In this episode, we challenge the modern approach to client experience.
We urge you to rewind to a time before social media, emphasizing genuine human connections. Forget elaborate gifts or guides—2023 is about serving people and making real, personal connections.
Automation often takes away the human touch; we discuss how a simple phone call can set you apart in this tech-dominated era.
Join us as we dive into the art of getting to know your clients personally, and rediscover the power of real conversations, a key to standing out in today's business world.
Tune in, learn, and elevate your business through trust and transparency via authentic human connections.
Join Your Magic Year here.
Use the code PODCAST to receive special pricing when you enroll.
Connect with Karinda!
Thanks for listening!
In this episode, we challenge the modern approach to client experience.
We urge you to rewind to a time before social media, emphasizing genuine human connections. Forget elaborate gifts or guides—2023 is about serving people and making real, personal connections.
Automation often takes away the human touch; we discuss how a simple phone call can set you apart in this tech-dominated era.
Join us as we dive into the art of getting to know your clients personally, and rediscover the power of real conversations, a key to standing out in today's business world.
Tune in, learn, and elevate your business through trust and transparency via authentic human connections.
Join Your Magic Year here.
Use the code PODCAST to receive special pricing when you enroll.
Connect with Karinda!
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to Mindset and Money Mastery for Photographers the podcast. We help overwhelmed photographers make more money while simplifying their business by mastering their you guessed it mindset and money. Tune in each week for practical and actionable tips to take your photography business up a notch.
Speaker 2:Let's dive right in, we're going to be talking a little bit about the client experience and we're going to talk about taking your business back to free internet times, pre-social media, all of those things. I know that sounds a little bit weird, but I want to challenge you with this podcast episode to consider that the way to stand out in 2023 is to actually take your business back in time, when business was about conversations, real connections with people and just getting to know and serving people. I want to ask you, what do you think the client experience is all about right now? If I were to ask you, I'm guessing you would say like gifts, welcome guides, all of these fun, fluffy things. But I genuinely believe that in 2023, what we need to focus on in our client experience is serving people and creating real, genuine connections with other humans, because, although we are so deeply connected online, a lot of times these conversations are a little superficial, and the fact of the matter is that people want to hire people who care about them and show that they want to get to know them, and the easiest way to do that is to pick up the phone and have conversations with people. If you've been around long enough, you know that something I love to do is talk to people who follow me in my public Facebook group, photography Business, tune Up. Sometimes I'll just post in there and be like hey guys, I'm driving down the road today, I'm on a road trip, I have some time in the car. I love to talk to some of y'all. Here's my number text me and I will put it out there in the world that I just want to have conversations with y'all, because the only way to really get to know y'all and to connect with y'all and to really serve y'all is to get to know you as people. And that same thing applies to my photography business.
Speaker 2:I think in 2023, there's so many businesses relying on automations, on systems, on emails, on all of these cool fancy things that just take the human out of business, and I think that all people really want right now are real people to serve them. Can I tell you how many times I've been so frustrated, like I can't just pick up the phone and call tech support, or I can't just pick up the phone and ask this question to this company. You have to go online, you have to fill out this form, you have to submit the thing, you have to wait for it to come back and then, if you have another question, you have to wait a few more days to get a response. I think that people are overwhelmed and I think that people are really tired of that. So I'm going to tell you that the easiest way and my mind right now to stand out from all of that is to just pick up the phone and talk to your people.
Speaker 2:Pick up the phone and, honestly, like Zoom is great too, but there's something different about a phone call. I think that a phone call is something that you do with your friends and your closest family members. You don't just talk on the phone to anybody. I think about, like picking up the phone and talking to like a childhood friend for hours or something like that. When we pick up the phone and our talk to our clients, it's almost putting ourselves on that same level with our clients. And when we look back at the history of photography and the way things used to be done, things were done sitting down, meeting with people, going to their home, all of these high touch things that you do with your friends.
