PODCAST TRANSCRIPT - EPISODE 328

4 CREATIVE WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR VALUE (AND YOUR SALES AVERAGE)

Please note: This transcript was created with the assistance of AI technology. While we strive for accuracy, the text may contain errors and should be verified against the original source for critical uses.

Annemie Tonken  00:00

The other day, I got a reply to one of those emails that I send asking someone why they didn't buy if they watch the simple sales masterclass and then they decide not to purchase the course. I send an email that just says, like, Hey, I'd love your feedback on what it was that kept you from purchasing. And most of the time, people don't respond. I understand. But this particular response really stuck with me, not because it was rude, it definitely wasn't, but because it perfectly captured a mindset that I hear all the time from photographers. So this particular student wrote, I love the idea of simple sales, but I'm not convinced it would work for me. People these days just want digitals trying to sell packages that include prints or wall art feels like forcing them to buy something they don't want. So first of all, I always appreciate it when someone actually takes the time to respond to my emails. Most of the time, I think people assume that the fact that those are part of a sales sequence, or that they're an automated email, means that I'm not actually paying attention to how they respond, but I really am, and I try and respond to all of those people as well. But you know, maybe they worry that if they respond, I'm going to try to poke holes in their argument. Whatever, I don't It's not that, truthfully, I just want to hear where it is that people are getting stuck. And based on what this particular photographer said in her email, the truth is that she probably made the right call, not because I think that her clients wouldn't benefit from simple sales. Honestly, I think nearly everyone would, but it is incredibly hard, if not impossible, to sell something effectively if you don't believe in it. So the fact that this particular woman clearly wasn't there or isn't there yet would indicate to me that this isn't the right system for her. So that is not the purpose of me sharing this story. What's interesting is that I hear versions of this hesitation all the time, not just about simple sales, but about pricing, product offerings, client experience. Just about every strategy I teach, and it almost always boils down to some version of this core belief that we as photographers have to give people exactly what they ask for, because that's what good customer service is. Now, on the surface, that doesn't sound like a bad idea, right? Listening to your clients is important. Honoring what someone says they want or don't want is important. It is the way that we should be treating people. We should absolutely care about what our clients want. But the reason that I wanted to share this email is because it highlights a trap that a lot of us fall into, and that is this idea that we should build our businesses entirely around the vocabulary that our clients give us right what they say they want. The problem is that clients don't always have the language or the vision to ask for what they actually need. They are not experts in photography. They are not experts in photographic products or experience design or visual storytelling that is our job, as photographers, as professionals, as small business owners, as service providers, instead of just asking our clients what they want and then taking that at face value, our role is to dig deeper, to ask about their pain points, their motivations, to notice patterns and to connect the dots between what our clients say and what's really going on underneath. That's where we are able to problem solve for people, we're able to innovate. We bring our expertise to the table and we lead. There's that quote that is often attributed to Henry Ford, although my understanding is that it's like one of these fake quotes that came out of nowhere. But in it, you know, Henry Ford, who was one of the early pioneers in automobiles, said, If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, faster horses. And you could, you know, apply that to anything. If you had asked people in the 1990s

