Recorded: Welcome to the ReWork with Allison Tyler-Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, mini workshops, and behind-the-scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She will challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business. Let’s do the rework.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hi friends, and welcome back to the ReWork. Most photographers that I meet are sensitive, creative souls, and we all just kind of prefer to avoid conflict. We don’t really love it. We don’t love conflict in any area of our life, and so sometimes that means that we aren’t clear enough ahead of time because we want people to like us and we want things to just be smooth, and we want to just create pretty beautiful portraits for our clients and have them pay us and all go on our merry way. But sometimes it doesn’t work out like that. Sometimes it feels like we’re putting our baby out in the cold, cruel world and our feelings get hurt. But it’s important if we’re going to be in business for the long haul that we develop a bit of a thick skin if we’re going to handle difficult situations in a professional manner, and I find it helpful to try to get out ahead of potential difficult situations before they happen. Today, I want to explore with you five different concepts of preventing client problems before they happen. So let’s jump in.
Allison Tyler Jones: Number one, one of my favorite words, clarity. To clarify something is to make it clear. When you think about clarifying butter, you boil it until the fat rises to the top and then you clear it off and it’s clear. So clarifying, using clarity, making it clear what it is that you do and how it is that you do it. So on your website, in your social media, is it clear exactly what it is that you’re doing, or do you just have a lot of beautiful images without the context of what it is that you’re going to do with them? On our website and in our social media, we are constantly putting images of installation, ATJ install day. Where are these going to hang in your home? Every conversation that we have with clients, we are talking about that we specialize in a finished product that’s wall art for your homes or custom designed albums, and that message is used again and again, visually, verbally and in writing with our clients over and over again.
Allison Tyler Jones: When you are so sick of hearing it, that’s when your clients are barely starting to understand what it is that you do. So because we’re creative and we like to change things all the time, and we always want to do things new, sometimes it can be very confusing for our clients because we might be saying the same thing, but we’re saying it in a bunch of different ways and they’re not tracking or coming along with us. So get a sentence, what is it that you’re doing? How is it that you do it? And repeat that to yourself again and again until it just trips off your tongue so easily. And then before you post something on social media, before you put something on your website, ask yourself, is this communicating what I want it to say? Is this communicating that sentence? Is it clear exactly what I do?
Allison Tyler Jones: The biggest mistake that photographers make in the clarity department is that they have beautiful images in galleries on their website, beautiful images on their Instagram with no context of what it is that you are expected to do with those images. So make it clear. Clarity, number one.
Allison Tyler Jones: Number two, having a conversation versus an email back and forth or text back and forth with a client. Okay, so what do I mean by that? Well, it’s very, very important for me when somebody DMs us or emails us, however they contact us the first time, it’s usually through a direct message on Instagram or through our website on our info at form on our website that we want to get them on a phone call as soon as possible.
Allison Tyler Jones: We do not send out any information regardless of what they’re asking. They might DM us and say, “Hey, can you send me your pricing? I’d love to have you photograph my family. I just need some more information.” That is not the time to send off an email with a price list or some kind of a brochure that has no context, that’s lazy, and it’s not going to convert how you think it will. I don’t care how beautiful that brochure is. You need to have a conversation with that person, and that conversation is going to be a more in depth version of your clarifying message.
Allison Tyler Jones: So in a first phone call, you’re getting some information about them. I would suggest highly that you go back and listen to ReWork episode number three, Having a Focused and Successful Initial Client Call. That’s probably one of our most downloaded episodes on the podcast because it explores in depth how we run our first phone call and how we clarify our message, how we have that conversation with a new lead, basically letting them know what it is that we do, how it is that we work, and get them to a consultation and convert them into a client.
Allison Tyler Jones: So have the conversation, don’t be lazy and just shoot off a price list. Sending a price list is absolutely useless because the client doesn’t know enough to know what to do with that price list. They don’t know what sizes of prints are. They don’t know our world and they don’t know what it is that they want. That’s our job is to help them, is to talk with them, talk about their family, their kids, where they’re at in their life, and help them determine how our talents can best serve them at this time in their life. That’s our job. It’s not their job to look at a price list and figure out what they want, just like it’s not their job to look at an online gallery and figure out which images to order.