Speaker 2:And Now people are short on time, they're tired of technology, they're tired of another email. I just got off a phone call with a client today a potential client on an info call and at the end of the call I said something to her like hey, do you mind if I just shoot you a text over with your session reservation form to get everything finalized? And she goes oh my gosh, that's so great, because if you emailed it to me I would totally get lost and I would never see it. That's the reality for most people and that's the reality for me too. When I talk to people now, I'm like don't email me, just call me, just text to me. My emails are gonna get lost. It is what it is because we are so bombarded there. So we have to start to stand out, and I think that just having these real conversations is one of the best, most Efficient ways to do that.
Speaker 2:And the other thing about this is that when we take that personal Touch back in, we become people. We lean away from what's happening, which is automation and all this stuff. We're able to just serve our clients and give them what they need. We're not just like throwing the book at them and saying here's all these things that you can do, here's all these prep guides, here's all these fancy emails. Now read it and put it together. We're just saying, hey, here's what you need to know. Hey, you should do this. Hey, check this out. Hey, I think this will be good for you and we're not counting on our clients to do the hard work.
Speaker 2:If somebody is inquiring with a bunch of photographers in your area and they send an email to 10 Photographers or a Facebook message or whatever it may be, I can guarantee you that a very small number of those photographers are actually going to pick up the phone and talk to the Person on the phone. Most photographers are going to say, here's my information, here's my pricing, here's my booking form, and their clients are gonna have to sit there and dissect and read. But when you pick up the phone and you get to know them and you say, hey, let's chat, I'd love to get to know you more, you're gonna stand out. So, from the very first point of contact, this is one of the number one ways you can stand out with your clients. Honestly, I don't send any information really to my clients. I do. There's like a couple of emails that happen, but it's at the very end of the process with me, it's not in the beginning. I would never send my clients a lengthy email with information about pricing or any of that stuff Before I had a chance to talk to them. The reason being is that because I can send over pricing, but if it's not relevant to them and their needs and what they want, it's not gonna work for them and it's not gonna make sense to them and it's just gonna cause them to be confused. Let's talk about this too.
Speaker 2:Honestly picking up the phone and talking to somebody takes far less time for you and your clients. If your client is short on time, if you're short on time, if you have a lot of things going on, you can get something done in a minute or two on the phone. That might take days going back and forth on email and by the time those emails have been exchanged and all those things have happened, your client has lost their excitement. But that excitement could have been there in a quick conversation on the phone. How many things in life, in your everyday life, could be solved if you could just pick up the phone and ask somebody the question.
Speaker 2:Right Now we're forced to search online, send the email, go back and forth, drawing all of these things out for days or weeks or sometimes even months. It feels like we're dealing with like some insurance stuff right now and, oh my gosh, it is infuriating. There's all these online systems. I have to go upload documents and do this and do that and it's like is this right? Is this not right? I don't know. The other thing is that I think people are really tapped out on technology. They're tapped out on technology, they're tired of it, and people are also really tired of having to make decisions.
Speaker 2:Think about the whole like what do you want for dinner? I don't know what do you want. Honestly, I think literally people right now would pay somebody to step in and be like hey, don't know what you want for dinner, call me up and pay me and I'll tell you what to have for dinner, because it solves the problem, it removes the headache, it removes the going back and forth. If someone was showed up and they were like hey, I'm an expert at helping people solve what they want for dinner and you were never gonna have to have this conversation. But what you want for dinner again with your significant other, just call me, I'll ask you a few questions and I will give you the perfect recommendation for where you should go to dinner. Oh my gosh, I would pay for that.
Speaker 2:As crazy as it sounds, it's the same reason I paid to go to a gym and work out is because my Decision-making skills and my power to research and learn and study on how to work out and what to do and figure out what I should be doing, is spent in my day-to-day life and my business and my family and having a child. So I pay to go to a gym to have somebody tell me here's what to do, here's how to do it, here's what's gonna work for you. Because it saves me the time, the energy, the effort and Learning, something that I quite frankly, don't feel like is necessary right now. What I could just pay somebody to teach me how to do it and to tell me how to do it. People are willing to pay for that convenience. People are willing to pay for people, just serve them and to take care of them, even when sometimes it means they could could do the thing themselves, but it would take more time and energy and power.
