31 July 2013

Some success!

I wish I new the success to sales.  Not just of art, but any kind.  I mean I have studied this part of business since college and have taken part in it since high school.  Heck, maybe even before that if you include my telling my father how much more important it was to be in that ball game rather than mow the lawn.  Like my father, buyers can be stubborn so and so's.

  Of course the buyer is not always right.......but he has the right to be.

  And that is the way I have always treated my clients.  Didn't matter if it was an idea to buy a certain commodity or stock way back when Merrill Lynch was really Merrill.  Or a stock position to that psychiatrist who himself should have been on a couch himself.  Or the bank president who had too many tips at lunch and fell asleep in the middle of a presentation.  I still contend it was the booze and not my titillating sales presentation.

The text says to find a need, find a product to fill that need, deliver it in a timely manner, and follow up to make sure the customer is happy.  Do all that and most clients with be repeaters.  And those that don't, you don't want to here about anyway cause they can never be happy with anything anybody does anyway. 

Oh and somewhere in there is "make them so happy they don't care what you charge them".  Not so sure that works any more.

I have been fortunate this week to make two sales.  First a lighthouse and then a frog.  I think that is OK.  Not great, but OK!   I mean I have no direct contact with the customer and have to compete with 85,000 other artists on a daily basis.  If I could just find the trick that sold those two, I could bottle it and start a whole nother kind of business.

 But the only thing I can think of is hard work.  Now don't tell all those folks that are on govt. handouts because I don't need to compete with another fifty million or so.

But I have found that I am no longer a photographer and photo editor.  But a purveyor of gibberish on a blog, a photo manipulator, a judge of whats good and not so good, and I can finally throw out that picture I took 15 years ago that I thought was so good.  Just can't understand how I could have been so wrong for all those years about that photo.  Never did sell it but love it all the way into the waste basket.  Maybe thats maturity?