FocalPower…the blog

Another topic that came out of the wedding album discussion with my photographer friend a few days ago was the DIY wedding album.  Since she is a photographer, she really wanted to put together the wedding album herself.  Thus, she looked for wedding photographers who would give her the negatives immediately after the big day and didn’t offer (or wouldn’t include) the album in their price.

During my friend’s wedding, there were a number of enthusiast and semi-professional photographers who were there with cameras in tow and taking pictures that the wedding photographers were not.  In the end, many pages of photos in my friends wedding album were taken not by the professional photographers she hired, but by the guests who were just doing what they love to do.  And at every wedding I go to, I continue to see more and more DSLR cameras of increasing quality snapping away.

The technology of photography is constantly forcing professional photographers to be nimble and adapt their business models in order to stay in business. Thus, with the rise of the enthusiast photographer and the continual price erosion of high quality DSLR cameras, I am wondering: are more wedding photographers seeing requests from clients for the negatives to do their own wedding album?

This seems like a natural evolution of the business trends that have been occurring.  But I would love to hear from some professional wedding photographers to see if this is the case.

There is still huge value that professional wedding photographers offer in both photographing the day as well as album design.  The trick for wedding photographers is to make sure their clients don’t forget this value.

A few days ago I was talking with a fellow photographer and we some how ended up on the topic of wedding albums.  We were comparing notes on how the different photographs that we had at each of our weddings handled the album sale after the wedding.  It was quite surprising the stark differences that each photographer used and the result that this had on the incremental revenue gained from the sale of an album.

The general trend amongst most professional wedding photographers is to offer multiple packages that the prospective couple could choose from.  The two main variables that are involved with sizing these packages is the number of hours spent photographing the wedding and the number of album pages that are included .  Including some album pages in the package is the first step to a successful wedding album sales after the big day.

The second step to a successful wedding album sale is selling the couple on the wedding album vision.  Regardless of what it says on our business cards, we are all sales people first and foremost.   Helping the happy couple have a complete memory of their big day is the value they will get out of their wedding album.  The trick is to be energetic and positive while showing them the vision of a complete album that is more than what their package contains.

I learned this trick from the wedding photographer who my wife and I hired for our wedding.   He knew I was a photographer and so was a bit more open on sharing before, during, and after our wedding.  This, coupled with my business sense from selling technology for years, allowed me to pickup on his highly refined sales process for the album.  His process was getting the couple emotionally attached to a vision and then enabling them to make an emotional decision on the wedding album.

Within a week or two of the wedding, he had scheduled a time for my wife and I to come back in to his studio and review the photos.  He had all the keeper photos from our wedding available as 4×6 prints.  All he asked was that we spend 30 minutes or so flipping through all the photos and making two piles:  likes and dislikes.  Then, we were scheduled to come back in within a week to “layout” our album.

When we arrived for the layout session, he had already taken our pile of likes and laid out the ideal wedding album from our big day using these photos.  He sat us down to review the layout with us and show us the options and alternative photos that could be used in certain spots.  Page by page, we saw our wedding day come to life before our very eyes.  Seeing moments of the wedding that we had not observed or had missed during the day itself.  When we reached the last page, it felt like we had experienced the whole wedding day for the first time.  This was the emotional hook.

The photo package that we had purchased included 12 album pages.  Laid out on the table in front of us was almost 30 album pages.  The additional cost for the ideal wedding album was easily a couple thousand dollars.  I could see that most couples at this point would just go with the photographer’s ideal layout and happily pay the additional money.  But my sales instincts kicked into high gear and allowed me to realize what had just happened.  After discussing it over with my wife (who hadn’t realized what just happened even though she has worked in retail sales for years), we went for the ideal wedding album.  We were very happy with our decision.  And the photographer had successfully upsold another client.

The lesson to be learned here for all photographers is to project a positive energetic feeling about the photos every time you interact with your customers. This positive energy will wash away the small flaws that we, with our photographer’s critical eye, always see and sometimes focus on to our detriment.   And this positive energy will not only transfer to the client but also stick in their mind.  You then need to have a sales process in place that times up selling during the most emotional interaction with your client.  This sales skill is not an easy one to learn, but can be learned by everyone who is willing to try.  In the end, you will end up with more business per client and a more successful photography business.

Eventually, you too can retire early to your well earned beach house…just like our wedding photographer did.