Guest post by international wedding photographer Milton Gan

As small businesses it’s natural to think that we have to do everything ourselves, including the dreaded selling. But when it comes to selling albums you can reduce the pressure on yourself by leveraging the services and support of your suppliers. Here are three ways that I utilize my suppliers to sell more albums:

1. Educate Yourself and Your Clients

When it comes to selling, knowledge is key, so I highly recommend visiting your album supplier’s website and giving them a call to learn as much as you can about the company, their mission, and their products. Album styles, paper types, cover options and the production process are things you should aim to become an expert in so you can speak to your clients with confidence about why an album made by your supplier is a fantastic investment as well as answer any questions they may have.

When potential clients are browsing my Queensberry sample books, I share the story of how they are a family run company based in New Zealand who use only the finest quality materials for their hand crafted albums. I can always tell that they are impressed by my knowledge and passion. In fact I’m so interested in learning everything about Queensberry that I flew to New Zealand to meet the team and to take a tour of their production facilities where I even saw some of my albums being assembled! Check out my live Facebook chat with them here.

If your supplier is based locally, or if you’re going to be traveling in the area, I would urge you to contact them ask them if you can drop by for a tour.

2. Showcase a Range of Album Styles

I recently wrote about why offering a range of albums is better than offering just one style, the main benefit being that options gives your clients more control over their buying decision and empowers them to choose the style they feel best suits them. When clients feel empowered, they are more comfortable spending money. So while you may currently offer a gorgeous flush mount album, check whether your supplier produces any other styles. If not, source a second supplier that offers something different. By adding one or two more styles to your range, your clients are more likely to find a style that appeals to them. Their emotional attachment to the style they choose will then improve the likelihood of them investing in additional pages and copies come design time.

3. Sell With a Slideshow

I used to struggle to get my album designs started due to the dilemma over image selection. Do I select them all or do I let my clients choose their favorites? How many images do I even need? It was all a time-consuming headache until I discovered Pixellu SmartSlides and started to create slideshows set to music as a surprise treat for my clients before they received their full gallery. I quickly realized that the 150 or so images I was selecting for the slideshow also formed a perfect initial album design, so I was effectively killing two birds with one stone and dramatically speeding up my workflow in the process!

The resulting effect was that my clients loved their surprise slideshow and would arrive for their album design session excited, emotionally connected to the images, and much more likely to invest in the extra pages that I recommended. And even if my clients didn’t initially order an album, I could reuse the slideshow images to quickly produce an album design for them to consider. At worst they would say no thanks, but if they said yes, then the few minutes it took to create it would produce a fantastic financial return!

I hope you found these tips on utilizing your suppliers useful. Suppliers are one of the greatest resources for selling so make the most of them!

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Read here for more tips on how to boost your album sales.