This guest blog post is written by Eric O’Connor, a Chicago wedding photographer, owner of Allori Photography and mylife-pages. Follow Eric on Twitter.

2012 will soon be here.

January is the perfect time to take a hard look at how to maximize profits in the upcoming year. These are a few recommendations that have helped me, follow all three and I know they’ll work for you too.

1. What’s in it for me?
2. Stay in Touch
3. Share the Love

What’s In It For Me?

Your clients want information. They want to know every detail about their purchase. Give it to them! You are the expert. Share your knowledge and process with them. Whatever you do please don’t wait until after the wedding to inform your client about the pre-design process. If you do they will feel cheated.  After they book with you make sure to take time or create a wedding album FAQ to walk them through the album process. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Just a simple step by step from the day you shoot the wedding to the day you deliver their album. Set expectations and then deliver on them. It is important they understand you will be telling the story of their wedding day and you’ll use as many pages as it takes to get it right. I always like to mention it gives them a great starting point. They can then customize the album to exactly what they want. Your clients will love this idea. Anytime they can take ownership in the process, you win!

Stay in Touch

Take a minute and think about the excitement leading up to the wedding. Your clients are excited about their wedding and then … BAM! … the wedding is over. It doesn’t take long and they are back to real life. Catch your bride and groom in that first 30 days and their wedding day excitement will do the selling for you. You likely only have a 30 day window to take advantage of the wedding high. If 30 to 90 days go by and your bride hasn’t seen pictures or a draft of her album it is much harder to add pages or sell additional albums. I make it a point to have everything to my brides 7 days after their wedding. I used to deliver images 30 days after the wedding and routinely life got in the way and the brides wouldn’t even think about their album for a few more months. There were always a lot of album edits and very little pages added. Now, 7 days after their wedding they can view their Animoto slideshow, image gallery, and album pre-design right on their wedding website. I make sure to give my clients a deadline. We want to have the album completed and ready to print in 3 to 4 weeks. This helps give them a target to have their changes complete. Extra albums page sales have gone from a few or none to five, ten or more from every wedding.

Share the Love

Quick turnaround time is essential but I find coupling that with excitement from friends has really helped additional album page sales. A few years ago I emailed PDFs to my brides and they would leave me comments for changes. This was pretty efficient but didn’t help me much when it came to advertising or extra album pages. I don’t pay for ads in magazines and only have one ad online that I tested out this year and will discontinue Jan 1.  Word of mouth, SEO, social media, and over the top customer service do the job for me. The next iteration of album sharing was a slideshow posted on YouTube. I found I was getting quite a few hits and at the same time album sales started to increase. Brides started telling me their friends loved watching their wedding album movies. This was one of those common sense moments when the light goes on in your head. Friends of the bride love the album and they start telling the bride about their favorite pages. This process makes it harder and harder for the bride to remove or change pages.

Finally I arrived at the perfect solution, Share the Love! Wedding album movies on a post wedding website are essential to higher album page sales. With a favorites gallery, Animoto slideshow, and movie of the album, my brides have a constant flow of compliments from their friends about how much they love the wedding images and album pages. As you can see in the graphic the album movie in this wedding was viewed over 200 times in 6 weeks. I have been completely removed from the album page sales process. Yes, I have to take images my clients love but my brides’ friends do the rest of the work for me. I do not meet with my clients to sell or add pages. These days they all add pages without sitting down with me.

Test out the three steps above. They are easy so don’t cheat yourself and pick just one. Do all three. You will start to see a difference in sales. Click the image below to see how I display sample albums on post wedding websites.

Want to try a post wedding website? Your first site is FREE. Surprise one of your favorite clients with a wedding website with colors to match their wedding.

Photo consultant Selina Maitreya discusses a rarely used approach in client sales meetings. Check it out in the video below.

Did you like Selina’s business tip for photographers? Want to get more of these tips and for FREE? Selina offers a free 5 day video course, “Building the Ideal Professional Photography Business.”

