We always tell our couples choosing a wedding photographer is hard because our wedding couples are first time buyers.
You will be at the receiving end of a slew of marketing and sales techniques that will attempt to get you to spend with that one vendor and maximize what you spend. Some are subtle. Some are not. Weddings are an emotional event, but your monetary decisions beforehand don’t have to be. Here are some of the specific ways sales is used and identifying the techniques is the first step in increasing your position.
The Hard Sell
ALWAYS STAY AWAY FROM THE HARD SELL. When you are at a swap meet, sure it’s expected. But this is the wedding industry. We have a beautiful and precious day that we have to capture. Hard selling creates urgency and uses base emotions to make a more impulsive buy, but this is a bad idea when making wedding decisions. There should only be soft selling in our industry. Hard selling is characterized by:
- techniques that provoke the consumer
- creating a sense of urgency
- flattery, play on emotions
- playing off fear or fear of missing out
- aggressive communication
- focus on limited availability
Reserve your date now
This is the most common sales technique in the wedding industry. The easiest way to lock in a sale is to create urgency, even if it’s artificial. In terms of supply and demand, it’s decreasing the supply to artificially create demand.
I’ve seen brides start our conversation nervous that they want to lock in their day, because some other vendor already created that false urgency in them. We try to bring them back down to reality, telling them the truth about their date (if we have other inquiries, who was first, how much time they have), and then urging them to still look around before putting down a deposit. By maximizing their time looking around, it guarantees that they really want to book us. Understand that we have a very high closing rate (around 80-90% of our meetings will book with us), so we don’t need to use sales techniques to increase that booking rate. But we’ve heard some horror stories about other vendors pushing hard to close a sale, leaving our brides with some sales PTSD by the time they meet with us.
Now, when a vendor is booked for the day, it really is a limited product with photographers, videographers, DJs, and officiants. Some can arrange and handle multiple weddings in a day, but not individual artists. BUT don’t let the vendor use that to lock in the sale too soon and at too high of a price. Try to distinguish between the ones that are truly busy (you’ll notice by their honesty) and the ones that are faking it.
Prices and Anchoring
Anchoring is the cognitive bias created by the initial piece of information. In sales, it’s called price anchoring. If I tell you, “Hey this wedding package is $10,000,” you will think that the ballpark of my services are at $10k. When you say $7k, and then we settle on $8k, you might think that you just got a 20% discount on the initial price. But that’s the mind trick that anchoring does, where you are coerced or subconsciously forced into overestimating the value. JC Penny did the opposite and paid dearly for it. They removed price anchoring for an honest and true low price, but their customers wanted to believe that the price was higher and that they could get a good deal on it.
Now it’s almost impossible to anchor the price initially with any established photographer, since they already have their prices figured out. New photographers don’t know their worth yet, and are easier to negotiate with. But just because the price is anchored doesn’t mean that you can’t figure out if it’s anchored artificially high. If you go to a vendor and they are offering 20% right off the bat, you can assume that the new price is actually their real price. This is why photographers often hide their pricing, but we can talk about that in the next section. As for anchoring, know that it exists and that it is used by photographers to negotiate higher prices in their favor.
Prices starting at “X”
Almost every photographer’s website has a vague “investments” page that states the packages and products, but always ends with a “Prices starting at….” This is done intentionally. They need to give some information, but are trying to limit price information. This is for a couple reasons.
First, they are trying to delay the price talk. Almost all sales seminars and classes will teach you that as a business you want to talk about prices LAST. That way, you’ve spent time building confidence and comfort in your relationship. This makes the customer feel more pot-committed (like they are obligated to stay) and it makes the price negotiation go in favor of the business.
Second, they are trying to anchor you to a higher price. In negotiations, information is gold. If you know their real pricing, you have the upper hand. If they know about you, they can use that information to their advantage. Often photographers will ask for your wedding venue before pricing can come up. If they find our that your wedding is at the Ritz-Carlton, they can do a price quote that is higher, assuming that you can afford it. If you are having a backyard wedding, they will quote you lower to hopefully lock in the sale and not scare you away, even if at a lower price. The point is that they are maximizing their sales using information.