Allison Tyler Jones: If we are specializing in finished product and we want to run a portrait studio that uniquely brands, profitably prices and confidently sells our very best work and provides a stellar client experience, that is not done through shooting an email of a price list to somebody. It is having a conversation with them and assessing their needs, giving them some kind of an idea of what they would be spending and then bringing them into our world through a consultation. So have the conversation.
Allison Tyler Jones: Number three, just mentioned it, having a client consultation. The client consultation is where the sale is made. It’s where we manage the client’s expectations. It’s where we put together a game plan for the session itself. It’s where we quote them the pricing, and this is where clients, if we do it right, they will either come along with us through the whole process and become amazing clients or they will weed themselves out. At this point, I don’t weed anybody out. I bring everybody into my world. I assume everybody wants and can afford what I can do, and is thrilled and excited to do it until they tell me, “Actually, this is not in the cards for us right now. We’ll do this later.” I find that having that consultation, spending that time, walking them through the process, when people decide that they don’t want it or that it’s not in the cards for them right now, and they decide to weed themselves out, they don’t leave mad, they’re not upset, they’re not like, “How dare you charge this much money, you loser. I can’t believe it.”
Allison Tyler Jones: They actually leave saying things like, “Wow, thank you so much for spending this time with me. This is so special and so cool what you do, and I really didn’t even know anything like this existed. What we’re doing right now and what I was talking to you about is just kind of not that important, but we’re getting together for a family reunion next year and I really want you to do that for us. Or we’re going to come back next year. My oldest is graduating. We want to do our last nuclear family picture before she goes to college. And that’s when I really want to spend and create something really special.”
Allison Tyler Jones: So what it does is it clarifies that conversation, clarifies what it is that we do, lets them know also what we’re not doing, a bunch of digital files for X number of dollars. And they say, “Oh, okay. Now, I understand that what you’re doing is something really special. It’s going to be really amazing and it’s going to be more money than what I thought, and I actually do want that, but maybe not just right now for this project that I just called you about because I just saw your name or talk to somebody and ask about a photographer, or I saw you on Instagram and thought, ‘Hey, I just want a few little images,’ and I can see that what you’re doing is bigger than that and it’s for a time when you’re doing something really special.” So that’s not a negative. The negative is letting them go along and thinking that they’re going to get a couple of little things and we’re spinning our dreams, our visions of well, when they see everything, they’re going to be so excited that I’m going to be able to upsell them and never quoting a price.
Allison Tyler Jones: Sometimes that will work, but it never feels good. The foundation of that is very shaky. That’s usually when you’re getting a sale where maybe you can strong arm them into buying something more than what they thought or a lot more, but that’s when they call back the next day and cancel because you haven’t been transparent and clear with them upfront about how you work and what you do. So having that consultation, that’s where you have time to talk about their family, their goals, their home. You paint the vision for them of what is possible, using your talent to the best of your ability for their specific family and your expertise and what you think that they should have, and then they can decide whether they want to move forward or not.
Allison Tyler Jones: Fourth C is confrontation. So during this consultation and sometimes during the first phone call is being willing to confront the elephant in the room, and we all know what the elephant is, right? It’s those frequently asked difficult questions. It’s the areas of potential conflict that are going to come up later. And we sometimes have magical thinking and think if we don’t bring them up, then they won’t either. So that could be areas like digital files, it could be pricing. Those are usually the two big ones, right? Your pricing and your digital files. So thinking the clients will love the images so much that they won’t care about the pricing or that they will love the images so much that they won’t care about the fact that you’re not selling printable digital files is going to create a disappointed client because they’re thinking that they’re going to get one thing, you’re thinking another and they are not the same thing. So bringing that up early, letting them know exactly what it is that you do and specialize in and conversely what it is that you don’t do.
Allison Tyler Jones: So don’t be afraid to confront those things and talk about those two items. What is your policy on the digital file situation and talking about price. We talk about those two things a little bit on the first phone call and then a lot more in depth in the client consultation, but at some point we have to confront those two issues. And so those might sound something like, “We specialize in finished product, which is wall art for your home and custom designed albums. Of course, anything that goes on the wall or in an album, you are going to have the social media files for those. They are for screens only.” So that’s very common, you can tell I don’t even have that written anywhere in front of me, literally that is in my brain and in my employee’s brains that comes off of our tongue all the time. We are not specializing in printable digital files. That’s not what we’re creating. We are creating wall art for your home or custom designed albums.
