On June 8-9 I’m doing two days of my marketing workshop for professional photographers. It’s a free webinar, but you have to register at www.creativelive.com in order to attend. Thanks to a whole bunch of sponsors we’ve got some pretty slick door prizes to give away as well. Nik Software, SmugMugPro, Album Epoca, WHCC are all coming to the party and I’ll be giving away a scholarship to Skip’s Summer School. All the doorprizes, or should we call them “cyberprizes,” will tie into the tweet stream during the webinar.

We’ve also got some fun prizes for those six brave souls who give up two days to be in my audience. A live audience makes the presentation itself so much more effective, but even more important they’ll represent the typical profile of professional photographers, part time or full time, who deal with so many of today’s biggest marketing challenges.

During the two days we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about building an effective website, becoming your own publicity machine, creating a marketing calendar, identifying your key demographics and ways to establish a stronger reputation in your community and that’s only the beginning!

Here’s the link to enroll!

See you in Seattle…or in cyberspace!

Sal will be our closing program at Skip’s Summer School in August. Few people have Sal’s experience in business and marketing combined with his skill set as a photographer. This video on pricing really goes into some solid thoughts on pricing, which is so critical to building a solid foundation for your business.

Sal’s comment at the beginning of the video says it all and I’m paraphrasing… If you really want to create problems for your business then don’t spend enough time establishing your price points!

• If anybody tells me they had a pretty good year last year or sales were at least flat, the next sentence is always, “But I’ve never worked so hard in my life!”  That last sentence is usually accompanied by a four-letter expletive and a huge *sigh*!
• When exploring what activities meet the definition of “never worked so hard” it always relates to diversity in their business. They’ve started targeting some other photographic need in their community.

Another trend seems to be the younger the photographer or the less time somebody has been in business the more impatient they are to see results.  Their definition of success is just seeing business come through the door and that’s really my point this morning.

There are simply no shortcuts to success in any business today. Sure, there are stories of people who invent amazing products or concepts and skyrocket to the top instantly, but it’s not the norm. For most of us, it’s not going to happen overnight and while I hate to sound like my grandmother when I was kid, you just need to be patient, continue to work hard and trust your instincts.

The challenge with being successful is to first figure out your definition of success and second, stay focused and just keep doing the things you need to build your skill set and business.  If you wake up every morning looking for “success” as if it was a rare species of animal, you’ll never find it – in fact, you’ll scare it away!

We’re all sick of dealing with the economy, but one thing tough times do is force us to look for new ways to do business we should have been doing all along.  If you’re looking for a way to reduce your marketing costs, without cutting back on your exposure, then look for some partners to share the burden of direct mail and cross-promotions.

Here’s a prime example:  Homecoming at every high school in the country is only a couple of months away.  Why not do a direct mail campaign together with the florist in town and a limo company?   Looking for ways to promote your wedding photography?  How about teaming up with a travel agent, a local venue, a tux shop and a florist?   Vicki Taufer finds partners to help promote her pet promotion every summer for the local animal shelter.

In terms of the actual presentation to your target audience, it can be anything from a mailing with a series of independent offers, like the “Value-Pak” envelopes we all receive at our homes, to an actual cross-promotion e.g. Rent your tuxedo and get a certificate worth $__ off a portrait sitting and vice versa: get a discount on your tuxedo rental with your portrait sitting.   I know it might not sound very upscale, described in brief here, but that’s where your creativity comes in when designing the offer and the promotion.

Consumer bundling is the perfect way for you to promote your business without having to absorb the full burden of the cost.  And here’s one more idea on cross-promoting – team up with a few other photographers!  How about the combination of a wedding photographer and a children’s photographer cross-promoting each other’s work? 

Check out this post from a while back by Bruce Berg. Three competing photographic studios sponsor a children’s contest each year during the first quarter, the “slow season” in Oregon! The result is business during a time when normally there wasn’t any!

Just because the economy is tough doesn’t mean you can’t continue or better yet, increase your exposure to your target audience.  This is really nothing more than a bunch of friends going to lunch – you just need a few new partners to split the check!

A trip to Las Vegas in February isn’t just about WPPI anymore. It’s about adding new building blocks to your business and some of them are outside WPPI programming. For two years I’ve started every marketing presentation with the same statement.

Just because the media says it’s going to be a bad year, doesn’t mean it has to be!

