How Not To Paralyze Your Photography Clients
#6: They work well from different angles…
Summary: "How Not To Paralyze Your Photography Clients"
Are you putting your clients in shock with too many photographs to choose from and too many package options? Limiting what they can choose from may actually help your sales.
How many package or print options do you offer your clients? Three? Five? Ten? Fifty? Does it really matter? Apparently it does! Sometimes, less really can be more. If we provide too many options in a misguided attempt at helping our client with more possibilities, we could actually send them into option shock, resulting in them not choosing anything at all.
Wheat, Rye or White?
I’m sure many of us have encountered this problem in the past through the simple task of trying to order a sandwich. What could possibly be difficult about ordering two slices of bread with something in between?
If the oversize menu behind the counter isn’t enough to put one in shock, the barrage of questions from the server certainly can. Wheat, Rye or White? Mayonnaise or mustard, or both? Oil and vinegar? Which meats would you like? Cheese? Sure. American, Swiss, Provolone, Cheddar, Colby Jack, Monterey Jack? Oh forget it, I don’t feel hungry any more!
It can be difficult to truly enjoy a sandwich that was this much effort to order.
When our food finally arrives, how many of us look first to see what everyone else got, and secretly wish we’d ordered what they have? The pain of the decision makes us wonder if we made the correct choice and can have us second-guessing.
Option Paralysis
The feeling of being unable to make a choice in the face of so many options is like being a deer in the headlights. We can no longer move towards a decision because we’re subconsciously afraid that we’ll make the wrong choice, or that another choice might be a better one. With so many options, it’s difficult to sort them out rationally.
There are so many variables at play that it derails our normal decision-making process and renders us powerless to make a decision that we find satisfying.
Perhaps this is why the waiter tries to break down the decision into smaller, more manageable chunks or stages, which finally result in the order for a finished sandwich. Even so, the process is still a painful one.
What’s On Your Menu?
When your clients view their finished portraits to make their final order selections, what factors do you think will come into play to affect their decision-making ability and, ultimately, the value of their final purchase?
More importantly, how will the ease or difficulty of the decision-making process affect the probability of them having an attack of buyer’s remorse the next day, and calling to cancel the order?
There are two distinct components involved here:
- The number of photographs from which to choose
- The number of packages the client can pick from
Too Many Photographs
This is a mistake that I think many of us are making, myself included at times. We’re simply showing the client too many images at the projection session. I’ve seen this at work over and over again, yet it’s a difficult one to fix sometimes, especially if we have a lot of great but varied images.
The optimum number of photographs to show depends to some extent on the type of session we’re showing and the result we’re expecting. It’s fair to say that we can show many more photographs from a wedding than we would for a portrait session, where the expectations and end products are very different.
For the sake of this article, let’s assume that we’re talking about portrait sessions; families, seniors, kids etc.
How many images should we show to avoid the client going into overload?
My mentor and well-known photographer Charles Lewis suggests that 15 images is the optimum number. Too many more than that and we risk pushing them into option paralysis. I would tend to agree with this, but I still find it very hard to narrow down the selection to that number. I usually end up showing between 20 and 28 images, and have found that this works reasonably well.
Become A Better Editor
To help us reduce the number of photographs we project, we perhaps need to train ourselves to become better editors. This is easier said than done, I know, but it means we should be able to select the one image that stands out the most from a group of similar poses and not show the others, even though they might be perfectly acceptable images.
On a side note, I can say that I’ve found this process a lot easier since I adopted Adobe Lightroom as part of my workflow.
We can also make our job easier by not over-shooting during the session. It’s simply unnecessary to take 5 or 10 photographs of the same pose when we know we only want 1 or 2. I’m a firm believer that editing on the fly, as we shoot, is a great way to make life easier later on.
Too Many Packages
If the client makes it through the process of selecting their favorite photographs then we should ensure that they don’t then succumb to option paralysis when it comes to choosing an appropriate package.
We all know that developing portrait packages to suit everyone is next to impossible – everybody that comes to the studio seems to have some new request or wants a combination we haven’t seen before!
This makes it tempting to devise a menu of collections that tries to satisfy everyone, but this is a mistake. Too many choices at this stage can inevitably lead to stalls like, “We need to think it over, can we take the price list home and let you know tomorrow?” This is just a code for, “There are too many choices to make right now, I want to escape so that I don’t have to choose at all.”
Good, Better and Best
The solution is to have a very limited choice of collections; what you might call good, better and best. Choosing from three is a lot easier than choosing from 5, 7 or 10 options.
Usually, the client will choose the middle one, and that’s perfectly fine. You can always offer to customize their collection a little if there are some things they really must have, but this approach is far less likely to introduce option shock.
Choosing from three is also easy to rationalize and justify in their own mind and less likely to result in buyer’s remorse:
Package A was too expensive, C lacked the features I wanted, B was a good compromise or just right.
Take Stock Of Your Package Offerings
Now is the time to take a look at the packages you offer to your clients. Are there too many options? Is there a way to pare down the list to something more reasonable? Do you offer every print size your lab offers you? Just because you can doesn’t mean you have to!
As a follow-on, here’s an interesting video from the great series of TED talks by Barry Schwartz on “The Paradox of Choice“:
If you found this interesting, thought-provoking or you flat-out disagree with it, please take a moment to let me know. This blog is for you too, so please feel free to submit your comments – I love to get other perspectives on all issues.
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I am having such a hard time with this exact thing so I was very thankful to read this today!
Good advice re. number of reference photos, as well as simplification of the packages proposed – indeed, this makes your client’s choice easier
Just know how to play around it 