Allison Tyler Jones: So we confront that very early in the first phone call. And then pricing, obviously, in the first phone call, you’re not going to get into the weeds in your price list because they don’t even know what they want. You’re just having a basic conversation. You’re getting them to the point where they want to come in for a consultation and talk about what it is that you’re shooting for, where that image is going to hang or is it going in an album and you’re having those kinds of kind conversations, but that’s when you’re wanting to quote some kind of a price. So on a first phone call, that’s going to look like, “Most of our clients spend north of X number of dollars. Our session fee is X.” If your session fee has some kind of a product credit, you let them know about it then.
Allison Tyler Jones: So that’s pretty much, unless, I mean, every now and then you’ll get a client that will say, “How much is a 30 by 40 framed?” Very unusual. But some people, if they’ve lived in other parts of the country and used other photographers that specialize in finished product, maybe they have been having a 30 by 40 created every single year, and they just know that that’s the size that they want. It’s not very common, but sometimes you will have somebody ask that, but usually they have no idea. So even if they haven’t asked about price, we will confront that, whether it’s on the first phone call or during the consultation. If they have not asked, we don’t just think, “Oh, good, thank goodness they didn’t ask about pricing.” We confront it and say, “Do you have any questions for me about pricing?” And then if they say, no, that worries me because if I haven’t quoted it, they have no idea.
Allison Tyler Jones: Now, if they say, “No, I don’t have any questions. I’m really good friends with Alicia, and she told me that you are super expensive, she kind of told me what she spent. So if we’re in that ballpark, we’re fine.” So then I might even say, “Okay, well then you know that about $5,000,” or whatever the amount is, I might just throw, still throw a number out there, but then I don’t feel so worried about that I’ve got to quote them prices. But if they say, “No, I don’t think I have any question about pricing.” And they don’t say that they know somebody and that somebody told them, then I’ll say, “Okay, you know what? Just to give you an idea, a statement piece which holds a wall alone is going to start at X number of dollars. A couple of small series pieces are going to be X number of dollars. Our albums start at X number of dollars.”
Allison Tyler Jones: So it just gives them an idea. And then I might reiterate what they heard in the first phone call is, “Most of our clients spend north of $5,000,” or whatever the amount is that you want to tell them. And sometimes they’ll ask you, “Well, what does that get me? What would $5,000 get me?” And then you need to have answers for that.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love a free resource, and I know you do too. So I have one for you that goes along with this podcast episode called The 5 C’s of Weeding Out Difficult Clients. All you have to do to download it for free is to go to dotherework.com/difficult. That’s do the dotherework.com/difficult. There’s a worksheet that has all the concepts that we talked about in today’s episode highlighted as well as a worksheet to help you use the 5 C’s to get out ahead of problems in your business, make things clearer with your clients. That’s dotherework.com/difficult. Go get it now.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s something that’s really important is that when you are saying, “Most of our clients spend north of whatever that number is, what can they get for that amount of money?” And to have an answer for that is that, “Well, large family portrait, maybe a couple of smaller pieces and some holiday cards or an album and some holiday cards.” Just what would fit in that bucket of that amount that you are quoting. And so to have those just at the ready, ready to go is a really, really good way to confront that question in a super positive way, give them the information, paint the picture for them of like, “Oh, this is what we could do. This is how it could be done. And they feel informed, but not overwhelmed.
Allison Tyler Jones: Do not pull out a price sheet and throw in front of them because they’re just going to go down a rabbit hole and you’re going to be explaining, “Well that if it’s framed in gold, but if it’s framed in silver, it’s this. And if it’s framed in a painted frame, then… ” No, no, no, no, no, no. Keep it at the higher level of defining that scope of work, what it is that we’re going to do and then you can dive down into the details later.
