Q4 and Pivot

In this episode of Art Business Mornings, Patrick dives into the essential strategies for executing successful Q4 sales, focusing on key marketing fundamentals like incentive, scarcity, and attention. He also discusses the concept of the 'Pivot,' emphasizing the importance of constantly testing new styles and marketing approaches to align with business ambitions. Patrick explains that the fundamentals of a sale—having an enticing offer, creating a sense of urgency, and capturing attention—are critical for success, and developing these 'muscles' takes time and consistent effort. Listeners will learn actionable steps to improve their sales techniques, understand the importance of marketing consistency, and assess when it might be time to shift strategies or 'pivot' to find greater market validation and business growth.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Or I don't know what does. So let me get everything queued up here. Welcome to another edition or what do I usually say? Coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Mornings, we're talking Q4 and the Pivot, okay? Specifically Q4 in the coming sales and it's just another muscle and then the Pivot.

You write the whole intro music going. What's up Cash Money, good to see you again. All right, let my intro music play for a second. So this is a part of a rant of speech that I gave, what was it like a week ago or so in one of our customer workshops and so I pulled some of the, you know, for customers only stuff out of it.

But I thought it was so important that it's just worth going over again. And I would say welcome to another edition of Art Business Mornings. The show that's going to torch you on the path to a six-figure a year plus art business. So I want to talk about the Q4 sales that are coming, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, whatever you do for Christmas, Singles Day, whatever gets, you know, transpires you in the fourth quarter.

And I would say a well-executed sale, okay? No matter the time of the year, it's about having the fundamentals in place and really it's just an equation. A good sale is just a math equation, right? It's a math equation in three parts, namely incentive, you have the discount, scarcity, the fact that it expires, multiplied by attention.

Attention, the size of the audience you have and your ability to reach it. That is the equation of a sale, it's the same for everybody. Those three parts, incentive, scarcity, so it's incentive plus scarcity, times the attention that you have. That's going to dictate if you have the elements, how big the attention is, how successful it's going to be.

And running a well-executed sale is essentially, it's the most important fundamental part of running an art business or running any digital e-commerce business really but especially in art business. Has been for the last 50 years, gonna be for the next 50, right? So, getting the basics of it in place, you know, is easy enough but learning how to properly execute it takes time.

By which I mean, having executed multiple sales over the course of years and years and years. And, you know, anytime that this Q4 comes around and, you know, we have to get into teaching our customers how to execute a sale, I go back and I look at what I've created in the years previous, as it pertains to the playbooks.

And I go back and I look at what I've created four to five years ago on this, for art storefronts and very little has changed. Very little has changed. The fundamentals involved are all still there, you have a deal with the aforementioned incentive and scarcity and then you omni-channel market it, okay, which means you use every channel you have at your disposal in a coordinated fashion.

Fire all the guns at once and explode into space. So a few years ago, it might've been the email sequence, the social parts, the hand-to-hand combat throughout, ending the deal, extending the deal. This year what's gonna change? Live video's gonna play a big role in it this year, right? So I'm going to have to update the playbooks to include how live video, going live on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube like I am now, will help and assist the sale.

But overall it's pretty much the same, every single solitary year. It's the equation, it's incentive plus scarcity times attention. That's why we teach lead generation all year. How successful your sale is going to be, assuming you have the incentive plus scarcity part, is solely a factor on how many leads, how much attention you have.

It's very, very simple. And I think, you know, it's also just a subset of marketing muscles, okay? And I mention all of the time that you guys need to be able to do a hundred pushups. We all need to be able to do to a hundred pushups in one sitting, right? Which is the analogy used to describe a comprehensive marketing system that you do consistently all year long.

It takes time to build up those muscles, to be able to do that, to learn how to do that, to get those muscles in shape, right? Like the capturing emails all year, emailing them regularly, posting to the socials regularly, having line launches, having the sales, understanding all the mechanics. And somebody was asking scarcity, so I'll break down that again, I see your question's longer.

The fundamental of a sale again, very very easy is incentive, i.e., the discount, because we're humans, we need to be motivated to take action. The scarcity is the fact that it's going to end. It's not a sale that goes on forever. You know, deal ends in 24 hours, deal ends in seven days, 48 hours left, right? You have to have those two elements, that's essentially it. That's why you can break any sales process down to an equation, right? And like, let's make it real, let's give it to you.