Annemie Tonken  04:11

or 80s how they wanted to see the next version of the Walkman, they would say, I need a carabiner to carry it around or something, as opposed to, like, what I could use is digital music. People know what they've seen, they know what they're used to, but they don't always know what's possible, and they're not really spending a lot of time and energy thinking outside the box unless it's the thing that they do. We are the ones working in the photography industry, right? So, yes, giving people what they ask for is good service, but solving a problem that they didn't even know how to articulate, that is remarkable. That is the kind of experience that turns a customer into a raving fan. So today I want to walk you through four creative add on offers that you can layer into your business without adding more sessions. Without trying to do the same thing over and over again, right? These are low lift, high impact ideas designed to serve your clients more fully and grow your revenue in a really thoughtful way, while establishing yourself as that remarkable service provider. Welcome to this can't be that hard. My name is Annemie Tonken, and I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it, and I can show you how. So after that long preamble, I want to just dive right in with my first idea for you, and that is a headshot or a pet portrait add on to your standard sessions. Now this is going to somewhat depend on what kind of work you do as a standard, but these are two different ideas that almost any photographer could probably add on to their services. It's such an easy win, right? And it works across so many different client types. So let's say you're working with high school seniors. Most of them will want or need some sort of clean professional headshot for LinkedIn or their college applications. And the photos that you're taking for senior portraits maybe could work, but generally speaking, those are going to be more casual, more dramatic, whatever, not so much professional, right? If you're shooting an engagement session, chances are that one or both of the members of the couple that you're photographing are, you know, they've got a website or a social media profile or a LinkedIn profile, even just their wedding website, where they're going to want individual portraits for that. So if you are photographing an engagement session for a client that you know you're going to be photographing their wedding. Again, lots of wonderful photos of the two of them is great, but chances are one or both of them might need an updated LinkedIn portrait or something for social media. So adding that as something that they can do as part of the process, like they're already getting their photos made. They know that they need this box checked at some point in the near future. It's a small additional investment, but it's not the big deal. Of like going out and shopping for a photographer. It's a great opportunity. And if you're a family photographer, like I am sure that you frequently get parents saying, hey, is there any way that we can add a headshot onto the session, and maybe that's something that you've been doing as just sort of like a, yeah, sure. I'm already here. I can do that for you. I would very strongly suggest that, instead of letting them come to you and say, Hey, can you do this for me, where you feel like, oh, okay, sure, and I'll just do that extra little bit of work and not charge you anything more for it. How about instead, make that an upsell. As soon as they've booked their family session, it's just a box that they can check or a toggle that they can switch on in the course of paying their session fee. Or however you do that initial invoice, where they can say for $150 add in a headshot, add on session for one parent with three to five photos included. However you want to structure that. They can add one. They could add two. You know, that's an additional $300 that you're going to make in almost no additional time, right? Honestly, you can layer in pet portraits almost exactly the same way again, to almost any of those sessions. People