Allison Tyler Jones: The last C is closure. No conflict or difficult situation is finished in our studio until we reach the closure phase. The closure phase looks something like an assessment. So the first four C’s, clarity, conversation, consultation, and confrontation, those are all getting out ahead of problems. But you know what? It doesn’t matter how hard you try. Inevitably, you are going to come up against a difficult situation that you did not anticipate. Some client is going to come up with a question, a problem, something that you did not anticipate, and it’s going to be difficult and you’re going to have to figure it out. Okay? And so maybe that client has left unsatisfied, maybe they’re angry, whatever. It hasn’t gone the way that you thought it was going to go. So how do you reach closure on that?
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, you have to assess. Okay, what went wrong? What really went wrong? And this might take you a minute, especially if you’re feeling defensive and hurt and angry over some kind of interaction. I will suggest to you, do not get on a Facebook group with other photographers and talk bad about your client, because what’s usually going to happen is they are going to support you and talk about what an idiot your client is. And that is actually not going to help you. That is not going to help you get better. What is going to help you get better is for you to sit in that discomfort and think what really went wrong? Was there anything here that could have been prevented? Where did I go wrong? And usually it’s going to be in number one, clarity or two, conversation or consultation.
Allison Tyler Jones: Somewhere in there you didn’t give the information. You got too chatty. You got talking about the outfits and the kids and how creative this is all going to be, and just oopsie forgot to quote some pricing. Or you are like, “Well, they just had total amnesia. I told her that most of our clients spend north of $5,000, but she just didn’t hear that.” And sometimes that happens. And then you want to ask yourself, in this closure phase, how was that difficult situation handled? Did I handle it as professionally as I possibly could have or did I let my emotions get involved? Did I get defensive? How can I do better next time? Because there is no wasted experience unless we neglect to learn from it.
Allison Tyler Jones: So the biggest mistake you can make here is not realizing that a mistake handled properly can be some of your best marketing. That sometimes when somebody’s had a disappointment or something has gone wrong, that the way you handle that actually can become great marketing. So I’ll give you an example of that. We had a lovely family come in for a multi-gen session. They had never done professional portraits before. So on the first phone call, we gave them all the quoting, and they were kind of like, “Really? It can’t possibly be that much, but we’ll go ahead and come in for the consultation.” So they came in for the consultation. The wife and daughters came in, and I was very transparent. Especially on a multi-gen session, it’s so much work. And so I have no problem being very bold about confronting pricing and digital files and all of these things when it comes to a multi-gen session because it’s so much work. I know how long it takes. I know what effort it takes to create that much energy to keep that many people going during a session. So I have no problem confronting.
Allison Tyler Jones: So we quoted prices, et cetera. So then they came in for the session. They wore what we told them to wear. They were just a lovely family. They were so amazing. And then when they came in for their sales appointment, the dad, dad and the mom, and then all the daughters. And so we showed them the image. They really just wanted one big image of the family, and then they wanted a smaller image of the grandparents with the grandkids. So that is what we shot. We did not do breakouts. We did not do all the other things because we nailed it down and we quoted them that price.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so at the end of that view and order or sales appointment, it was funny because the dad said to me, he’s like, “When she told me how much this was going to be, I just couldn’t believe that it could possibly be that much. And so my whole purpose in coming here today was to shut this down and say, there’s no way that it can be this much money.” And he’s like, “And now here I am telling her she needs to make the picture bigger and spend more money.” And he was just kind of poking fun at himself. So it was lovely. We had no price sensitivity, no sticker shock, it was great. So we printed the image, we framed it, and then we took it and delivered and installed it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, unbeknownst there was some kind of flaw in the canvas. And on one of the granddaughter’s dresses, there was kind of this little weird white fleck, and we just hadn’t caught it, and our framer hadn’t caught it either. Very unusual, but it happened. And so I was not on the install. One of my employees had gone on the install with the installer, and the husband was very upset, and he’s like, “You would think for what we spent that this would be perfect.” And unfortunately, the employee that went on this installation, she did not answer that objection in the way that she should have. She said, “Oh, well, we’ll take it back and we’ll fix it. It’ll be fine.” And he said, “I don’t want it fixed. I want it reprinted.” And she’s like, “Oh, well, no, we can fix it.”.
