011: Chris Scott – How to Go From Shoot & Burn to Print Sales Master – Let’s Make More Money!

September 15, 2020

“Make it Work Today. Make it Better Tomorrow”

CHRIS SCOTT

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Chris Scott, founder of Swift Galleries – we are really excited to have him on the show.

Chris Scott is a print sales expert, specialising in helping Shoot & Burn photographers make the switch to selling printed products. His work, tools and education have been featured by Rangefinder Magazine, Professional Photographer Magazine, CreativeLive, Click Magazine, SLR Lounge and countless blogs, print labs and podcasts. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife Adrienne, their two kids and their adopted dog, Todd.

Check out some of the biggest points from Chris’ interview below:

Let’s talk a little bit more about Swift Galleries in more detail. Can you tell us the real crux of what it is, how it works, and just go into a bit more detail for us there?

Swift Galleries is a web-based tool. It allows you to, number one, design wall art galleries, so that you can show your clients what their photos will look like on their walls at the right size. Say this gallery behind me, so if you’re listening to this, sorry. If you’re watching this, then that’s what I’m talking about. This gallery behind me, I could just take a picture of that wall, and I could show them exactly what this would look like on that wall, calibrated to the right size.

It really takes all of the guesswork out of selling wall art galleries, because they see exactly what they’re going to get. There’s no question about it. Then the other side to Swift Galleries is the sales tool. It’s not just for designing wall art. It’s for actually going through the sales process. There’s a full print sales sales flow inside Swift Galleries, so it’ll walk you through a title screen, the slide show, doing your cull, comparing similar images, selling wall art, selling what we call add-ons, so that’s basically anything that doesn’t go on the wall.

You do that, and then go through the check out process, discounts, all of that, so that you can do your entire sales meeting, whether it’s in traditional in-person, or virtual in-person sales, you can do the entire thing right there inside Swift Galleries. It’s really a one-stop shop for anybody who’s wanting to sell prints. I’m proud of it. I’m a little biased.

How can photographers use virtual sales and use this whole process right now?

Oh my gosh. We were made for this. We kind of joked around, we’ve been teaching virtual sales now for a couple of years, because I think the technology is finally there. We’re talking over Zoom right now, and I’m in the US. You’re in the UK. This is easy. I could share my screen with you right now. We could go through an entire sales meeting as if we were in the same room. We live in the freaking future.

We’ve been teaching this now for a few years, so when coronavirus came and we finally accepted that this is a real thing, and it hit our industry so hard, at first we did what everybody did. We stumbled back, and we were like, “Oh my gosh. What are we going to do?” Then we’re like, “Wait. We were born for this guys. This is what we do here. Take this message and spread it far and wide.” Because this process, I mean it’s tailor made for this. It’s a way for you to sell your products to clients when you can’t be face-to-face with them.

Is the ROI going to be exactly the same? Probably not. You’re probably going to be able to do better with a traditional, in-person sales process. You can have samples to show them and stuff like that. If that’s not possible for you, you don’t just say, “Well, then I’m not going to do anything.” Great. This is what I can do right now. Well, guess what, we had a lot of members who were doing this before COVID even became a thing, and they found that their return on time invested, their profits were actually higher doing virtual sales than doing traditional sales because of the time that it took to get the room cleaned up, or to travel to their clients, travel back and forth, whatever.

Virtual sales meetings tend to be shorter than traditional, in-person sales meetings. When they counted all of the time involved, they realized, “Do you know what? No, I’m not making as much per sale, but I’m making more per hour by doing virtual in-person sales.” Gosh, it is tailor made for this. I would encourage you, especially if you’re a shoot and burn photographer, you are sitting on a goldmine of images right now. They’re just sitting there.

You could easily implement a process, whether it’s a virtual sales meeting or just some sort of offer on prints to all of those past clients. If you’re stuck and you’re in lockdown, and you’re like, “What am I doing right now?” You need to be tapping into those past clients. You have all of these images that are just sitting there, and now’s the time to make an offer to those clients, whether you’re doing it through a Zoom meeting in a full sales meeting, or if you’re just sending an image over and saying, “Hey, I’ve got a special running on this type of print product. Here’s a mock-up of it real quick. Here’s what it would look like. I think it would look amazing in your home. If you get it in the next three days, it’s whatever percent off.”

Do something. You have all of these images. Start taking advantage of that, because there’s just so much money sitting there. I hate seeing so many photographers struggle. It’s not all about the money, but guess what, it is kind of about the money too. We have to be okay with that. We run photography businesses, so we have to be okay with the fact that we’re going to talk about money sometimes, and especially right now.

It’s hard. It’s hard, but there are things that you can be doing to do just as well. I would argue that as a shoot and burn photographer, typically you’re probably not charging that much for your session and your files. You could maybe even do better right now than you’re doing actually out shooting and burning, selling printed products, because you can charge a premium for some of those products.

What would you say to a photographer that loves the idea, they love everything they’ve heard from you so far, but they’re just a little bit unsure about the whole selling wall art or selling prints?

I would say, so this is my life mantra, and it’s something that we say a ton over at Swift Galleries and to our members and everything is this idea of make it work, then make it better. It’s what I live and die by. Make it work, then make it better. It’s what gets me to do something today. Basically, it’s similar to done is better than perfect. Just get something out there. Don’t worry about it being perfect today. Make it work today and then spend the rest of your days making it better. It’s so much easier to iterate your way to a really great process, than it is to wait, and wait and build that process in stealth, and then launch it all. No. Just put something out there today.

I would say, if you’re listening and you’re like, “This sounds good, but I don’t know. What are the baby steps?” I would start with starting to show products everywhere someone touches your brand. Whether you’re doing mock-ups on Instagram, Facebook. Just wherever they look, I want them to start seeing products. Then from there, I would add planning meetings where you’re saying, “Tell me, what do you want to do with these images?” You start painting that picture.

Even if on the backend you still don’t plan on doing a sales meeting, no big deal. Start with the planning meeting, because you’re going to start setting those expectations for products, even if you’re delivering files at the end. I think what you’ll find happen though is they’ll say, “We talked about this thing. Can you just do it for me?” Yeah. We can absolutely do that for you, like I suppose I can take your money. Great.

I would start though with showing products everywhere someone touches your brand. In fact, I guess really what I would start with is making an offer to your existing clients on images that you’ve already created. A shameless plug, we actually own another company called Pro Photo Mockups. It’s like Photoshop. Mock-ups of different products from actual print labs, so you know that what you’re showing them is what they’re going to get. You can use something like that. They’re like five bucks a piece over there. You could use something like that.

Get one mock-up and say, “I’m going to offer a five by seven gallery wrapped canvas to every client.” You get that one mock-up, and you create a custom mock-up for each client. You email them that image, and you say, “If you buy this in the X number of days, then you get this percentage off, or you get this bonus thing.” You give them some sort of reason to buy it right now. I would just encourage you to do that, because it at least gets something in their hands. It gets something in their home. It gets some money in your account. You’ve already done the work to create the images. Just start making some money off of those.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Chris for coming on and sharing his expertise on going from Shoot and Burn Photographer to Print Sales Pro!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally