Sales is NOT a Dirty Word!

When thinking about IPS, one of the biggest hurdles for photographers is a discomfort with the idea of selling. I hear this all the time: “I’m not a salesman. I hate the idea of being a pushy salesman - it’s just not me!” You may feel this way. Perhaps you have images of a sleazy salesman trying to trick or push you into buying something you don’t really want. We’ve all been on the receiving end of that kind of pressure and it’s not pleasant.

Here’s the good news: that’s not at ALL what IPS is about. You don’t have to take any cues from that sleazy salesman in order to have amazing results.

IPS is all about providing an amazing experience for your clients, and focusing on serving them as well as you possibly can. In fact, you can think of the S in IPS as standing for service rather than sales, if that helps you.

Forcing people to buy something that they don’t truly want is never going to help you in the long run. It’s a short-sighted strategy that risks alienating clients and ruining any chance at a long-term relationship with them. And that’s not obviously something that’s in your best interest.

Instead, we simply show them how we can solve their problems and meet their needs, and we walk them through something that can be overwhelming for them and make it easy. Our clients often don’t understand the first thing about printing and don’t know where to start, even if they do want to print their own portraits. So they procrastinate and don’t end up doing anything at all. That’s actually the main reason I got into in-person sales in the first place. I reached out to my clients, asking how they had ended up printing the portraits from their digital galleries. Almost all of them responded sheepishly, saying that they’d been meaning to print but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That’s when I knew I needed to help them with this crucial last step, so they could enjoy their portraits the way they were meant to be enjoyed, rather than letting them languish on a hard drive or in a desk somewhere.

Selling is a service because we are helping our clients, making their lives easier, going out of our way to take care of them. And people will pay well for that service. Have you ever paid to have someone do something for you that you could easily do yourself, but your time was more valuable than money? Maybe you’ve paid someone to clean your house, or walk your dog, or mow your lawn. I know I’ve paid for many services like this, because I determined that my time was more valuable to me than the money I was spending. That’s a big part of why people invest in our services. It’s not only about our work, which of course does play a big part, but also that we are going that extra mile to provide a service that very few others will. And clients are usually incredibly grateful for this.

So you can put those fears of being a pushy salesperson to rest and remind yourself that if your goal is to truly serve your clients, you can’t go wrong.

Want to learn more about how to price, market, and sell your photography? Check out the Photography Academy, which features hundreds of videos, tools, templates, and resources to get your photography business working like a well-oiled machine!