Speaker 2:I Would pay for so many crazy things in life. It's like the busier life gets, the more things are happening, the more things we have going on, the more I'm willing to just pay somebody to take care of it and to give me the shortcut and to give me the hey, here's what you need to know, here's what's gonna work for you. Here's my recommendation. So if we can step into that position for our clients and we can say, hey, you don't know what to wear, don't worry, I got you, let me take care of you. Here's what I recommend. You could do this, you could do this, you could do this. Hey, I'll even go help you find out that. I'll even look online for you. If we step into that role of like, being the guide and serving our clients in that way and Doing that by having conversations, beginning to know them, we're gonna see huge ripples in our results, in our business. When we step into the role of getting to know our clients, we ask the right questions and we help our clients uncover what they truly need. By being a person and a friend, we start to stand out from the crowd.
Speaker 2:When I photographed weddings, I was told time and time again hey, corinna, we booked with you because we loved you. Hey, the minute we came and talked to you, the minute we saw you at the bridal show, the minute we talked to you on the phone or emails back and forth with you because I did use to email a little bit more back Then we knew that you were the photographer for us. That's a cool feeling people booking with you because they love who you are as a person and they love the fact that you took the time to talk to them. We booked with you because you cared about us. We booked with you because we knew that you cared about our day. We booked with you because we knew it would feel like we had a friend there with us on our wedding day and not a stranger. We booked with you because you were the only person that called and figured out what we needed, instead of just sending us a package and saying here's our packages. You were the only person that served us and showed up for us and the way we needed to be served, and that was a cool feeling.
Speaker 2:I think that it's really easy to fall into the whole idea of I can make these fancy guides, I can build these questionnaires, I can do these magazines that I send out. I can do all these things to prepare my clients. But in all reality, when we do those things, we're just bombarding our clients with things and adding to their task list, which is already long enough. They don't need those things. They don't want those things. They skim them, they don't read them, they don't really take them in and know what they say. They're gonna show up to your sessions. They're not gonna be ready. Their outfits are gonna suck, their horse is gonna be wet, their dog is gonna be dirty. They're gonna have taken their dog on a 10 mile hike right before and they show up to their session and their dog is absolutely toast, laying their like splat on the crowd and you're gonna be sitting there scratching your head being like I sent them that guide. I told them not to do that in that email and they're not gonna read it. People don't want to read another email. They don't want to look at another guide.
Speaker 2:People are craving real human interaction in a world full of AI and chatbots, and I will say that, in order to continue to grow over the next 20 plus years, as people are increasingly being taken out of the equation and AI is taking over that, we are going to have to lean more than ever on being people in our businesses, by taking care of people, by showing up as a person instead of technology and saying this makes me feel old oh my gosh, it makes me feel so old and I'm sure that 15, 20 years ago, there were photographers saying the same thing about our generation and what we're doing. But I think, more than ever, this is really, really important. I want you to start to take notice in your life, when you run into these situations, that you're frustrated by technology and by the non-human aspect of the world we're living in, and I want you to say, like, from a client perspective, how does this make me feel and what would I rather it be like? What would make this better for me as a client? And really just consider those things.
Speaker 2:In a world that's ever evolving and changing, sometimes the best thing to do is to go back to our roots, the things that have been around the longest, and I've been in this industry for over 10 years now and I've seen so many changes in the last 10 years. There was a day when I, in the early years, would print out printed 4x6s for my clients and show them printed proofs in person, and we would set them into three piles. And now it's all done over Zoom, which there's nothing wrong with Zoom. I still think Zoom meetings have their place and honestly, I think Zoom meetings are great for a lot of our clients these days because their time is so limited that hopping on a Zoom call instead of having to sit down face-to-face for things like an image reveal, is incredibly helpful and saves their time and it shows that like hey, I show you your time. I don't need you to drive to my studio to do this. I know I can take care of you from your home where you're cool, where you don't have to drive and spend more time doing this. So I think there are some places for technology, like in the Zoom world.