Allison Tyler Jones: So she kind of was dismissing his concern and she wasn’t really hearing him and understanding him that he was really upset. He felt like this should be reprinted. So it left a bad taste in his mouth, and he was very, very upset. So she came back to the studio. She had the portrait with her, and she’s like, “Yeah, he was just really upset. And I told him we would fix it, and I don’t know why he was so upset.” And so she was kind of coming from a place of the client is being unreasonable or the client’s being a jerk. And so we had to do this closure phase with her and assess, okay, what happened here? Could this have been prevented? So yes, we could have done better quality control. Obviously, mistakes happened, we didn’t see it. And how was it handled? Well, it wasn’t handled great because she did not immediately say, “Oh my gosh, I am so sorry. We’re taking this away right now. We will come back and it will be perfect.” How it’s going to be perfect doesn’t need to be talked about, right?
Allison Tyler Jones: So her saying, “Oh, yeah, well, we can fix it.” And him saying, “Well, no, I want it reprinted.” That’s where the problem came in. Of course, no matter what, it’s going to be perfect. So we reprinted it, we took it back. I called the mom, the client before we reprinted it, that same exact day. When she had come back to the studio and reported what had happened, I called the client immediately and I just said, “I just want you to know this will be perfect. It will be fixed. If we have to reprint it, we will absolutely reprint it. It’ll be handled. I don’t want you to worry about it. It’ll be handled.” And she’s like, “Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.”
Allison Tyler Jones: So we reprinted it, we took it, we rehung it, and I got a text from that mom, and she said, “I feel so bad that this happened that you had to reprint that, but the fact that you did and that you just took care of it without us having to make a big deal about it, I just am so grateful for the way that you run your business. You totally took care of our family. It was just such an amazing experience beginning to end. We loved it. But even though this was a negative, the fact that you took it away from my house and that first it was there and I loved it so much, and then that it was gone, and then it came back again, it actually made me realize, this is what’s been missing in my home for years. I have wanted this forever. And so this is every day now that I see it, even the fact that it was missing for that little period of time while you were reprinting, it just made me realize how much I value and love it and I love it more and more every day.”
Allison Tyler Jones: So there’s no wasted experience unless we neglect to learn from it. If we’re willing to be clear ahead of time, let everybody know how we work and what we do. Have the conversation rather than just lazily sending off an email of our price list or just sending off some information rather than getting them on the phone, having a consultation where we quote pricing, get a game plan of what it is that we’re shooting for and what product we are creating. What is the end product that we are creating? Nailing that down in the conversation, nailing that down in the consultation. And then confronting all the sticky issues that we know everybody asks before they ask. And then if something goes wrong, making sure that we don’t miss the step of closure of going back over and thinking, what went wrong? How could this have been prevented? Was it handled correctly? And how can we do better next time?
Allison Tyler Jones: Employing these 5 C’s in your business will make your process better and better and better every single time. You will improve exponentially, you will improve quickly, and you will learn so fast how to make your client experience better, how to make the work itself better. And you will find that you will have less problems, you will have less conflict with your clients. It’s funny, the more clear you become and the more that you employ these five concepts, suddenly all of your clients get, I’m using air quotes here, “better”. You get better clients. And honestly, it’s not the clients that have changed, it’s you who have changed.
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re clear about the message that you’re putting out there and about how you work, and everybody’s on the same page. And those that don’t want what you do, go away, not angry. They go away informed, and they know when it’s special and when they want to do it, they will come to you. And when they just want some digital files or a few little prints, they know that you’re overkill for that. So they’re not going to call you for that. So be willing. Don’t be afraid. Be willing to employ the 5 Cs in your business. Get out ahead of those problems and prevent them before they happen.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’d love to hear how you’re using these 5 C’s in your business. And if we’ve missed one, maybe there’s one that we missed. So hit us up in the DMs on Instagram at dotherework or at atjphoto, either one or support@dotherework.com. We’d love to hear about what you’re doing. And if you found this lesson helpful, share this episode with another photographer friend. And if you have a minute and could give us a review wherever you listen to your podcast, it really helps us get the message out to more photographers, and we’d love to be able to help as many photographers as we possibly can to build better businesses, to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work to great clients. Thank you for being here. See you next time.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com and on Instagram at do.the.rework.
