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Last week I had a fascinating conversation with one of our photography clients who is already crushing it—$150K last year, tracking towards $300K this year—and honestly, I see a clear path to $500K.
0:00Alright. I had a conversation with one of our clients that did $150,000 in sales last year. This year they're projected to do about 300,000 and I really think we can get to 500,000. And I'm going to show you how.
0:12So we had a conversation. I went through their CRM and they're getting somewhere between 150 to 250 leads per month, just depending on what month it is, what the budget is. They're getting them at a really good lead cost, anywhere from $10 to $15 a lead.
0:29But there's some problems. Number one, let's talk about the good. The good is that they're booked out till September. Right now, it's April, so over the next four or five months, they have almost no availability.
0:38There's some things we can do to fix that because this is a one-person team. This is a person that's shooting everything, booking everything on the phone. They're following up. They're doing all the editing. They're doing all the ordering appointments, and they're doing all the shooting. So it can be a lot of work, and it can be pretty hard to start scaling past some of these points if you don't have help.
0:56The other problem that they have is that not all the leads book consults. And this is true across almost any industry, any niche. If you get 100 leads, I mean, you're lucky to get 25, let's just say, scheduled consults.
1:08And honestly, one of the biggest mistakes I ever made here at Photography Profits is having photographers rely on the call scheduler because what ends up happening is people basically just rely on only the call schedules.
1:21So what they do is if those 200 leads come in, if they're not following up, if they're not generating content, if they're not active on socials, if they're not sending emails out, then the only people that they're really talking to are the people that book the consult.
1:34So you can imagine if you have 200 leads, only less than 25% book consults. 40 to 50 people book consults. Then technically, you only have 50 leads per month because we're not actually getting on the phone. We're not calling the other people. But we're just disregarding them because we're so busy and we're only focused on the people that book consults.
1:53And then even on top of that, if 50 people book consults, 30 of them might show up. So a smaller percentage of those are going to be qualified. So we really needed to work through that.
2:05And then the booking rate is pretty low, but it's still really profitable. So this photographer is booked out till September. They have very few openings. And we're really looking at, okay, 300 is great. Obviously costs have gone up a little bit. Maybe they want to hire a team member. Is it worth doing all that?
2:23If we have extra cost, you're making an extra $150,000 a year, but you're doing three times more work. For some photographers, if the net that they get to keep is not significantly more, then it can be pretty disheartening or really crush morale or cause burnout.
2:40A lot of photographers do get burnout. So during our conversation last week, we went through and initially for almost every photographer when they look at this, okay, how do I get to this? We think we need more campaigns. We think we need to get this to 300 leads per month.
2:56And I kind of steer them away from that because I know that all that's going to happen is we're probably going to get an even smaller percentage of people to book consults and we're going to get a smaller booking rate because if we were not 100% following up with all of these people, then we're just going to, it's probably going to be even worse when we have 300 leads per month.
3:15And we're from 50 to 350. So we went through their campaigns and we saw, okay, the lead performance, the Facebook ads, the retargeting, the conversions are actually really, really good. So I kind of set this in green. We're really, really happy with that. Almost everything's coming from Meta platforms. We're getting Google ads and obviously organic, but most are coming from here. And then there's retargeting as well.
3:38Everything is sent into automations. So people are getting texted, people are getting followed up with emails and stuff. But some of the improvements we can make. So actually, let me come over here.
3:50So here I'm going to set this to green because this went exceptionally well. Let's look at this retargeting ads. I said, "Hey, let's improve them. Let's add more video." So this is a really good improvement we can make here.
4:00I think that maybe we get more people to actually number one, remember to get on their phone consults if we rely more on video. And number two, all the people that maybe didn't finish that step, they'll go ahead and complete that step if we direct them to that page.
4:15The other thing we said we would do is we have the 5x5 rule here at Photography to Profits. And that's basically that you're going to call people, you're going to call them five times in the first 5 days as well. And that was not happening. That was absolutely not happening.