Speaker 2:But also there's a difference between a Zoom call and a phone call. For some reason I find that phone calls I'm able to connect with people a lot more. I don't know why. I don't know if it's that people feel like a little bit less business transactional on the phone than a Zoom call. And I've had a few coaching clients who've experimented with going to Zoom calls for their info calls like initially when someone contacts them, hopping on Zoom and doing a Zoom call, and I've played with that too and I really go back and forth on whether or not being able to see you face-to-face on Zoom is nice and it has its advantages, but I feel like you don't get the candid, really transparency, of your clients on a Zoom call like you do on a phone call. And maybe it's just because on the phone call your clients feel like they're talking to a friend or a family member. On Zoom, it feels more like a business transaction. So I don't know, that might be something you consider and I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you feel different on a Zoom call than you feel on a phone call? Is there a different vibe, a different feeling? Do you get different reactions from people on the phone versus on Zoom? Because I would genuinely love to hear what your thoughts are. This is just something that I've kind of thought about, but I haven't really said that way until today recording this episode. So let me know your thoughts.
Speaker 2:In the early years of my business, I had all the things the PDF guys', emails, the inquiry processes, these workflows that were killed out, that like someone inquired and they got all these emails and these systems and if they did this, this happened. If they did that, that happened and that was cool. But honestly, when I got rid of it all. I felt a lot less overwhelmed and my business worked better, actually, when I didn't have all of those things. If you've been around here long enough, you know that I ditched my price list and my product guide. I don't have any of that anymore either really have taken things back and simplified.
Speaker 2:I'm going to ask you this right now Do you feel like you're really serving your clients? Do you feel like you're really taking the time to get to know them, or do you feel like maybe you're dropping the ball a little bit when it comes to getting to know your clients and serving them? Number two are you just giving your clients a lot of information and expecting them to do the work, or are you telling them what they need to know and what's relevant for them? If you're just expecting your clients to do the work, it's not gonna happen and you're not gonna have those same results than if you tell them. And number three are you being a friend to your clients?
Speaker 2:And I know that sounds kind of weird and it's something that I've struggled with a bit in my own personal business, because you could take place where you love your clients and you become really close to them and they become like friends and then you get burned a couple of times and then you kind of like retreat back in your hole of like I'm gonna have boundaries and I'm gonna have walls, I'm not gonna text my clients. And honestly, I kind of have gone through this phase where I had some really bad clients that walked all over boundaries. They were not super great to deal with. I stopped texting clients. I kept everything in my email inbox. I kept it very professional. I tried to like have really hard boundaries with them and then what I found was that after I raised my prices and my clients were paying me a lot more money, I actually have been able to tear down some of those boundaries again and go back to like sending my client a text about something I mean like hey, just wanted to check in and my clients not abusing that and texting me at 10 o'clock at night and being, hey, I sent an email. I sent a text. Did you get my email? I sent an email an hour ago. You know that stuff really like stopped with the really bad, weird boundaries with my clients Whenever I started charging more money and my clients were paying more.
Speaker 2:So that might be something to consider if you find that you have trouble with your boundaries with your clients. So being a person and having that real connection is causing issues. I'm gonna guess that when you raise your prices, you have really good, solid policies and you set the precedence of you need to respect me, you need to respect my business. Here is you know how things are done and you just learn to walk that line, I think, and it becomes a little bit easier to be a person and to build those relationships but also tear down the boundaries of you know, we only communicate by email, we only do things this way and being a little bit flexible with your clients and just serving them like they need to be served. I hope that made sense.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit difficult for me to explain that because I think that it's something you have to go through and you have to have like a bit of those experiences with clients where they kind of take advantage of you and there's boundaries crossed and then you have to learn how to set those boundaries again. And a big piece of this too and this is actually not something I was gonna talk about at all during this episode, but it just kind of naturally came up so clearly it needs to be said in order for your clients to respect you as a business owner, you have to respect yourself. If you don't respect yourself and your business and yourself as a business owner, your clients are not going to show you that respect. And one of the number one ways I see photographers not expecting their clients to respect them or showing that they're worthy of that respect is by not charging appropriately.
