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- [00:00]
A
Back when I was pregnant with Oliver, my oldest, I was a nurse at the time. I was not yet a photographer at all, and I was a vegetarian. And I remember during my pregnancy feeling stressed about everything because that's the way that works. But at one point, I was having a conversation with my dad and I was saying, I wonder if, you know, what happens if this baby is a picky eater, if he refuses to eat from the same menu, what if I need to feed him meat or that? That's part of the thing. And I remember I was sort of spiraling about this, and my dad, who was not a vegetarian, and, you know, I feel like he pretty easily could have been like, yeah, you're going to need to open up the menu instead. Said something along the lines of, look, if you ask a kid if they want broccoli or pop tarts, they're going to pick pop tarts every single time. But if you say, do you want broccoli or peas? Then the kid's going to choose one of those things. Either one, but because you're giving them two, both are solid, positive choices, then you win every time, basically. And that helped me think that through. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're right, you're right. I raised that story because I have thought about it many, many times since well past when I needed to figure out how to feed my kids. And I actually think about it a fair amount when it comes to how I build the menu of offers that I hand to my potential clients. Last week, in the first episode of this theme that we are creating or that we are delivering this month around the Back to School Marketing Challenge, where we're trying to fill up our fall busy season with clients. We talked about dividing your email list and all of your contacts into these, like, cold, warm and hot leads. But it's not just about reaching out to your leads and saying, hey, I'm ready to book part of it. And part of taking a more proactive approach involves giving them an offer. And many of us just have one offer. So today I want to talk about the benefits of thinking through that offer menu in a bit of a broader way and some practical ways that you can build that out that aren't going to cannibalize your business.
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Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Annemie Tonkin, 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.
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All right, so here's why the broccoli pop tart story matters for our businesses. Because when we give our clients that kind of take it or leave it binary offer, where there's here's the price, here's the package, yes or no, we are essentially putting pop Tarts on the table as an offer because it is really easy for someone to say no or just ghost altogether rather than taking the next step. It is the pop tarts part of the offer because it doesn't require a decision, it just requires doing nothing, ghosting the email or writing back and being like, thanks, we have to think about it and then never coming back. And if you think about your offers as a menu like you would get at a restaurant, menus generally don't have one item on them. And if they do, if you're one of those super niche food trucks or little mini restaurants or something where they're like, we just serve oysters, then it's going to be a really narrow segment of the market that wants to go eat there. It might be that's enough to fill up that restaurant because they have good marketing or they have a big cult following. And if that's your business and you're already full, then you're probably skipping these episodes anyway because you don't need to market for this season. But if you typically have one item on your menu and you are not booked for the coming season, then what I want this episode to help you do is think through how you can develop your menu so that you're not just appealing to that one periodic person who's like, yep, this is exactly what I want. And the answer is yes. If your menu has one item on it, then again that one person may stop. But everybody else is going right past that restaurant. Now, I want to just start out here, right at the beginning by giving you the opposite scenario, which is that huge laminated, 30 page menu that we've all seen at places like the Cheesecake Factory, where there's so many options that you get totally overwhelmed. They hand you this menu and you feel like you've got homework. And a lot of photographers do that. You're giving people too many options and asking them to navigate all of those decisions on their own. That is not what I'm suggesting that you do. What I want you to do is consider how you might expand to give people a curated small menu, a few things that work together that can flex for a big appetite or a small one, and that might be able to accommodate somebody's dietary restriction without you having to build a whole separate kitchen for them. So the real question that this episode is built around isn't what should I offer? It's when someone reaches out to you, are you handing them a yes or no question or are you giving them something that gives them a bit of flexibility, a bit of choice? And I want to be clear right from the beginning that this is not something that you have to do. Again, if you are already close to fully booked for the season, you probably don't need to hear this right now. This is for those of you who are listening, who want to get more, I don't want to say aggressive. Let's say you