Annemie Tonken  08:44

love their animals, whether it's their little golden retriever with a bow tie, or their cat rescue, whatever it is, if you're in a setting where you can accommodate pets, whether or not the pet is involved in the main session, you can offer that as an add on. Obviously, you need to be comfortable with photographing animals. It is a little bit different, but that is something that you can add on, and that is the key here, right? This should not be a surprise upsell during the session. You don't want to be pitching it while you're like, doing the rest of your work. You want to give them the heads up, and you really want to do it right when they are booking, because they've already said yes to you, you've already sold. The main thing right? This is just a simple add on. Would you like to include a professional headshot? Would you like to include a unique portrait of your pet, whatever the case may be, that sets the expectation early. It frames it as a thoughtful bonus, and it lets you prepare accordingly. If there's any additional equipment or anything that you need to bring, then you're going to be ready for that. This is a high margin, low effort add on that adds real value for your clients, especially for those clients who hadn't even realized. It until you made it easy. So the second idea that I have for you is a little bit bigger, but I think this is a pretty great one as well, and that is that you offer a photo cleanup concierge service for your client's personal photos. So we all know that moment after you have guided a client through choosing their favorite images from your session, and they breathe this big sigh of relief, right? It's like you've just lifted this weight off their shoulders, because we all have so many images in our camera rolls like floating around on various hard drives. And I think that people really are starting to recognize that the help that we give them as professionals to get through the images that we have sent them and actually just find the ones that they really want and figure out something to do with them, if you're not offering that as a service already for your images. Number one, make sure that you start considering how you can help your clients do that, because that's a really important piece of what it is that we do. But oftentimes, in the moment, your clients will say something like, I wish you could help me do this with all the photos on my phone, or, I wish you could do this with all the photos on my hard drive. And most of the time, you know, we kind of laugh that off. We say something like, oh, yeah, I wish I could too. And then we move on, but we don't have to move on, right? What if we took that very real need, because again, let's be honest, most of us are drowning in digital photo clutter, and we turned that into an actual offer. This is something that I think would be perfect for your slower seasons, where you could offer these one on one photo cleanup concierge services, right? This isn't just about the photos that you are taking for people. This is really about their snapshots, the 1000s of images that are sitting on their camera roll or their hard drive that they feel vaguely guilty about never doing anything with. You could offer this as a one to one session where you are either in person or virtual, where you can help them sort, tag and organize and come up with a system going forward so that they know exactly how to handle their photos as they're making them. You can also offer this as like a VIP day type offer, where it's a photo Cleanup Day, which is like a virtual event where they do some pre work ahead of time to get you the files that they need. Maybe they fill out some sort of questionnaire, or something like that, where then you sit down for several hours over the course of a day, and with your professional eye, you're able to look at exit data, organize things by time, organize things by event or location, those kinds of things, and then you're renaming, organizing them into folders, maybe getting rid of duplicates or a photo of the back of a serial Number or something that they don't really need, and then you're putting all those things together for them in a way that feels very custom and concierge, right? Obviously, this could also become an online course if you are interested in pursuing that sort of thing, a lot of times, starting smaller with an online course that's targeted for your clients can be a really wonderful way to add value, to establish additional authority with the people that you're speaking to, all of those kinds of things. And once you've created that for those people, that has the potential to spread further, and if it's something that you're really enjoying, then you know the sky is the limit, but if you were to keep this as like a one to one kind of an offer, and you're just working with your clients, once you get them to the point where you have not just solved the clutter problem, but you've really helped them reconnect with memories and reclaim their photos from this like digital void. Once that happens, the next natural question is, now that I've found the photos that I love, what should I do with them next? And that leads us directly to my third idea, which is to create a family yearbook service so once someone with your help, has done the emotional and mental work of sorting through their images, whether through a cleanup day or just on their own with your guidance, there's this moment of momentum. They are riding the high of feeling like I just got this big load off my shoulders. I feel so good. They found the good stuff. They've located the memories. They've picked out the images that actually matter to them, and then they hit that next wall, which is, what do I do with these? This is where this family yearbook idea comes in. So this is a service where you create a printed photo book that either is exclusively their images or that blends the professional images that you. Have provided for them with their snapshots. I generally tend to like to keep these things separate. I feel like professional photos do really well in a professional album, but if you are looking to fill in these gaps and help people with the other very real photo related problems that they have, then helping them organize their personal photos from things like vacations and birthday parties, candid walks in the park, whatever school milestones, all of those things are typically not going to be professionally captured. But it doesn't mean that it's not worth maintaining and keeping in a beautiful keepsake where they're actually looking at them right in a beautifully designed, printed album that is something that takes a lot of people weeks, if not months, and a lot of stress and a lot of technical frustration and all that sort of thing. Most of us have the skill set and the equipment to get that done very quickly, very efficiently. So again, you can offer this in a few different ways. You could offer it as a standalone product that they can order anytime. You could offer it as a recurring annual add on. And you know that I love recurring income. And you could even make it like a monthly payment that they pay for and then they have to get their images from the year to you by September, and then they get an album by the end of the year, whatever the case may be, you could also offer it as an upgrade from the photo cleanup service, so either at the time of booking or once the cleanup is done, then that could lead to the next sale. So this is great for families, obviously, but it also works for pet owners, couples, new parents, even small business owners who want to have some sort of like yearbook for their business. And the best part is that this is something that very few people are offering. There are people out there who are professional photo organizers, and in no way do I mean to say that we should be out there undercutting them. I just think that this is an offer that is actually not available in the numbers that people are going to need it and probably need it now. It's still a fresh idea, right? It feels incredibly bespoke and high touch. And if someone already trusts you because they work with you as a photographer, then it's an easy upsell. And once you start doing this, the number one thing is that you pay attention to the organization piece of it, and systematize as much as possible, because that will you know in the beginning, it's probably going to feel kind of messy, and you need to figure out kind of your workflow on that, because that will make it highly repeatable after the person who hired you To do this, purchases an album. You can also offer gift copies for grandparents. You can create a special version for a graduating senior, or build in a spot for legacy notes and letters and all that sort of thing. And actually, Legacy notes and letters leads me into that final offer that I wanted to tell you about, which is this idea of a legacy story add on. So this is actually something that I started doing, and for a while, early in my business, was offering to my wedding clients. And I love this idea, I never fully pursued it, and it's one of the like regrets of my photography career. So the