Speaker 2:When you are really cheap, when you're not charging well for your services and your products, chances are your clients are gonna walk all over you and it's gonna suck. The more money your clients pay you, the more they respect you, the more they treat you well and the better of an experience it becomes for you and your clients and everybody involved. And just trust me on this. I know I'm rambling about it a bit, but I've seen it so true in my own business and in so many of my coaching clients. So whenever it comes back to talking and having real conversations with clients, if you're finding that your clients are not properly prepared for the process, if you're finding that your clients are not ready or they seem like surprised by things that are happening in your business, it's probably because you're not just having real conversations with them. So anytime you have like a weird experience with a client, or a client that feels like they didn't know what to expect or they're just like huh, what?
Speaker 2:this is how it works. It's because there has been a lapse in communication and it's been a lapse in education, and in my minds and in my experience of what I've learned through this is that we have to have multiple conversations. We have to reinforce things multiple times through these conversations. So don't feel like you can just have a conversation with somebody once and they get it. It might take a few conversations to get the point across, and that boils down to also being a little direct with what you're giving them and what you're dishing out, cause if you're overwhelming them with too much information, they're not gonna take the important things. So you need to really pinpoint and be able to identify. This is important for this client. I need to share this with this client and also, too, when you're serving them, when you're taking care of them, when you're just doing the things for them, they're going to be ready and willing to spend so much more money with you. When you have clients that are saying, hey, oh my gosh, that's all, of course. That sounds totally worth it. Of course I'll pay your prices. It shows that you've built the connection and you've built the value and what you're providing and you've been able to say, hey, I'm gonna take care of you. I'm a real person that's gonna do that for you.
Speaker 2:If you have clients that are saying that's too expensive when you give them your pricing or they're ghosting you, then chances are you haven't taken the time to get to know them and to have those real conversations with them. First, because if we have a real conversation, if I get to know my client before they book and if I pour into them before they're even a client of mine, and then it comes to pricing and genuinely it is out of their price range and they cannot afford it, they're not going to say it's too expensive. They're going to say, oh my gosh, this sounds so amazing. I had no idea that this is how photography worked. I've never heard of anything like this in my life. This sounds so cool. I have to have this. I didn't expect it to be quite this much right now, but I'm going to save my pennies and I'm going to come back and we're going to do this and they will come back to you.
Speaker 2:If they're just saying this is too expensive or they're ghosting you when you send your reservation forms, it's because you haven't built that trust in that open line of communication. That's really important too, because when you have that open line of communication and that trust with real people, even when it comes down to your image reveals, you're going to be hopping on image reveals with these people and saying, hey, do you want to spend thousands of dollars on art? If they feel comfortable with you, they're going to be honest with you. They're going to be able to say, hey, tell me what you're thinking, what are your thoughts on this? What do you want to do? Are you leaning this way or that way? Talk to me, tell me where you're at. I can help you. That's what I'm here to do. I'm not here to just be like, hey, you need to buy this giant piece of art and you're going to send all your money on it. I'm here to say like, hey, we're friends, let's go through this together. Tell me what your thoughts are, Let me help serve you in the way you need to be served. And in order to do that, they have to be honest and they have to be transparent and they have to tell me what their thoughts are. But I'm able to do this because my clients know me and I know them. If you aren't picking up the phone and having conversations with your potential clients. You are losing out on so much money. You're losing out on this connection. You're losing out on so much and you're doing it to service to your clients. Sending your price list, a PDF guide, is not going to cut it and today's day and age, if you want to stand out, you have to start having real conversations with their clients.
