[00:00:00] Hey, real quick. Do you remember how you first found this podcast? I'm guessing someone sent it to you or you saw it on some sort of social post. The only way this podcast grows is through word of mouth, through the listeners, through someone like you. So if you could pay it forward and send this to another creative freelancer or creative entrepreneur in your life, it would mean the world to me and you may just change someone's life.
Thank you. Why do most photography or videography businesses fail? It's not because of their creative skills. The answer is actually simpler than you think, but it's often overlooked. The reason is that most people will focus on marketing too much and neglect sales. Marketing gets you clients in one to two years, but sales gets you clients right away.
Photographers need to start generating income right away. And the only way to do that is through sales. Now, whether you call it sales or pitching or reaching out to people, it's all the same today. We're going to be talking about how we can get early momentum with active sales. I'll walk you through how to market [00:01:00] in the background.
But focus on sales at the start so that we can get clients right away and set our business up for long term success. Welcome to the creative biz launch podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures, whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer. You'll find something of value here.
The reality is that most photographers and videographers are going to focus on marketing, which means building up their portfolio, creating a pretty website, posting on social media, and this stuff is great, but most photographers and videographers do this and most photographers and videographers don't make much money and don't do it full time.
And that's because they're all doing the same things, the wrong actions rather than. Following what everyone else is doing. We need to focus on active sales so that we can actually run a successful business. If you want what everyone else has, you do what everyone else does. But if you want the things that no one else has, that very few people have.
You don't have to do what [00:02:00] everyone else is doing. You have to do different things. So let's talk about what these things are. I want to illustrate this through a story, a story of Sally and Mark.
Sally and Mark are both great photographers. They're both incredible photographers. Actually, they have great portfolios, great websites, and a strong offer that anyone in the market would want to invest in, but they're both relatively new. They just decided to start their photography business and have two very different strategies.
Mark says he's going to focus on marketing to get his business off the ground. Now, Sally, on the other hand, is going to focus on, you guessed it sales.
Let's see how this plays out for them. Mark spends a lot of time perfecting his website. He creates this absolutely beautiful photography portfolio and it's truly world class. He sees everyone else doing this too. So he starts posting on social media. And his plan is simple, focus on marketing, focus on building his brands.
So he posts on social media. He shares all his beautiful photos. He shows the behind the scenes and [00:03:00] stories of what he's doing, but no clients are coming. He starts an email newsletter even where he actually breaks down trends in product photography. He's educating his clients on what the market is doing.
This seems like something that's super valuable for companies. He gets a few subscribers and he does deliver amazing value here, but he's still not really getting clients. His marketing strategy is really good, but the clients just don't really reach out to him. And he thinks,
he thinks that by doing all this marketing, the clients should be lining up to work with him, but they're just not for some reason. Sally, on the other hand, She spent some time on her website, but pretty soon after that started doing direct outreach. She's cold emailing, cold approaching, cold DMing brands, and from there she's actually booking sales calls.
She hasn't started her social media pages yet because she first wants to see whether anyone actually wants her services. After a few weeks of highly curated emails and a few sales calls, she lands her first client. She [00:04:00] focused on reaching out to clients, while Mark focused on getting clients to reach out to him.
Both sales and marketing are really important, and all companies need both of these. But why does Mark seem to struggle, and Sally appears to be crushing it when it comes to getting clients? Let's talk about the pitfalls of passive marketing. There's a big pitfall of passive marketing. When we start marketing as photographers or videographers, We begin playing a long game.
Now, there's nothing wrong with this. In fact, playing a long game is great. But, here's where the disconnect comes. We don't realize we're playing a long game because we see other photographers getting client after client so we think we should be getting them right away. But the reality is marketing efforts take a long time to actually bear fruit.
You're building your brand, you're building your reputation, and this stuff takes a long time. You're going to spend at least a year of building up a brand before people start learning who you are. And you're going to put all this effort into marketing and find yourself waiting for months or even years to actually Get results from this, [00:05:00] and this is really disheartening as a beginner business owner, because you're not making any money and you're probably comparing yourself to your peers on social media who are making money.
You're going to end up wasting a lot of resources, investing all those resources into marketing without seeing immediate returns. And that can feel like you're wasting your time and your money. Now, when the results don't come from your marketing efforts, well, you're going to lose motivation. That's going to hurt mentally.
It's going to hurt when you're not getting immediate. Results from this sort of thing and marketing the reality is you're not getting immediate feedback and results So it's going to lead you down a path of decreased motivation and maybe burnout. So what's the solution to this? Focus on sales for immediate results when we start our creative business.
We need to focus on sales for these immediate results Let's take a page off Sally's book. The one thing a business can't live without is revenue. Sales give us immediate revenue generation. Sales directly generate revenue [00:06:00] for our business, which is essential for survival and growth, especially early on.
Sure, even if you know that marketing won't bear fruit for a year, It's going to be tough to keep going when you're making 0, but if you can start landing clients early on, even if it's just for low budgets, you're going to have momentum. You're going to feel good. You're going to feel motivated. You'll feel like you're winning there by focusing on sales.
You're actively working to increase your client base. Now I've only been talking about revenue here, but sales early on is actually really important for something else here. Not only does sales bring in immediate business, but it could lead to repeat customers and referrals in the future.
