Thursday, September 04, 2008

[B]Business Day Thursday: Part 2 - What's In Your Salesroom - Part 2

We have a great segment today with this edition of Business Day Thursday. I'm combining today's post with our regular weekly Podcast. My conversation with talented photographer and ProSelect beta tester, Michael Jonas, brings significant insights into running a successful studio. Michael and I have been friends for a long number of years. So I'm very pleased he has agreed to share his expertise.

Michael and I helped develop one of the finest pieces of studio sales software on the planet way back in 1999. That software was called ProShots and it was the hands-down winner for exciting client presentations. Michael even wrote the manual for the ProShots software. Kodak sadly closed the doors on ProShots at the end of 2007. So what's the best sales solution available today?

There really aren't a lot of solid sales solutions available for the pro studio, but a lot of successful photographers around the world feel strongly that the new solution is ProSelect by TimeExposure.com. Micheal has been a beta tester for the software through most of it's recent versions and will share with us how he made the transition in his own studio from ProShots to ProSelect. His insights reflect his years of experience of selling pro-actively and successfully in his own studio.

In this podcast we discuss:
1. Why relying simply on on-line image hosting kills the sale. Most people are spinning the "wheel of misfortune" and hoping for the best by simply having their images hosted on-line.
2. Now, up to 1/3 of wedding photographers just shoot and burn and some industry insiders are predicting that to reach 50% in 2009-2020!
3. Would or wouldn't you agree that the best way for a photographer to present their images to their clients is with dedicated presentation software in a studio environment? This might even be your home, if that's where your studio is located. Pro-active selling is the best way to success. You made that transition a number of years ago - proofs to pro-active - what were your results?
4. We were both huge ProShots users - you switched a lot sooner than me - Why?
5. Quick overview of ProSelect's strongest points.
6. Room features, slide shows to sell, project templates, etc.
7. How about the learning curve - easy or hard? What are the training resources out there - videos, manuals?
8. Have you seen a net effect in customer response, positive customer experience, increase in sales?
9. Are you using ProSelect in conjunction with Lightroom? If so, - how?
10. OK, you are the beta tester and have the inside tract, what's on the ProSelct horizon? Anything you can talk about?

Do your success home work and give a listen by hitting the PLAY button on the Gcast widget in the right column of the blog. Enjoy!

Article Links:
Michael Jonas Photography
ProSelect
ProShots
Shoot and Burn Photographers

p.s. You can also down load this podcast or all other podcasts right here.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the podcast guys. This looks really interesting, and I'm gonna check it out further. It's super that their cross platform.

    It has me thinking of ways I would use this being a LR user to make things faster.

    Gav
    prophotoshow.net

    ReplyDelete