how hard it would be to sell something so expensive that you had to convince not only your client, but yourself too, that it’s worth the asking price. This is the problem a lot of photographers feel they are faced with – and many of them respond by reducing their prices unnecessarily, to a level they themselves might feel more comfortable with.
But why does this happen?
Naturally, our own confidence in our pricing is based upon how comfortable we might feel actually paying the prices we ourselves are asking. How many times have you looked at your own prices and caught yourself thinking something like, “I don’t think they will want to pay that much” for a particular product or service? Your inner voice is using the only value system it has – your own experience – in order to evaluate whether a potential client will baulk at the prices you’re proposing. If you couldn’t afford to hire yourself, it can make you feel insecure in your price list. This comes across to the client as a lack of confidence in yourself when you’re trying to communicate the prices to them. Sales can easily be lost that way, and a lot of money can be left on the table.
Price = Value = Sale:
We need to believe in what we’re selling and be confident in the prices we charge as representing good value for money and worth the investment. That doesn’t mean we have to be cheap. Consider someone in car sales as an example. It’s possible that the salesperson trying to sell a brand new Porsche to a client wouldn’t be able to afford to buy the car for themselves. Yet, they can proudly state the price to the client – leaving it to them to decide if the car is worth the asking price based on the intangible values of the purchase as well as the car itself.
The point is: You are not your own market.
If you want to earn a great living from your photography, and you certainly can do, even in this economic climate, then you need to set your prices to provide you with the earnings you need in order to live and make a profit. That means becoming comfortable with prices you might not be able to afford if you were the client.
How Much Did You Say?
One way to do this is to create a top tier price that is so outrageous and so high that no one would invest in it. The client is supposed to think the price is crazy – which takes the pressure off you because you already know what their response is going to be. The price for the next level down suddenly sounds reasonable to both you and the client, and you can more easily talk about your prices with confidence. This is one reason we should never give prices to a prospective client out of context or without the appropriate sales presentation (more on this in a later post).
Some things to bear in mind when creating a price list for your photography services:
- Make sure you know all of your associated costs
- Create tiered pricing with different options (but not too many)
- Packages always outsell a la carte
- Base your prices on how many units you need to sell to earn the living you want
- Don’t be intimidated by your target market
- Be confident in what you’re selling – believe in it and in yourself
Your work is immensely valuable to your client in a sentimental sense – it’s up to you to match that value with a monetary equivalent that both you and the client will be happy with.
If you are still in any doubt, think of it this way, how much would she value a $5 8×10 portrait in 20 years time? Now, what about a $200 8×10?
Which one would you rather sell?
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I found the best way to get comfortable with my prices was to set them, put them on my website and forget about them. This way when the client contact you, you know they’ve seen the prices and have decided they are comfortable with the prices.
For me, I picked a percentage to mark up all of my print prices. I used the same percentage over my cost for all of my products. That made me comfortable with my prices since I knew there wasn’t a big discrepency between different products.
I definitely had a hard time setting and sticking to prices in the beginning but once I did it, I don’t even think about it anymore. I feel like that makes me more confident when talking with the client.
Love your articles!