Selling Skills Or Just Good Practise?
Selling your art like a professional is a lot easier than it might first appear. I know! I’ve heard it said that selling is an art, a god given talent that few can do and to be truly successful in sales you need to go on some high cost training course and sit through three days of intensive sales skills training before you can even think of making your first sale. Come on, is it really that difficult?
Okay, joking aside…
professional sales skills can take your business to a new level
I know as well as anyone that selling is indeed a craft and just like any other craft it takes time to master and perserverence to get good and then get better. What I don’t believe it takes is a three day training course or fancy sales seminar in Vegas with Bruce, the world famous Kirby sales legend! Stay with me and I’ll explain…
Sales training has changed just like everything else has with the introduction, growth and development of the internet. What was a cost we could not carry ten years ago in business is now available at no cost at all. The internet offers a range of free tools and delivery platforms to enable the best trainers out there to offer courses to suit all our needs so do a little research and you should find just what you are looking for without stepping outside your home or your comfort zone.
But before you head away here’s my take on selling to increase your skill set and your bottom line. Let’s take a look at how an artist might approach one aspect of the sales process; creating the right buying experience.
There are lots of good abstract artists around; there are lots of good landscape artists around. In fact, there a lots and lots of great artists everywhere you look. So what makes you so different and your art so saleable; why would someone buy your art and not Jim Browns’ across the street?
The answer is simple; because people are buying the experience of buying from you.
You are unique and your work is a part of you; whatever that experience may be, people buy the uniqueness of buying from you and also the uniqueness of what you produce.
Artists often wonder why they don’t sell art from some of the popular art sharing sites, as they have people who appear to like their work and the work is reasonably priced and appears easy to buy. But they sell very little from sites such as Image Kind and Red Bubble and one of the reasons is because the people viewing that art don’t know the artist. Despite the fact that you are not in a gallery, retail sales techniques still apply as they would in the real world and people want to feel pampered.
Even if they like the work they need something of the person that comes with the art; it’s such an impersonal experience that most fail to make a single sale this way. Selling art or indeed selling anything online is at best difficult and at worst impossible. But by providing a great experience for your buyers when they do arrive and dealing with them in a professional and curteous way you will have a greater chance of turning that one off sale into a repeat buyer.
