In Person Portrait Sales Archives

How I Rocked My First In-Person Portrait Sales Session

From the outside looking in, it would be easy to think that I have it all together. I’ve been honored to write an several guest posts, including one here on The Modern Tog, so people sometimes assume I’ve got everything figured out. Let me tell you, that can not be farther from the truth!

I’m just like you. I struggle with business decisions, second guess my work, design and redesign my website and then I head to my favorite photography group (Have you joined yet? Because it’s awesome!) to get reassurance from others that I’m not totally screwing things up.

Sound familiar?

I’ve been accepting paying clients for two years now. This week I had my first in-person sales appointment. And not only that, it was the first time I actually offered products to my portrait clients rather than just handing over a disc of images and calling it a day.

We all hear about in-person sales being the way to go so why didn’t I make the leap sooner? Simple. I was delusional. I really convinced myself that higher prices and in-person sales may work for some people, but not for me. I was sure that no one in my area would pay $500 for something that cost me only $100 to order for them. And you know what? I underestimated how much people value a quality product and excellent customer service – and I underestimated myself in the process. Does that sound familiar too?

Consider this your smack upside the head! You can do it! Everything I learned about how to do in-person sales was through The Modern Tog’s articles and advice from other photographers who were doing it right. So here’s how it went. [Click to read more]

The Most Common Portrait Sales Mistake That Almost All Photographers Make

When I was first starting out in photography, I had no idea what I was doing.

I think I charged something insanely low like $50 for a session plus a disc of all the digital negatives. I put the images in an online gallery, but I didn’t really sell many prints. I got lots of compliments about how people loved that they got the disc and could do what they wanted with it.

I told myself this was simply a case of meeting my clients’ needs and giving them what they wanted, so it was a good business practice.

The problem was, my ideal clients, the ones who valued photography and really wanted to preserve their memories didn’t just want the disc. They wanted someone to walk them through the photos, help them decide which ones would look best on their walls, and suggest products that would truly help them preserve this time in their lives as best as possible. I just didn’t believe that.

Not only that, but sometimes life gets busy and sometimes people simply don’t do what they intend to do. Eventually I stopped just giving the disc away and started charging for it to help encourage print sales, but then I’d get clients who raved about their image but never actually bought anything. Life just got busy and they never got to it.

That made me a Sad Panda. See? [Click to read more]

The Secret to Significantly Increasing Your Portrait Sales

I used to be a shoot-and-burn portrait photographer, but wow was that a mistake. I don’t even want to think about how much money I lost by doing things that way.

It made logical sense to me. I am mainly a wedding photographer, and I didn’t promote my portraits much at all because I simply didn’t have time for them or for placing print orders. People got their disk of images, an occasional 8×10, and it was quick and easy.

If someone had told me that I’d effectively triple my average portrait sale by taking the extra time to do in-person ordering sessions, I could have shot fewer portraits and still made more money in the same amount of time.

I’m not going to claim to be super-experienced in this because I’m not. I just changed to this method of sales this year. But the results so far have been ridiculously amazing. I had heard from other people that this was the case, but it was hard to fathom that I could have sales as high as they were saying. But the results are amazing.

Here’s what I did to drastically increase my average portrait sale. [Click to read more]