Once you get the ball rolling and get three to five clients and deliver a fantastic customer experience, you'll get testimonials and case studies that you can use a social proof that you actually do what you say you do. And meanwhile, marketing Mark doesn't have that social proof that, and as a result of no social proof, he has less trust with customers and clients because no one [00:07:00] knows that he actually delivers upon his results.
Now, yes, this revenue is great. The repeat customers are great. Social proof is great, but this next point is really big and you can only get it from these immediate sales. You get to understand your clients. Sure. You're offering photography services and that's what you think. Client wants, but what else do they want?
What kinds of packages do they want by engaging in sales calls? You get that direct interaction with clients and you get to learn about your market. You get to ask questions on these sales calls that give you an idea of what clients actually need. Now maybe you thought they need this one thing, this thousand dollar package to this client.
But turns out they're actually looking for a way more and you start seeing this trend pop up with other companies. So now you have this direct feedback that you can use to build out different packages. You get insight into what your clients actually want, not what you think they want. I'm going to say that again here.
You get insight into what your clients [00:08:00] actually want, not what you think you want. If you've never worked with clients and you've never done sales and you only focus on marketing, you don't get this valuable information. You may think you have this amazing package that will help clients out. But until you actually talk to these clients on sales calls, you're not going to know what they need for sure.
On these sales calls, we dig into problems, we propose solutions, we pitch them deals, and then we close those deals.
There's a reason my students inside of creative biz launch are dominating the industry. And that's because we teach this exact framework in my program.
So now we know what our clients want. We're making immediate revenue because we're focusing on sales. And this early momentum from sales is a really big motivation boost. Each sale that we get serves as motivation and it gives us the energy to push through these early challenges and even better, you get the financial stability.
So you feel more comfortable doing the work. You feel like you're on the right path. [00:09:00] You're doing the activities that actually generate you revenue. Now, as you're selling your service, you're also learning about your competition. Maybe you sent a proposal and the lead comes back and says, Hey, this looks great.
But this other photographer is charging this for that. Can you match that now here? You're learning about who you're competing with in the marketplace, what they're charging, and you can. Adjust your offer accordingly, either to compete with them or to really set yourself outside of that. Now offer creation is another thing that I work with my students on to really hone in on what they can sell to clients here.
So this direct feedback here is really important because creatives that solely focus on marketing, they don't get this direct feedback. People focus on sales do get this feedback here, which is amazing.
Now, once you've gotten a few clients, those early sales are going to lead to hopefully satisfied customers, which will then lead to word of mouth marketing. These clients are going to want to refer you to their friends and their peers. And all this is assuming one big thing that the product is good, that the final [00:10:00] photos or videos that you deliver are good.
They need to be good enough for people to refer you to their friends, because if your product sucks, if your service sucks, then your brand just won't grow. No matter how pretty try and make it. It won't work. You can't put a bow tie on a Toyota and expect it to be a Ferrari here. The core of what your business offer is your business offer needs to be fantastic.
And it doesn't stop there. You need great customer experience, like faster on times, great communication, and it has to be easy to work with you. Now these things and word of mouth can become your best friend. So now let's fast forward a year and see where Sally and Mark are at. Sally actually started doing a little bit of marketing on the backend.
She spent 80 percent of her time on sales, 20 percent on marketing in her first year in business. Now this is a perfect balance here. Mark. On the other hand, he's not doing so hot. He's still struggling to land clients. Sally's approach of balancing sales with marketing and a 80 20 split was actually genius.
She focused on building a solid client [00:11:00] base while building her brand in the background. She understands most clients don't come to her the first year she has to go to them. She's balancing sales and marketing. Allowing her to pursue immediate results through sales while setting the stage for long term success through marketing.
Her brand is slowly growing in the background. She's building it. She's got social pages that are active. She's got a good website now, and she's collecting emails for marketing efforts. Now, a balancing strategy like this ensures that you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. You've got this two pronged approach here.
Splitting your efforts into sales and marketing like this allows you to better optimize resources. You're getting revenue from sales. And that revenue, you can actually invest into your marketing efforts. So now you can actually pay a graphic designer to make a pretty, pretty website for you. You can invest into software.
So I will help with marketing all this stuff. This is an amazing approach to take, and this is what I took.
Sally's approach is exactly what. I did when I was starting out, I focused [00:12:00] on sales and this grew my business over the course of three years. Like crazy. I was marking on the backend. Now, if you go and see my pet productions, Instagram page, you'll see that it's filled with content. My website is also full of successful client case studies.
And these days I don't even do sales for this company anymore. All the clients I work with are either retainer clients or they come to me. And that's partly because I'm focusing most of my time on building the best training for creative entrepreneurs out there. But also because,
because of the upfront work I did in that company. through the sales, gathering testimonials, case studies, all marketing on the backend have allowed me to build out this inbound funnel there. Now, if you want to learn about the basics of sales, there's actually a free workshop you can take in the show notes.
That's going to teach you my exact business process that I do. Uh, it's a high level overview of everything that you can start doing today. Now, if you've never done any hours before, start with doing five a day, start with five outreaches a [00:13:00] day. This is either an Instagram message, email, cold approach, whatever you have to do to reach out to five potential customers every single day.
And eventually you're going to land a client, but you have to do the work here. Now, if you don't know how to do any outreach, go sign up for that free workshop and the show notes. I truly appreciate your time. My name is Chris Pieta. I'll catch you next time.