In addition to that, Selina and 13 other experts will be presenting a FREE two-day online event on February 11 and 12, called Clarion Call. [aff] You do need to register to get access to these awesome speakers. Remember, it is FREE, so why wouldn’t you sign up?

If you miss the live event, you can still order the recordings, which garner you a bunch of very cool bonuses.

What sales tip could you/would you share here with your peers? Please comment!

This is a guest blog by Sarah Petty, a marketing whiz, who grew her photography studio to one of the most successful in the country in only five years. She eats, sleeps and breathes marketing. You can now learn from her and many other talented photographers at The Joy Of Marketing.

Clients have needs too.

Would you go into a hair salon and sit down in the chair and let them go to town? Of course you wouldn’t! The stylist typically asks you many questions. “Did you like what we did last time?,” “Do you like the color?,” “What length do you want?,” Do you want layers?” And what do you do? You tell him/her in as much detail as you can, exactly what you want! Sometimes, you even bring photographs or magazine clippings.

So, now you are a photographer and you had someone call and want portraits of their children. They come in, you photograph them and then a few weeks later you are in the sales room fielding objections like crazy. “I was hoping for two vertical images,” “I don’t hang photographs on my walls,” “I really wanted the two kids together and you only photographed them separately.” All three of these objections could have been eliminated had you simply ASKED THE CLIENT WHAT THEY WANTED!

If you ask, people will tell you their needs.

One of the most important elements of having a successful sales session is to conduct a needs analysis in the very beginning. Like in the haircutting example, people want to tell you what they want because they want you to please them. They called you for a reason and it is your job to extract that reason from them.

So where do you start? Well, for me, I do everything in my power not to have a session without having an in-person consultation. That is where I can ask all of the right questions and discover what the client wants. Sometimes, the client doesn’t even know what they want until I help uncover it. Sometimes they come in wanting one thing and they leave with clarity after discovering that they really wanted something else. Many times, until they see it, they have no idea that they even want it. Whenever I get the objection “I really can’t come in because of my schedule or because I live far away,” I tell them that others have tried that but what they found was that they would come in on the day of their session, see something on the wall that they love yet they are dressed in the wrong clothing. That usually gets them in because they don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to have something they love!

For me, I would rather do fewer sessions where I can spend more time with my clients finding out what they want and then creating it for them. It makes the sales presentation go so smoothly and it helps increase sales averages. In turn, this means you work fewer hours and have an increased quality of life!

Because the sales process is SO incredibly important to running a successful small business, we have created an event at thejoyofmarketing.com called 10 10 10. This is a free, online event on October 10, 2010 from 10 am – 10 pm CST where you can learn from 10 industry leaders about how to increase your sales. The topics will start at the first phone call, through the in-person consultation, how to shoot to sell, managing the sales presentation and follow up after the sale to create loyalty and generate referrals. Here is a list of the speakers: Julia Woods, Jessica Claire, Joy Bianchi Brown and Jules Bianchi, Sandy Puc, Kia Bondurant, Scott and Adina Hayne, Tim and Beverly Walden, Kevin Kubota, Ron Nichols and Sarah Petty.

Register for the event.

We will also be trying to generate enough money to provide clean drinking water for 1010 people so be sure to check back at our thermometer and grab some free speaker resources while you are there!

The event is sponsored by White House Custom Colour and we will be giving away 10 FREE things from them so be sure to Tweet #101010 and read our daily blog!

Sarah is giving ONE recording of this event to a lucky Tiffinbox reader. This is what you need to do to win. 1) Tweet the following message: “I’ll be listening to @SarahPetty and 9 other speakers for FREE on 10/10/10 about SELLING. http://tjom.cc/a/322 #Tiffinbox #101010″ 2) Comment below and include your Twitter handle in your message. Tell me WHY and HOW the Salessummit on October 10, 2010 will help your business. If you post anonymously, you can’t win. You need to be using a valid email address as well. And yes, there is an affiliate link associated with this giveaway.

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Business Standard, India

“For the US-based imaging major Kodak, India has become the largest market
for cameras, bigger than China and the US.”