Hi! My name is Rachel. If we’ve not met before, I’m a wedding photographer and business coach on a mission to help wedding professionals elevate the quality of clients you attract, craft a luxury client experience, by focusing on what matters and profitably automating everything else.
Today we are talking about how to get more of the RIGHT clients. If you’ve been feeling like something is off in your business, even though you are busy, even though you are doing and hustling and you have leads coming in, this post is for you.
Let’s first take a look at the anatomy of a business. All businesses have these four elements:
LEADS
SALES
FULFILLMENT
COLLECTION
Leads: The acquisition of interested customers
Sales: The conversion of leads to a booked client
Fulfillment: Giving the client what they paid for
Collection: Getting paid for your service/product
When you notice that something is off in your business, it’s because something went wrong in one of these areas.
It’s really easy to see that there’s a problem, jump to a conclusion about what that problem is, and try to fix everything all at once. It’s also really easy to miss what the REAL problem is because you got to work automating fulfillment, but you didn’t hone in your sales process, or because you have COLLECTION figured out, but you haven’t done any work toward attracting the right leads. I see wedding professionals “fixing” their business till it’s broke all the time.
For most wedding professionals who feel like something is off, the most common problem area is:
Leads: Attracting the RIGHT leads and getting the right volume of leads.
As with many things in life, the symptom of attracting the wrong people to your business might show up in another area of your business.
For instance: you might experience sales being incredibly difficult, because the wrong people are much harder to sell. Sales should be an effortless conversation, with no persuasion and arm-bending required. Since you’re experiencing the problem in sales, you might think you have a sales problem. But this is actually a LEADS problem.
Another example: perhaps you’re working with a client who’s been wonderful to work with, no problems, all the way up to close to the wedding, when suddenly you start experiencing a myriad of requests and expectations that go beyond the scope of what was planned. Perhaps on the wedding day, your interactions with the client are not going smoothly, and you can plainly see NOW that you weren’t the right fit for that client to begin with. This is not a fulfillment problem- this is a LEADS problem.
I see wedding professionals all the time who think that the reason they aren’t booking high end clients is their images aren’t consistent enough, they don’t give enough gifts, they don’t have the right equipment, etc. etc. This is one of the most common mistakes a wedding professional can make: confusing the symptom they’re seeing with the actual problem.
Because wedding professionals are often a one-man-band, running everything themselves, it’s really easy to notice symptoms, take them personally, and assume that the thing WE are most insecure about is the problem. For a lot of wedding professionals, who are also creative artists, our artistry is often called into question first, because that’s what we as an artist are most insecure about. We can get so consumed by “fixing” our art that we deliver an A+ FULFILLMENT while simultaneously leaving our LEADS and SALES floundering at the C- level.
The truth is that attracting the RIGHT leads to your business is the most important first step you can take for your business. Without the right leads coming in, every other aspect of your business will experience problematic symptoms.
So step one to getting more of the RIGHT clients is to step back and assess. Get clear on what the problem really is.
Do you have a LEADS problem? If yes, then we need to move on to solving this problem with the right message that will attract the right people.
Get clear on your dream clients. How well do you know them?
As wedding photographers, we tend to know a lot about the demographics of our clients, right? They are in their 20s-30s usually, brides, typically, and live near your city…. There’s obviously going to be some variations of that depending on your specialty, but those are the obvious demographics. What you need to get to know is your dream client’s psychographics: What is meaningful to them, what makes them tick, how do they like to make decisions, what drives their motivations, what do they aspire to? Etc. ect.
It’s in the psychographics that the secret sauce of attracting the right clients. For example: two clients, exactly the same age, same city, even the same career and income, might have completely different motivations for their wedding. One bride might design her wedding to be the best party ever for her family and 200 of her closest friends, while the other might want the day to be as stress free as possible while choosing to focus on deep meaning and simple details.
Even if they don’t know it for themselves, they are looking for a photographer that fits their unique vision for the day, not just in the style of the finished photos, but in the alignment of the focus that the photographer brings to the day.
If your website is speaking to the party queen, it WILL repel the bride who wanted a simple, meaningful, stress-free event, and vice versa. And if you are not sure who your website is speaking to, potential clients are confused as well, even if they don’t consciously know it. Since you are speaking to everyone, you are speaking to no-one, and that is what attracts budget shoppers!
The other step that you need to take in order to attract the RIGHT clients to your business is to get clear on what it is that makes you uniquely qualified to work with your dream clients.
Basically, why you? What do you do that fits their needs and their vision like a glove? What makes you different?
So to go back to our examples, our party queen might want to know that you take fun, exciting images, and you excel at dancing shots at the reception. You know how to bring the party vibe throughout the whole day and you feel like their best friend. Whereas, the other bride wants to feel supported and like you have a calming presence that just melts away the stress, a consummate professional who has all the details in hand so she doesn’t have to worry about a thing, and who specializes in photographing details.
You can see that the way you position yourself to uniquely meet your unique client’s needs matters a ton!
Getting clear on this is the ultimate sales tool. When a client feels like you understand their exact needs and that you are uniquely qualified to make that vision come to life for them. They will feel like working with you is meant to be, a dream come true, omg YES. From then, the sales conversation becomes about which package they want to choose.
The students in my Empowered Weddings Masterclass are getting really practical help with all of this as we are going deep into actually understanding and implementing all of this for their business.
If you want some personalized help with understanding more about what might be keeping you from attracting your soulmate clients, I offer free 15 minute business audits. These audits are not sales calls, they are literally there to help you get clarity on all this, and to help you take that first step forward. If you want to have a free 15 minute audit with me, follow this link to book yours right away! https://racheljordaneducation.com/audit/
Blessings!