That’s a big part of the GoingPro theme and Bootcamp. We started the project because there are so many aspiring photographers interested in going pro and missing the boat on the right way to get started. Frustrated, they jump into the market with lousy quality and low-ball pricing. Instead of building a business on a solid foundation, they try and build it on the word “professional”, having no understanding of the importance of how to sustain a business.

Well, it’s been two years since we started the GoingPro, which originally was just a book with Random House. Now it’s a blog with an estimated 50,000 followers and sixty-four podcasts, resulting in 120-150,000 downloads a month. Last but not least, it’s our second Bootcamp, an all day event helping you with everything, but photography.

George missed the last GoingPro Bootcamp, but we didn’t and neither did a 100+ aspiring and working professional photographers. He’s got another chance and so do you! With the combination of Michele Celentano, Scott Bourne and me we’ll help you with ideas on marketing, pricing, building your business, insurance, social media, community involvement and local networking, just to name a few. Most important of all, we’ll help you figure out how to promote yourself and your work so you can get your second customer.

Anybody can get their first customer. The trick of building a solid business is getting your second customer and even better, getting the first customer to come back a second time. You know how to focus your camera. Well, we’re going to help you focus on concepts like quality, value, integrity and the ability to exceed customer expectations. Those are the key attributes of any business that brings customers back!

And speaking of exceeding expectations – that’s just what we intend to do on February 18. It’s only $99 for the day. So, whether you’re just getting ready to take the plunge into the pro side of the business or you’ve been out there for a few years and need some help – we intend to exceed your expectations. 

See you in Vegas! Signing up for GoingPro Bootcamp is just a click away!

Living closer, we get to spend a lot more time together and there’s a never-ending stream of conversations about business. Today’s business meaning of words like trust, integrity, confidence and creativity have never changed, even though the way we communicate today has. Dad didn’t have Twitter, but he did have a telephone. He didn’t have a lot of conventions to network, but he did have time to meet people, talk to potential clients and a firm handshake. He didn’t have workshops to go to, but he did have books to read and ideas to share with his associates over lunch.

So, I hope you enjoy Pop’s encore performance. As you think about 2012 – everything he talks about is so relevant! Like he said to me so many years ago,

Just watch the left front fender!

Yesterday was my 88^th birthday.  I have been happily retired for many years, and unemployed for at least 15 of those. Now, out of the blue, comes our son, Skip, threatening me with employment! The pay he considers adequate is $.02 per word. So gathering together, my 50+ years in business experience, I thought this would be a good time to put my two cents in.

I am not a plagiarist, but I must quote my father who spent the last months of his life writing advice to his children:

 “Conduct your business in an upright manner and remember, the most important thing in one’s life is to be honest with one’s self. Maintain the high standard and dignity that your business requires. Do not go into deals hastily and be visible in your business as much of the time as is possible.  If you take time to play, do it away from your business, because your livelihood needs all the attention you can give to it.”

Early on, I concluded that the best testimonials came from my many friendly competitors.  We didn’t really compete with each other, in the true sense. True, we were in the same field of endeavor, but we all knew we were there to help each other. Happily, the “tough competition” fell by the wayside.  I remember giving Skip driving lessons and I told him, “Watch the left front fender…..the rest will take care of itself!”  I’ve found this is really true of everything in life.

An old axiom says “If you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said.”  That is all part of reputation-building. I found that, sadly, in the field of real estate, truth is hard to come by for many. In our case, it was a major building block in the reputation which we enjoyed, and helped us to thwart the competition.

Goodwill is all of the above, plus a lot of caring for your clients as well as your competitors.  If life is a give-and-take situation, giving is the more important of the two.  The taking will come with time and be far more appreciative.  Just remember – you heard it here!  Ralph Cohen, Founder and Creator of Skip Cohen!

For most of you this is a down week. The Christmas orders are out and you’re hopefully finding time to just kick back, enjoy your family and here and there think about the new year.  Find some time this week to think about your business in terms of the services you offer.  Are there opportunities for add-on sales? Can you increase your average sales with add-on products and add-on value?

When I was at Polaroid, back when Polaroid was a Fortune 500 company,  I was involved in a series of consumer surveys for product development.  The surveys repeatedly showed that consumer satisfaction for a product dramatically increased with the number of accessories available.  As a result, when Polaroid launched the Spectra camera, it was a complete system.  There was a full line of accessories including self-timers, cable releases, albums, bags, table top tripods and even Cokin filters, just to name a few.

