I’ve been running a professional photography business for 26 years, and I still make mistakes. The key is every time I make a mistake, I look at it as a lesson to learn. Today I’m spilling the beans of what I did wrong with 60 professional photographers watching me, so you can hopefully shorten your learning curve and keep calm when you make your next mistake..
There are three types of mistakes I’ve found that are typical during a sales presentation. The first type of mistake is a technical mistake where, for example, I’m adding up the total and I miss, add or skip a step in my process that I know is important. Those are just things that need to be systematized and become routine and I’ve found that every time I sway from my own system, something typically goes wrong.
The second type of mistake is not understanding the psychology of human behavior. A couple of examples of this type of mistake are things like talking too much or overwhelming the client with too many choices so they can’t make a decision. When you make these types of mistakes, it will cause many of your clients to shut down and not be able to get to a decision.
And the third mistake is a little trickier to identify. Sometimes it’s just making an assumption or taking an action that doesn’t serve the client. This type of mistake is maybe thinking that you’ve covered everything and you think you know what the client wants but you didn’t ask certain questions. I had that happen once where I didn’t ask enough questions and the client got to the end of the presentation, loved all the images, and we started talking about sizes and she said, “Well, the only wall I have is vertical and all of these are horizontal.”
We can do the best we can to fix these mistakes in the moment, and then we make a note and adjust the process next time. Usually that happens by serving them before the session even happens. That’s why we have an in-person meeting with our clients.
If you listened to Podcast #226 and #227, you know that I met over 60 professional photographers who are students of mine in Virginia at the studio of one of our coaches at our annual Peak Performance Coaching Program Summer Camp. To summarize, she did two sessions on day one where all of the students got to watch, and then I did the two sales presentations on day two. While it was amazing and made her over $10,000 in two days, it wasn’t without a few bumps in the road. Overall, the experience was amazing. But to serve my students and to serve you, I want to share behind the curtain of the things that went wrong and what to fix for the next time.
Mistake #1: Sending the client into overwhelm
Mistake number one happened because I almost sent the client into overwhelm. In sales presentation number one, this was the family client. I accidentally, as we were going through, deleted an image that the client thought they wanted. We narrowed it down and they were looking at two and they said, “We like the one on the left,” and I accidentally removed the one on the left instead of the one on the right. Not a big deal.
Typically when we build our presentations, because there’s typically two weeks between the session and the presentation so there’s lots of time to get it just perfect, and we were doing it in 24 hours, when we’re building the presentation for the client, we bring in extra images. We always leave some extras in a little hidden bank of images, similar to the ones that I presented.
In the event a client doesn’t like the expression on one of the faces or whatever, I can go into the bank of extras, grab one or two extras quickly and show it to them without losing that image or that series. Usually there are very few in here, but because of time, I left too many really good images in the hidden extra space in the presentation. When I deleted the image, it occurred to me, “Oh my gosh, I have one of two choices. I can go to the extras or I can go to the trash.” Either way, my choice wasn’t good because she was going to see them. So I thought, “I’ll just do it really fast.” And so I had to go into that little secret hidden extras folder and she immediately was like, “Wait, what’s that one? Did I see that one?”
Because I’ve made this mistake before, I knew that I had opened a can of worms. We have one hour in this presentation to get them to make their decision and serve them. So because of the fact that we were about 45 minutes in and we’d gone through this process of cutting and she loved everything and it was hard for her to cut, for me to open a door where I showed her more could have been devastating and I could have ruined the sale.
Mistake #2: A tactical mistake
This is going to happen to you if you’re in business long enough. Despite my best effort to not have it happen, it happened in this same presentation. When I’m in the presentation, I’m super focused on the client and a lot of my students notice that. I don’t type their order into the software to get all fancy with it. I just use a pen and paper. In this case, I was writing the order out on an iPad. I am focused on the body language of the client and the nonverbal communication as well as the words they’re saying. As I was writing everything down and summarizing it for the client, I walked over to her to show her the total and she was good with it.
But, I realized I hadn’t included the $3,000 album that we had been talking about. Sometimes we don’t realize it till later and then we have to figure out how to address it. But I just addressed it and I said, “Oh, shoot, I didn’t add your album in.” So I had to walk back to Amy to get her price list and re-add it in which put her total over $12,000. I knew that was going to be a game changer for the client because that’s a lot of money.
As I added it up and I got the new total, I walked over to her and I was hyper tuned into her reaction. I was fully prepared for her to either be upset or silent and was prepared for her to need to cut. She said, “We probably do need to cut a little bit.” We got it down to around $11,000 and she was happy.
Mistake #3: A big one
The same client that I just told you about would typically complete her order and she would not call back to cancel or cut it back. But she did call back and cut the order down. Here is what happened and why. Something happened up front that we didn’t catch and we didn’t know it until the end of the presentation. This was a nuance and it was completely our fault. In my system, I require an in-person consultation where we sit down with a client. There are seven things that have to come out in that meeting. I’ve learned in all these years that there is a certain amount of information I need to find out. Like you only have a vertical space or how many kids do you have? Little things like that. But because this person was filling in for someone who canceled at the last minute for our group that was coming in, Amy didn’t have the opportunity to have that in-person consultation.
She knew that she was a right fit client but she had to do a phone consultation which i don’t recommend but we had to go with it. In that in-person consultation we always go through everything about the family, all the kids’ ages, all of their names, all of those things. And when we go through that, we would have learned that there was actually another son who couldn’t be there that day. It was the husband’s son from a first marriage and he was out of town. It is our job to find those things out because it will impact the order. We probably would’ve handled the session very differently and made a plan for how to do things that could have incorporated the other son at a later date.
But again, this is why we always have this meeting in-person before because we learn so many things. As she was finishing up the presentation, she said, “I’m so sad that my other son, my bonus son, couldn’t be here.” And we both went, “Wait, what? There’s another human in this family?” And it could have crushed the sale that day, but the mom, those were her two kids with the new husband, and she loves the other son, I’m sure, but they were thinking about this new family unit. We had to really pivot at that point and sort of hope that everything would stick. And then of course, she went home and they talked about it and because the son couldn’t be there, the order got dropped down to about $6,000.
That’s still a great order, but we would’ve handled it differently and we would’ve served her in a different way. It was great that everybody got to learn this lesson. It still ended up being over a $10,000 day for Amy between the two clients.
Here’s the thing I want to stress. As each of these things happened, Amy and I both stayed really calm. We didn’t panic and we came from a place of serving the client. We don’t have to know every answer or get everything right. We’re humans and we can fix things. When you spend more time with your clients during this boutique process, you’ve built rapport and trust. And what I love about working with right fit clients, just like these two clients that Amy booked, is that when we do make a mistake, they’re typically very kind and understanding. And if they’re a big jerk, maybe they aren’t the kind of client you want to continue with.
At the end of the day, all you can do is your best to take care of people and to create artwork they will treasure for their lifetime. And that doesn’t include being perfect.
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