Zenologue

It’s a real shame that the popular conception of the word “salesperson” evokes more negative thoughts than positive ones in people’s minds. We all know who the usual suspects are: the shady used car salesperson, the unscrupulous insurance salesperson, and the pressure salesperson… no one wants to be like them, right?

We speak of “sales tactics” as though we, as prospects, are engaged in a war of nerves with these people. Even the phrase “foot in the door” evolved from the early adoption of poor technique by some desperate door-to-door salesperson who couldn’t use gentle persuasion to help a prospect buy from them.

Unfortunately, these minority individuals have tarnished the good profession of selling so much that the truly ethical and professional sales people are faced with the daily challenge of having to overcome an enormous amount of natural distrust in their prospects. There are literally millions of ethical salespeople working every day with their clients’ needs forefront in their minds, yet they’re forced to dispel the myth that all sales people are dishonest before they can even begin to do their job.

I can hear you saying, “What has this to do with being a photographer?”

The answer is, “Everything.”

If you’re in the position of earning part or all of your income from photography, ask yourself this question: “Do I consider myself to be a salesperson?” Be honest with your answer. Several years ago, I myself would have answered “no“, protesting inwardly that I’m a photographer, not a salesman.

But the truth is, we’re not photographers – we’re salespeople – we just happen to be selling our photographic services as well as ourselves. It doesn’t matter how good our photography is if we can’t sell it effectively – it certainly isn’t going to sell itself. If that were the case, there would be no starving artists or poor photographers, and talented photographers wouldn’t be going out of business by the dozen right now.

An even harder lesson for many photographers to learn is this: We need to sell ourselves as trustworthy individuals with artistic vision and integrity before we ever try to sell a single photograph or portrait session.

A word of caution here – if you’re reading this and thinking to yourself that selling in the photography business is going to be all about trickery and manipulation, or trying to coerce clients into purchasing things beyond their means, you are quite wrong. Ethical selling doesn’t involve tricks or manipulation of any kind. It does rely on human psychology to understand the buying and selling process, but not to influence the result. That’s where the unethical salespeople have made their home, but you can’t run a successful photography studio based on those principles.

Anyway, before I learned the hard lesson that we need to sell ourselves first, I naively considered selling in the photography business to be the simple act of handing someone a photograph in exchange for some money. Somehow, someone would hire me to photograph them and then they would see the finished photographs and purchase some. That seemed great at the time, and fuelled my misconception that the photography must be doing the selling, not me.

Then I looked to see what I was actually selling – some 8×10′s, but mostly 5×7′s and that kind of thing. Why were these clients not purchasing a wall portrait? After all, they hired me to take their portrait, so why buy something that may only end up in a drawer somewhere? As far as I was concerned, the client was losing out on the long-term enjoyment of their portrait.

So, the next time, I decided to try to sell a 16×24, but with dismal results. Why? The answer is simple – it wasn’t because they couldn’t afford it, but merely because they weren’t sufficiently sold on me, and they weren’t sold on the benefits to them. Frankly, looking back on it now, I was lucky they even hired me in the first place!

I often look outside of the photography business to learn and study, so this example might help to reinforce my point: You visit a restaurant with your spouse for a romantic meal, a restaurant you’re both familiar with and which you know serves great food. On this particular visit, your waiter happens to be someone you’ve not seen before. He fumbles with the menu, is apathetic about the food, can’t recall the specials, knocks the wine over, curses and lacks general good manners. Now, even though the food is as good as or better than usual, do you think your overall experience could be considered great? Probably not… You might tell your friends that the food was okay but the service was terrible. Not a great recommendation, and it means the efforts of the kitchen were wasted.

To apply this to the business of photography, think of the food as being the photographs and the waiter as being the personality and character of the photographer. It’s very clear that the personality and character of the photographer is at least as important, if not more so, than the quality of the finished photographs. This is one of the reasons why there are some photographers with average talent doing better than others with outstanding photographic ability (the other reason being marketing skills, but that’s for another article).

The point of this example isn’t to simply say that we need to be polite and pleasant, although those are perfectly good qualities we all should have. The real point is that the client must first like us and trust us in order to make their buying experience a pleasant and memorable one. In the example given, especially if this was our first visit, we might be just as likely to leave the restaurant without ordering anything at all, given that the waiter was neither selling themselves, the food, or the restaurant in a positive way. The same goes for the photography studio.

Conversely, in a restaurant with friendly and professional staff, a wonderful atmosphere and great food, we experience a wonderful buying experience. There is absolutely no trickery or manipulation on the part of the restaurant, only good service and a great product. We, as clients, would not feel ripped off after spending money on a wonderful meal at a great restaurant, even though we know we could buy the ingredients ourselves for a lot less.

So, cast off those old misconceptions about what you think a salesperson is, and become a really good salesperson instead – the success of our photography business depends on it. There are a lot of resources out there to learn from – books, web sites, audio courses etc. As always, I strongly recommend the works of Zig Ziglar, one of the greatest of all salespeople, but there are many others too. A quick check of the local library or bookstore will reveal a treasure trove of information here.

The great thing is that you don’t need books directly related to selling photography. Sales techniques (good ones, that is!) are universal and will work in any business in any location, as long as you believe in yourself and in your product.

Sales professional photographer, selling