want to be a little bit more hustley about filling your calendar this fall. And if that is you, if you are willing to put in a little more effort to do that, then this is one way for you to get into that. Now, before we talk about how to build it, I do want you to think through what your specific situation calls for, because the fix is going to be different depending on what specific problem you have. So there's two questions to ask. Number one is, are you getting enough inquiries in the first place or is your inbox feeling way too quiet right now? Second, of the inquiries that you're getting, are those inquiries turning into bookings or are people either ghosting you or getting on a call and then saying no or what? You know, whatever your process is like, are you, are you getting too many no's even though you're getting enough inquiries? Now, if your problem is mostly the first issue that not enough people are reaching out, then your issue is kind of upstream. It's a matter of your public menu, public facing menu not attracting enough people. And so that's going to be the first thing that we dig into. But if your problem is mostly the second issue, where you're getting the inquiries, but then they're going cold once, maybe once the price comes up or in some part of that sales process, then your gap, your issue is further downstream and that is what we're going to talk about. Second, if you are dealing with both, where you're not getting many inquiries and then the few that you get are ghosting or disappearing, then you might want to take advantage of both of the strategies that we're going to talk about. And that's totally fine. We're going to be, like I said, talking about both today. So just keep that Answer in mind as we go along today because it's going to be telling you kind of which menu you want to work on first. So the first thing that we're talking about is this public facing menu, right? We're going to start upstream with what people see before they've ever even reached out to you. And this could be on your website, it's on social media, it's, you know, it's what you sort of put out there in the world. So as I said before, a lot of us offer basically one type of session. It's, let's say it's a 90 minute family session, it includes X number of digital files and you can upgrade and get all the files for X amount more. Whatever your structure is, there's usually kind of one main offer. Here's the package, here's the price, take it or leave it. And that feels clean, it feels confident, it's easy to manage as a business owner, but again, that kind of adds a pop tart to the menu. If there's just that one item, the opposite item is the pop tart and it's the, that's not for me, or I'm not sure it is handing an easy exit to potentially good clients who are simply a little nervous or a little price conscious or they're just not sure yet. When I say build out your menu, what I mean is signaling before anyone even reaches out that there is room for a conversation. I'm not talking about itemizing every dish on the menu with a price tag next to it. I just want you to give them enough information that you kind of hook that hesitant person into being like, okay, maybe there's something here for me instead of it's this exact price or nothing. But the flip side is also an issue. I'm not telling you to put every session, type every price point, every add on onto your website so that people can see everything. That's. That feels like transparency, but it does two things wrong at the same time. Number one, it's locking you into terms before you've talked to this specific person about their situation. And it's handing a total stranger a lot of decisions to make before they've even decided to trust you. So again, that's kind of the laminated huge menu that, that's going to just make a lot of people close the tab instead of reading through it all. It's too much information. It's asking people to do too much. Not to mention the fact that putting together that menu takes a ton of bandwidth from you and it's locking you into. Now this is what I offer. So when I say create a curated menu, what I mean is like if you're a family photographer and your signature offer is like a full session with all the bells and whistles, whatever your website copy might say something like sessions are tailored to your family, from a quick in and out to a full experience with wardrobe changes and extended locations. So reach out and let's talk about what makes sense for you. That is one line that does the whole job of letting that hesitant potential client know that there might be some options or some flexibility with pricing and timing and all that sort of stuff without locking you into any one specific thing. So it gives the inquiry or it invites the inquiry instead of pre answering it. If you are, let's say a senior portrait photographer instead of, you know, a pricing page with four collections laid out side by side, you might say every senior session starts with a conversation about what matters to you. Some students want one epic location and a handful of images. Others want the whole experience. Let's figure out what fits. Again, same move, you're signaling range without itemizing it. Now, I always recommend that you give people some sense of pricing. I don't want you to list every price point, every, you know, dollar that they might spend. But I do want you to give some sense of budget because there are a lot of people who will not reach out if there's no budget information at all. So