So when you see the “Prices starting at….” on their website, just be mentally prepared for it. I seriously know photographers that will charge you $500 extra if they find out you are a lawyer (just because they don’t like dealing with lawyers, and they make good money).
Upselling – Packages + Options
Since our couples are first time buyers, there is very little familiarity with the packages and options. And it doesn’t help that it’s sometimes not apples to apples from one photographer to another. With some photographers, packages are a way to maximize profits and incentivize spending. Sometimes it’s subtle or normal upselling (spend more and we’ll discount it). Sometimes it’s a bait and switch. These are some of the things to watch out for:
Digital Files
Always, always, always get full-resolution, non-watermarked digital images. There’s absolutely no excuse not to get them now-a-days. Whatever the extra cost for the digital images, make sure that you add that into the cost, making a true price comparison between photographers easier.
Note that “digital negatives” refers to RAW files, which are images straight off the camera sensor (no editing yet). These are different from the JPGs that we get for printing and viewing online/phones/tablets. Most of the time, only other photographers and graphic designers would want RAW files, since they require work to edit and make useable. BUT, one nice thing about RAW files is they give you the ability to re-edit your images. Every decade, there is a different trend in editing. Right now it is a return to vintage and that “film look.” But that can be really bad in ten years when things change, along with trends that might look good now but are bad in hindsight. For example, I was a guest at a wedding recently. The image I received for the family formal was only 2 megapixels (not full resolution). This is combined with vintage post (skin tones and colors are inaccurate) and ADDED grain (which degrades the image to make it look, well, vintage). Here is the image (enlarged 400%, details preserved, no noise reduction):
Note the noise that was added after the fact (this image was taken in the shade before sunset), along with the crushed color tones from the vintage preset (like Instagram presets). Look at the square dots on my forehead; that’s also on the bride and groom’s face in the same photo. This is something to note for the future. Couples who like trends can keep their style up to date using RAW files, while couples who don’t can opt for a more timeless and consistent edit.
But back to digital images. Make sure you get them, because it avoids the next problem.
Print Credits
Story – Downtown LA too far for an Engagement Session
We had a couple ask us to do their engagement session in DTLA, even though they already had a wedding photographer (and an included engagement session). Their “award-winning, international” photographer refused to go from Palos Verdes to Downtown LA for their engagement session without a travel fee. So they hired us to do the session, especially since they like our style (but only found us after they had booked the other photog). During the session, we find out that the photographer DOES NOT include the digital files. Printing through his website costs $25 for a single 4″x6″. That means printing 100 4x6s would cost $2,500, which would cost me only $25 through my professional printer and $17 through Costco Photo. That’s insane.
The old business model for photographers was shoot for cheap and make money on the printing (think of your school portraits back in the day). But then initial prices got higher, but some photographers still kept the old model. Print credits are a way to offset that cost, but it does so deceptively. For example, if the photographer from the shoot above offered a $1,000 in print credits, that would only buy 40 4×6 prints. And all the other print products would be exponentially higher. The way we phrase it is that when a photographer holds the digital files, that it’s basically “holding your photos hostage.” So try to figure out the total and true cost of photographer by adding estimated print costs after the wedding day.
Albums
Albums are a really nice way of realizing the images physically, but are also expensive. And this is a common way to upsell a wedding client, bumping up sales 30% to 100% of the original invoice. Some couples are looking for this and want an album and an album for each set of parents, plus extras. But some couples are still looking to put a down payment on a house. We always tell our couples to buy a house first, then a coffee table, then an album for the coffee table.
We offer the same price for albums, whether right after the wedding or 5 years later. Our advice is to get digital files, since they don’t degrade over 5 years. Print technology, however, gets cheaper and better every year. If your photographer offers a good deal on the albums and you already wanted one, that’s great. But the only thing cheaper than a discounted price is not spending the money in the first place.
Think like you are doing sales. You have a client that has already booked your services. They aren’t using a competitor. So you want to maximize sales for each client, maybe squeezing an extra 30% out of an invoice. You offer products at a discount, let’s say hypothetically selling a $1,000 album for $700. You know that your albums cost $300 and your labor is $200, with a profit of $200 (note that it matters that you get $200 to pay your employee). It’s creating a sense of urgency to get a client to “seek value,” which helps a client buy something they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise. Sometimes the discount is really that good of value, but I’m hoping that you make that decision in spite of the sense of urgency created.