4:32So one thing we're going to do, I told the photographer, "Hey, maybe you try it for one week. Yes, it's going to be a lot of work but you're going to set some time and you're going to follow up with all the leads and then look at, okay, if for that week, right without changing the ad budget, without creating all these campaigns and doing all this extra work, if we can maybe get the consults up and maybe get the booking to 15%. Then we'll see okay now we can really just skyrocket power."
4:59And then the plan is once they start doing this, let's just hire an appointment setter. An appointment setter that can maybe turn into a booking specialist.
5:09So I normally suggest this. If you're going to hire someone, we have methods to hire but one thing you can do to just make sure you're choosing the right person is get them to maybe start with appointment setting. The script is much shorter, their skills have to be lower level, and then they'll get the skills to become someone that can actually book for you.
5:26So we said retargeting. Okay. One other big thing that we decided to do is we're saying, "Hey, let's remove links. Let's remove links from a lot of the text messages."
5:34And one reason is a lot of the standards and a lot of the carriers and just regulations, links are not going through as much. So I just don't care. Let's maybe solicit responses. So maybe ask questions to get people to respond and get a conversation going because that's ultimately what we want instead of just sending our calendar link over and over again.
5:56And it kind of looks not spammy but it looks less personal. So people just might disregard it. So it might be worth having someone that you're paying hourly that either we're using AI or we're using something to kind of continue that conversation through text message to get them to just schedule their consults there.
6:13So if we can get these booked consults much higher here, that'll do really well. And then for closing, we said because we don't have as much feedback, we said, "Hey, let's go through and listen to a lot of the consults." It's not just enough to record them. You actually have to listen and improve them.
6:30And then another thing is maybe add a final offer. So for people that are really good leads and maybe they didn't book on the phone, what we can do is we can maybe automate something or bring them into our CRM and say, "Hey, we were hoping that you would book, but maybe life got in the way. Like to extend this offer to you if you make this decision today."
6:51So we can offer that to all the people that don't book on the phone or don't book within the one day, whatever your booking method is. And then things that you can do on top of that. You can call people back once a month, maybe leave them a voicemail, text them.
7:02So if you have a phone consult and they still don't, you really need to go through the script, improve your script, listen to the phone consults, and then continue with that email marketing.
7:12Okay. A lot of people, one of the biggest problems is that right now I'm talking about all brand new leads. But what should happen is if you're getting 200 leads per month, then your email list is growing.
7:25So the next month, let's just say we have all the exact same numbers. Well, we shouldn't just have 10 new bookings for this month from all the new leads. Hopefully we have those 10 bookings, but we should also have bookings from the past month. Maybe we get an extra two to three bookings from last month because now they're on your email list.
7:41Maybe they saw your retargeting. They saw some video. They saw another angle. Another solution, another problem that you solved that kind of removed that roadblock and then they book.
7:49Then the next month you get one more person from two months ago and then three new people from the last month and then your 10 people from this month. And it starts to compound, compound, compound.
7:59And then what's really great about that is then once Black Friday comes around, when you're offering something for Valentine's Day, New Year's, Mother's Day, whatever, you have a big warm pool to market to.
8:13So you should not just only be focused on the new leads. Really need to be focused on those past leads as well.
8:21So yeah, while there is always the instinct of "let's just get more leads, let's just get more leads," really what we're going to see, and I'm confident of this because I've been doing this for nine years, is that if we make these improvements without changing much of the offers because her offers are actually really good, that's why she's getting that many leads, that we can greatly get much closer to getting this.
8:41And if she can do this as one person or one person with a part-time, that's amazing. Most companies, most photography companies never even get to here, let alone here and then here with a little bit of help.
8:53So let me know where you are in this. We do have availability. I sent out an email about May 1st. I got to check. There was somebody that was going to book that, so I got to see if that's still available. I'm going to confirm with them.
9:03But if you'd like to be one of our clients and have these conversations with us and have these numbers and you already do in-person sales, you're already comfortable booking on the phone and you have a track record, maybe you're in this range. Yeah, let's see how we can help you do this.
9:19So that's it for this one. Visit us at photographytoprofits.com and you can reach out to me on any socials, whatever, if you got any questions. But see you in the next one.