you can say prices start at X, you can say investments range between X and Y. Whatever feels right for your business and describes what's happening that allows people to self select to some degree. But keeping the information vague about where exactly the flexibility lies and exactly what they get for what means that you have a chance to have that conversation with someone which brings them to the next step. So someone should, like when they land on your webpage and they look at the pricing or the investment page, they should think, huh, there's, there might be something here for me. I wonder what it is. I should reach out. So if you go to your own website or if you ask a friend to look at your website, you want to ask them if that's the impression or what. Whether it feels like this wide open guessing game or if it feels like too much information. You don't want to come across as being cagey, but you do want to decide on purpose what's getting put out there in the public versus what gets delivered in conversation. But now I want to talk about what happens after someone has already signed up for a, a call or reached out via email or whatever when the conversation potentially stalls. So I taught a whole episode about this back in episode 218. And if you want to go back and listen to that, that was where I introduced this concept of the back pocket offer. So I'm not going to reteach the whole thing in this episode. But I did want to reintroduce this idea because I have actually heard from a ton of people that this changed the way that they did business and how they were able to book clients. And what this concept is, if we bring it back to the menu metaphor that we've been working with, is that this is like the special that's not on the menu. It's that off menu item that the waiter comes over and tells you about when you sit down. So a back pocket offer is basically some scaled down version of your signature offer that you think through ahead of time. And I don't want you doing any of this in the moment on the fly because that ends up running into trouble because maybe you haven't made sure it's profitable, maybe you're coming across as desperate or whatever. But if you sit down and map this out on purpose ahead of time, then this is a really solid thing to have available. If you have someone who feels like a good fit client, who seems to be flagging whether they just haven't responded to your emails, or if you're on the phone and you can hear that hesitation. But say you're a documentary family photographer and your signature offer is a 12 hour session, it's $2,000. Or you have a six hour version for a thousand dollars and you are deep in conversation with somebody who feels like a great fit. But when you get to price, they start to kind of waffle and hedge and whatever. This is exactly the moment that the off menu special offer that back pocket offer exists for, you're not going to panic. Discount your 12 hour session because that cannibalizes your business. You have run the numbers, you know what you need to charge to make money. But perhaps you reach into your back pocket and you offer something that you've already thought through. Maybe it's an even shorter session, maybe it only has weekday availability, maybe it's scaled down by location instead of hours. If you do your 12 hour session and it's with a family at their house and you travel up to a hundred miles, whatever, maybe this is a two hour session that happens at a location near you that is easy for you to get to. It only happens Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Evening and, and it has kind of more structure to it. Right. So there are a lot of levers that you can pull to make this work and still be profitable for you. Whether that's time or geography or the days of the week that you're available, whatever makes it genuinely lighter for you to deliver and easier for them to say yes to, then that is what you're. If you hear them kind of flagging and like it seems like it's too much, then you can pull that out and say, actually I do have one offer and I don't always talk about this, but maybe this would be a good fit for you. So two rules to go by on this. Number one, this offer is truly off menu. It's not put on your website. There's no mentioning it to somebody who hasn't hit that specific objection with you directly. Because the second that you publicize it, it stops being a back pocket offer and it becomes the new front facing menu item. And that may very well pull somebody who would have been a full price client into this smaller offer that you need to book more of in order to fill your calendar. I also want you to make sure that you are always deciding what the floor is, what that bottom dollar figure is. That is like enough to get you out the door of your house before the season starts. Not when you're. Certainly not when you're on the phone with somebody, but not even when you're just starting to feel nervous about like oh, the season isn't busy enough, da da da. That's when that panic selling starts to happen, which does not end up going well. So one more thing from episode 218 that is easy to forget. The back pocket offer really only helps if you actually find out that price is the issue. So I talked in that episode about a photographer where the conversation was going great and then things got quiet when logistics came up and it turned out that the family was mid renovation and couldn't do an in home session that this photographer was describing. And that wasn't a