Speaker 2:And side note for you introverts out here, I got ya, I am an introvert. Y'all are thinking like Karina is not an introvert, she's staying that. That is total baloney. I don't believe it. I am an introvert. I am an introverted extrovert, if that makes sense. I do really great in one-on-one conversations and I think that most introverts are really great with one-on-one conversations. But in really big groups we struggle and that's me.
Speaker 2:For you introverts that struggle with the idea of picking up the phone and talking to strangers or having these conversations. Just remember, it's one person you are good at talking to one person one-on-one, okay, chances are the person you're on the other line with. They are equally as scared of like, oh my gosh, what is this phone call going to be like with this stranger? But the key is to have a really great process and a really great system for these communications and these interactions that happen with your clients, especially if you struggle with picking up the phone or you're scared of picking up the phone, because having a solid game plan of how to start a conversation and how to engage with people, how to ask them questions, how to break down those barriers, is going to allow you to accomplish these conversations without feeling like you're going to have a panic attack.
Speaker 2:This is one of the biggest things my coaching clients say they're so scared of phone calls in the beginning and they're so scared of, like just having conversations with clients instead of just sending them the PDF or the pricing. And it never fails that they have their first call and they're like oh my gosh, that was so bad, that was actually kind of fun. And then they have their second and their third and they're like those are really awesome, I love it. I never thought I would enjoy these conversations and as I do it more like it becomes more natural and it just becomes like a conversation with a friend and that's the way it should happen. If you were sitting there and you're like I know I need to do this. I just need to figure out how to have these conversations.
Speaker 2:Apply to join us in our coaching program. Applications are open right now and you'll apply at masterminemoneycom forward slash apply and inside of our coaching program, we are going to teach you how to have those conversations. We are going to teach you how to interact with people even if people are not your strong suit. We have lots of coaching clients in there that are introverts. I would say like 90% of our coaching clients are introverts. I don't know if it's because I'm an introvert and I attract introverts, introverted extroverts, I don't know, but we have a lot of introverts that come through our coaching program.
Speaker 2:I also do think that a lot of times, artists and photographers tend to be a little bit more introverted, especially when you look at animal photographers, pet and horse photographers specifically, they like animals more than they like people. So I get it. I feel you. It's okay, I can help you too, I promise. So apply to join us in our coaching program and inside of there, I will teach you exactly how to have these conversations. I will teach you how to get through those awkward moments whether you're on the phone or in public, running into people that you want to talk to about your business and exactly how to open up those conversations and just start to talk confidently about what you do and just talk about it with passion and fire inside of you.
Speaker 2:I hope you've loved this episode. Let me know your thoughts on this whole idea Taking the computer and the technology out of it, picking up the phone and also, too, I want to hear your thoughts on does a phone call feel different than a Zoom call? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, and so send me a DM on Master your Mind Money on Instagram. Post in our Facebook group photography business, tune up and just share your feedback with us and let us know how you're feeling about this. If you're loving the podcast too, I would absolutely adore it If you would head over and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast channel or network or share it with a photographer friend, because whenever you leave ratings reviews, you help this show up for more photographers and hopefully spread this awareness and this energy in the photography community.
Speaker 2:And really, if I can help one of you today with this podcast episode, it will make my heart so happy. If 10 of you listen to this and you're impacted by it, oh my goodness, it makes it even better. But if just one of you resonates with this, I know that what I'm doing here and what I'm sharing on the podcast is making a ripple. So make sure you share what your thoughts are and share with us what you're loving on the podcast this season.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support the podcast, please make sure you share it on social media or leave a rating and review. As always, you can check out the links and resources in the show notes over at masteryourmindmoneycom. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on Instagram at masteryourmindmoney, and don't forget to join our free Facebook group. Photography Business. Tune Up with Corinne Decay. Thanks, again and I'll see you next time.