Extra Photographers
This one irks me for multiple reasons, but the gist of it can be told in this anecdote:
Ex-husband at a wedding?
I’m doing video of a wedding at a gold course in 2006. I’m just starting to teach myself photography, so I’m paying a lot of attention to the photographer and how she works. I notice that the second shooter is having a tough time and I start chatting it up with him. I find out that he’s the lead photographer’s ex-husband! I also find out that he doesn’t know how to use his camera. So here I am, the videographer, teaching him how to use his camera to get useable exposures, and I wasn’t even familiar with Nikon (I’m a Canon shooter).
During the grand entrance, lead photographer freaks out as her camera spazzes out and turns on and off. She misses a bunch of images, only to find out it’s because she didn’t have the battery grip screwed on tight enough. Second shooter only got photos because I taught him how that day.
Fast forward a few months later. I’m talking to the bride after I deliver their video. She starts complaining about the photographer. Ends up she paid $3,000 (back in 2006) and that the package required she waited 12 months before getting the digital files. Her grandmother passed away and she needed a print from the wedding, which cost her dearly ordering it through the photographer’s website. She was bitter about that, and the fact that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy her photos for another 9 months.
So, the option for an extra photographer can be polar opposites. You can get an ex-husband that doesn’t know how to use a camera, or a high-end photographer that is helping out a friend on an open weekend. The real point is that it’s used as a bargaining chip (get more photos, more angles, more moments). This is part of the up-sell, often used to bump the client up to a higher package. The truth is that most photographers will always have a lighting assistant/second photographer, whether you pay for one or not. This one is a gray area (since performance varies between individual photographers), but just don’t let anyone pressure you on this one point alone.
Investments?
I still laugh at this one, just like when a dentist I went to had me sit down with an “investment advisor.” They tried to charge me for $5k. My next dentist said that half of the services were unnecessary and the other half could be done for $800 total.
The term investment is an attempt to create value. The truth of the matter is that nothing in a wedding is an investment. It’s a big ass party. It’s a celebration of family and friends; it’s a tradition; it’s a rite of passage; it’s a show of success and accomplishment; it’s an excuse for people to get drunk. It’s not an investment.
But that’s okay. Have fun and spend the money, just like taking a vacation or enjoying an expensive dinner. But don’t get lured into the idea that it’s an investment. An investment takes money you spend and yields a return greater than the amount spent. A good wedding photographer just takes the large amount of disposable money spent in one day and makes it easier and more enjoyable to remember. That’s not an investment; it’s a different way of enjoying the wedding day.
A wedding DJ adds joy to the wedding reception. A wedding photographer adds joy to the many years after, looking at albums, framed photos, and phone backgrounds.
Our Approach to Sales
I (Gavin) used to be a sales manager at a small software engineering firm. I’ve had to do cold calls, soft selling, closing, etc. I also grew up in a small family business, a Chinese restaurant in Temecula. I washed dishes, bussed tables, served customers, and managed the place. We had a product that didn’t need to be sold, because it was something all of our customers enjoyed. And in return they helped send me to college.
Now I’m doing another family business, but this time my couples help me raise my children. In return, we help capture them and theirs on their happiest days.
Knowing sales, I decided to stay away from the typical techniques. That’s why:
- We keep all our prices online and transparent
- We don’t barter. We noticed that our admirers don’t want to ask for discounts, and the ones asking for discounts don’t respect our work as much. Why should the respectful clients pay more? So we have kept lower and more reasonable prices, making sure everyone gets the same price.
- We keep prices independent of time. For example, no special prices based on time, no buying albums for cheaper now versus later. We are intentionally removing the urgency in the sales process.
- We hate the “Reserve your date now” hard sell. To counter it, we give each couple the maximum amount of time to make a decision while still being fair to other couples. We keep informal reservations on each date, letting our couples look around and make a good decision.
- We maintain a “help everyone” policy. We happily give advice, even if we are booked on their day. By spreading that goodwill, we believe that it removes the sales aspect of the job and introduces a human to human relationship.