budget objection, that's a logistics problem. So if she had just assumed that the issue was money and led with a discount, then that wouldn't have solved the problem and it would have potentially broken some of the trust that she had built to that point. So that brings me to this last piece. We've got two problems. Not enough inquiries and not enough conversion of inquiries into sales. And we have two solutions. One is that front facing menu being a little more flexible or indicating more flexibility. And the other is that off menu Item that you're, your back pocket, offer that you're pulling out. But what both of these have in common, and the piece that can make either of these solutions actually work, is to bear in mind that you can't hand someone the right thing off your menu if you don't know what they're actually hungry for. So a good server doesn't come to the table, hand you a menu, and walk away. They ask, you know, have you eaten here before? What are you in the mood for? Do you, do you have any allergies? You know, especially if that person starts to ask any sort of questions, they're going to follow the conversation and give you personalized recommendations. That is the mark of a good server. And my opinion, you guys have heard it before, is that you really can't do that job completely over email. This is something that I have taught for years. It is one of the core tenants in the simple sales blueprint, and it bears repeating here. Because if you are nervous about filling your calendar this coming season, one of the best ways that you can do that is to at least try to get on the phone with anyone who indicates interest in working with you. When I started doing this myself, even though I was nervous, even though it felt like, you know, what am I going to say? What if the conversation stalls? What if they get antsy when I start talking about price? How do I feel about talking about price? Like all of those different things. When I started doing this, my conversion rate went through the roof and it always stayed so much higher when I was talking to people. Not because I was some sort of like salesperson on the call, but because I was able to actually listen to what somebody was saying and maybe in certain cases what they weren't saying or what they weren't asking, and figure out what the actual problem was and get to give them options in the moment. So when you're on a call and somebody gets kind of quiet or hesitates or asks a question, you can respond in a personalized manner. If it's a scheduling issue, if it's a location issue, if it's a price issue, their answers, their responses tell you in the moment how to help them navigate the menu. Right. The more flexible entry point on your public facing menu or that back pocket offer that you're pulling out as kind of a special are so much better positioned when you're not guessing because of an order that nobody placed. The worst version of this is emailing somebody who has gone quiet with Just in case my pricing was too much, here's a cheaper option. That is that sort of desperate feeling approach that I feel like is what you really want to avoid, even if that's what you're feeling. So when you get on a call and you can actually have a conversation with someone, not only are you building intrinsic trust, but you are able to be more personalized to them. So that is my big thing after this episode. If you are not someone who has gotten on the call on the phone with potential clients in the past, I want you to really give that some thought and potentially build it into your schedule. If you have questions about that. I have talked about it on the podcast before. It is a whole module inside the simple sales blueprint talking about what to say, when to say it. And that kind of leads me nicely into next week's episode, which is the third episode in this back to school marketing challenge theme where I am interviewing my friend Melody McDonald who is talking about the intricacies, the communication intricacies of talking to your clients in the moment and how to handle your emotions and regulate your self when it comes to communicating those things. Because I think that's most people like aside from time, that's the thing that most people are worried about, about getting on the phone is like what if I get nervous, I'm going to feel awkward and afraid, whatever. And Melody used to be a 911-dispatcher and she has so many great practical tips for how to have what feel like hard conversations with confidence and grace and and sort of that clear headedness that one needs. So tune in for that episode. If you haven't yet gotten your ticket for the Marketing summit happening on September 1st, you're going to want to sign up and the way to do that is to become a member of the Consistency Club. You can go to thiscan't bethahard.comclub to join. You only have to join for the one month and there is going to be so much great information there about filling your calendar for the busy season to come. So I will see you guys next week.
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Well, 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. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads@thiscantbethard.com learn. If you like the podcast, be sure
- [24:55]
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to hit the subscribe button.
- [24:56]
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Even better, share the love by leaving a review in itunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.