Annemie Tonken  18:20

next best thing is sharing it here with you. This isn't a flashy idea. It's not a complex idea, and it's not a unique idea. I mean, there are people out there doing it, but the impact is huge. The idea is pretty simple. Basically, you help your clients add a deeper layer of meaning to their photos by including personal stories, memories, memories, messages, whatever, from the people who matter most in that particular scenario. So obviously, if you are a filmmaker, family films or wedding films, whatever that's it's got a similar vibe where you're including it's a multimedia experience, right? But it doesn't have to be video. It also doesn't have to be sort of professionally done. This could be as simple as recording voice memos from parents and grandparents for a newborn. It could be asking parents and grandparents or siblings or aunts and uncles or whomever to write notes to a newborn. All those same people could write notes to a new married couple. It could be a collection of short letters from the bridesmaids and groomsmen that get included in the wedding album. It could be letters from friends to a graduating senior that get put in their album, a la a yearbook, like a signed yearbook, but just a much higher level experience. This is, again, doesn't have to be full documentary mode, right? You are just giving people a way to pair emotion and words with this beautiful imagery that you are creating. And again, it works beautifully across niches, so weddings and newborns super easy. You can include transcribed vows. You could do toasts. You could do love letters in the album. Newborns, again, this could be notes from parents or grandparents to the baby. Seniors, gather messages from friends, teachers, family members. You could do this on the sly with the parents and surprise the senior. And this is not only adding value, but it is basically locking you in for providing an album sale. And then family sessions again, include a short interview with the parents about the kids at that particular stage. You could have them fill out a form ahead of time, talking about various family traditions, favorite memories from that year, and then you include that in an esthetically beautiful way in their album. And the best part about this is that you don't have to facilitate all of this live, right? It can be done asynchronously with homework, or you send people a way to record a voice memo or just a written message. Is just as easy, right? And then you include the final product. I'm sort of leaning on albums here, but this could be a keepsake box. It could even be like a private online gallery with audio files attached and things like that. But my inclination is, don't make this hard. Don't make it time, assuming, just turn it into, you know, instead of just photos, this really turns into, like a generational heirloom, kind of a product, and it positions you, not just as a photographer, but as someone who sees the whole story, not just that, like pretty picture. So there you have it. For

Speaker 1  21:36

creative, semi low lift, but very

Annemie Tonken  21:39

high value offers that can bring in additional revenue, in many cases, in the off season without adding more sessions to your calendar. This is work that you can add in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, right? But here's the thing, these are just four ideas. There are infinite possibilities when you start looking at your business through this lens, when you stop asking, What do people say they want, and start asking, what problems are my ideal clients carrying or experiencing that I am equipped to solve? Being creative in your offers isn't just about making more money, it really is about positioning yourself as more than a service provider, you are being that thoughtful guide, that trusted advisor, who leads with intention, and even if your clients don't initially jump at these offers, you know you're putting them together. You're learning how to talk about them. They're like, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Please don't take that as a firm final No, this is a terrible idea. Even if they don't bite on the add on or the extra offer, it starts to change how people see you, because again, now you're not just someone who shows up, snaps photos and delivers a gallery. You are someone who is paying attention, who is thinking one step ahead, and who sees that full picture, even when your client doesn't. And that is the kind of service that people remember. It's the kind of business that people come back to and tell their friends about, and ultimately, it is the kind of service that people decide that they want. It drives the demand for those services, and it gets in their brain, and then that's what they're asking about next year. So put these options out there. Pick one kind of put together a business plan around it. I would challenge you to to incorporate this. It makes you a stronger, better business owner, and hopefully one who's making more money. That's it for this week's episode of This can't be that hard. I'll be back Same time, same place next week. If you like the show, be sure to check out. This can't be that hard.com. To explore all the resources we have for photographers. And of course, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a review of the show on iTunes or Spotify as always. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.