You’ll find the exact same philosophy with most of the major consumer purchases we make today, especially in consumer electronics.   Photography isn’t any different and if you’re only offering your clients an album and a few different options on print packages then you’re missing the boat.

Let’s beef up what you’re offering your clients starting with online hosting and slide shows.  (The crew as SmugMug is ready to help you completely change the look of your site and get your images in a presentation that screams, “I’m a professional!”) Then let’s move into all the hard goods available.  Albums of every color, shape and size are out there.  (We were just in Italy last month and were blown away by what Album Epoca has in their lineup!) One of a kind table top books like the Asukabook line give you another outstanding direction to offer clients a quality product that’s different.   Frames are an outstanding add-on sale.

A canvas print becomes an amazing enhancement for those one or two special images from a wedding, a portrait sitting or children’s shoot.  And, while it might not be for every client, purses, bags and backpacks with the kid’s pictures on them are outstanding add-ons from a children’s shoot.  How about the types of images you present?  Sure, there’s black and white and color, but how about the look of infrared, special effects and cross-processing? (Ever notice there are an infinite number of combinations of plug-ins you can use, thanks to Kubota Image Tools?) And there are hundreds of different things to print on, including metal, whether you’re doing it yourself or working with your lab.

And don’t laugh, take a look at novelty products.    There are some outstanding items out there, from mugs to mouse pads!   For those of you who are purists and hate the idea, I’m not saying you need to be out there selling coffee mugs with the bride and groom’s face on them, but what an incredible marketing tool.  What a way to make a great client laugh and remember how much fun they had at the engagement shoot with you, when you send them a matched set of coffee mugs with their pictures on them!

I’m tired of hearing photographers complain about “Uncle Harry” stealing business.  I’m not saying the Uncle Harrys of the world don’t create problems, but they don’t have access to the hundreds of products and companies that make up the professional photographic market.  As a professional photographer you’ve got virtual exclusivity when it comes to the broadest most diverse selection of add-on products from the finest group of manufacturers in the history of photography!

When you put it all together add-on sales create added perceived value and in the end create higher customer satisfaction and return business, but best of all, it helps add to your bottom line!

Okay, so that was written almost two years ago and the potential for add-on sales hasn’t changed.  If we’ve learned nothing else from MacDonalds, try their approach in your selling skills with every client and simply ask, “You want fries with that?”

We’re living in the age of instant gratification. We text, we tweet, we abbreviate. Our spelling has become absurd, phonetically attacking a conversation for the sole purpose of packing a full paragraph into just 140 characters. Photographers have become “togs” & sum things R gr8 2 reed others rn’t.

We eat on the run, multi-tasking and getting a little work done so we can justify stepping away from the biz at lunch time. MacDonalds has two lines for the drive-in window and we can order combo meals, making the decision-making process even faster when it comes to the barrage of possibilities for our low nutrition intake of garbage.

New photographers, sorry “togs” jump into the market thinking because they understand Photoshop they’re perfectly capable of being a professional photographer. They shoot with wild abandon with a mindset, “No problem. I’ll fix it later in Photoshop!” The truth is, no matter what your skill set, if it’s a lousy image there’s one fundamental rule of nature, “You can’t buff a turd!”

The reality is that you can’t Tweet quality. There are no shortcuts to creating outstanding images. There are no shortcuts to building a relationship with your clients. There are no shortcuts to great marketing. All of this leaves me with one sentiment – it’s time for many of you to just slow down!

If you’re one of those shortcut, overnight, buy a camera and just add Photoshop photographers, here’s where you’re missing some incredible opportunities:

• You’re doing yourself a huge disservice and leaving a lot of great revenue on the table. A great series of images shown to an excited client has the potential to create not only more sales from the original job, but additional sales as your client shows your work to their friends.
• You’re doing your client a disservice, but not “being all you can be”. Yeah, it’s the US Army’s slogan, but it’s so dead-on, for every profession. You can’t compromise on being the best at what you do. When you present images that exceed a client’s expectations the excitement and goodwill you’ll be a part of will take your pride and theirs to a completely new level.
• You’re slowly undermining the credibility of an entire industry. The other night on the local news was a consumer protection story where a woman wrote to the TV station for help getting her wedding images. Look, mistakes happen and there are always extenuating circumstances, but when what should be a quietly resolved customer service issue gets so out of control the local news media gets involved, the business entity just didn’t do their job!  Think about the number of people who watched the story and got a bad impression about professional photographers. Even worse, think about the credibility boost the story just gave to all the Uncle Harrys and all that gear they just bought!
• You’re making it harder to build your business than it has to be. Anybody can get their first customer. The trick is to get the second, third and fourth customers along with getting that first customer to come back. Being a successful photographer is about building trust with your clients.  When that trust is violated the entire model collapses. On the other hand, when you exceed a client’s expectations you’ve got a customer for life, not to mention one more member of your word-of-mouth publicity machine.

Okay, so let’s end this little rant this morning with a few suggestions. Slow it down and pay attention to the quality of your images and the quality of your relationships. Build your business one client at a time and treat every client as if they were the only person who was ever going to pay you for your skill set as a photographer.

Focus on being the very best photographer with a mindset that Rangefinder Magazine wants to do a story about you, but you told them to wait until you had the images you wanted!   And as always, NEVER compromise!

You’re part of an amazing industry and there’s help every step of the way, providing you respect and love the craft.  And trust me, if you respect the craft, there is no way to describe the return on your investment!

Here’s the scenario: I contacted them after we bought the house and purchased a standard home protection package. Shame on me for not asking them to clarify the offer. However, at the time it seemed like a terrific deal, which included $850 of free goods related to our home system for fire, emergency and police protection. I’ll take full blame for not asking the right questions a month before moving into the house, but what transpired after the fact is my issue.

First, they tried to up-sell me to $4200 of charges to make our home second only to Fort Knox in security. Second, came the concern that our existing system was too old to be modified and therefore we’d need to go completely with their new system. (It was no surprise when they found a way to get the old system working.) Third, was the final straw, a three year contract. Keep in mind all of this started as a $99 offer with a minimal monthly fee!

So, here’s the lesson for your photography business:

Clearly state your promotional offers! Don’t jack up your normal prices to make the special promotion more attractive.

Take responsibility for your programs. We had two technicians here and they were both terrific, but they had no responsibility for the decision process and many of my questions were met with, “They won’t do that!”  If you made a mistake, just own it – don’t pass the buck onto your lab, album company or another vendor.

Learn to read your client. It couldn’t have been more obvious that I was frustrated and reaching the boiling point throughout the process. Once a customer has smoke coming out of his ears, you can forget about trying to find a reasonable outcome.

Be in tune with your competition and your market.During the installation the telemarketers were like vultures and I received a minimum of ten calls from other companies all pitching me on security deals. I went into the process happy with my selection of ADT, but the constant barrage of calls throughout the process made me even more skeptical of what I was being sold.

Deliver on time! I realize there’s no way to know how long some jobs take, but with ADT, after six hours I finally pulled the plug and told them to come back the next day. At the very least they should have staffed accordingly. All total it was probably ten hours of work. Even a short communication on the front end would have alerted me to the fact that this was an all day job.

Solve problems! This is the grand-daddy of them all. NEVER tell a client there’s nothing you can do! There’s always something you can do and always something you can offer to let the client know their business is important to you.

Follow the growth and reputation of any great company and you’ll always find good customer service in their building blocks. It’s at the very core of great companies like Nordstroms, L.L. Bean and Lands End.  Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon said it all,

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

Moving into a new home I’ve had eight telemarketing calls in the last 24 hours, four from ADT and four from various water purification companies. They’re vultures and they’ve picked up the scent of fresh meat in the area!  However, every single call starts out with the same phony approach.

“Hello Mr. Cohen. This is not a sales call, we just want to welcome you to the area and congratulate you on your new home with a special gift!” Seriously, not one call has varied from the pitch as they’ve even used the exact same words! It’s all scripted and always presented with that same obnoxious enthusiastic tone. It’s the same tone you got with a first grade teacher on your first parent’s night! “Welcome, are we all having fun tonight?” You were trying to, but you were too busy fighting off the cramp in your right thigh from sitting in those little chairs.

So, here’s the point this morning…

Speak from the heart when you’re talking to your clients. Listen more than you talk and if you’re going to do a phone campaign then utilize other vehicles to help establish your credibility first. For example, a direct mail campaign together with an email campaign will help to build brand awareness before you try and make a cold call.