What did Amazon just do over the last 48 hours? They had Prime Day. It was a two-day sale. Discounts on all kinds of things. There was the incentive, what was the scarcity? It ends in 48 hours, right? It doesn't matter how small you are as an artist or photographer, the first thing you've ever run, or if you're Amazon, it's just an equation, it's just an equation.

Now in Amazon's case, sadly they have a little bit more attention than the rest of us. Tyrants need to be broken up as far as I'm concerned. So anyway, why am I bringing all this up? If you want to have a successful art business, okay? You need to have this muscle in place. This set of muscles that is a profitably executed sale, right? And it takes work to get there, right? You know, I've been doing this my entire career and one thing I'm not naive about is thinking that you're gonna be able to build that muscle overnight. There are a lot of moving pieces to a well-executed sale. It takes practice. You're gonna be running these sales using this muscle group for the rest of your art-selling lives. Side note, like I said. You know who else is building these muscles? Every single solitary e-commerce merchant that exists in the world.

Merchant period, right? The sale is fundamental to running the business. And it's again, it's the same equation for you, for me, Art Storefronts, Amazon, Ali Baba when they run their single sale coming up on 11/11, which by the way is the biggest single solitary e-commerce sales day in the entire world, it happens in China, not here.

Crazy thing, right? So you never stop working at it, getting better at it, getting more efficient at it, seeing what works best for you. And there are no shortcuts to building these muscles, it is just fundamental, okay? Everyone listening to this live broadcast or podcast after the fact is at different spots in their business and their marketing argument, in the validation of their art as a product.

Everybody has tons of room for improvement, okay? In their marketing and, you know, this has been an interesting thing for me to see because we have these workshops for our customers, right? And we started to break them apart. Like if you're just beginning, you go to this workshop, if you're over a certain sales threshold, you go to this workshop, if you're over a really high sales threshold, you go to this workshop.

Guess what's consistent with all three? It doesn't matter if you haven't sold anything, if you sold more than 2000, if you sold more than a hundred thousand. You'll all have to get better at your sales. There is a ton of room for improvement with every single solitary group, right? Every group. The great news about this process though is, you get one in the water, perhaps you fall flat on your face, but you learn and every sale that you execute builds.

It's not just about Q4, it's about all year long because we're doing it all year long. You start with just one email, sale, discount, scarcity, times the attention you have. And then you send another email and then you do social posts. Maybe that was your third sale or maybe your first sale was just one email. And then the next sale you get an email and another email, you grow in sophistication, then you get the social posts and then you figure out how to do the ads with the social posts that dovetail.

Or the message that you have in your email, right? It's all just a process, right? Like every time you do it, you get better and better. Like, you know, that last sale, you weren't active on Instagram, you don't even know what an Instagram story is. This sale, you've got a countdown timer, 48 hour, one hour left, two hours left, 30 minutes left, you're throwing those Instagram story tiles in, right? You get better and better and better.

And, you know, we had this guy, shout out to Bill Wenzel, on the consulting session, or what we call office hours, on Tuesday and, you know, I looked at his sales and I look what he's done and each year the business is growing, you know, at a decent healthy clip. It's not hockey stick growth, you know, it's just that slow and steady up growth.

And the sales are getting and I asked him specifically, I'm like, "How much easier are the sales getting for you now that you're in year three of your business and running?" And he's like, "It was so difficult at first, you know, there were so

many moving pieces but you just do what you can do and you get better, you get better, you get better, you accomplish what you can, you're gonna miss out on some parts of it, which is okay, okay? And you're gonna get better and pretty soon it's just gonna become second nature as it needs to be because it's that critical part of running your business, okay?"

Now all of which to say as I transitioned out of the Q4 sales and the pivot argument with the strong takeaways being this is a subsection of muscles of the hundred pushups. It's very important.

No shortcut, gotta learn it, okay? For some, they might be following our playbooks, okay? And teaching this Q4 and they might struggle, right? Might not sell a single piece but if you follow the playbook and that happens if you follow our playbook on how to run Q4 sale and that happens, I'm not bummed. Well, I'm bummed you didn't sell anything, yes, but I'm also really happy you execute on it and did it, why? Because you need to learn.

You need to learn how to do this and you're gonna be doing this multiple times a year for the rest of your life of business. You gotta start somewhere. You gotta start just by executing the sale. I know there's so many are sitting on the sideline saying, how do I get it together? How do I do it? Where do I get started? Like, you know, this is so overwhelming.

Have a sale, make sure it has the incentive and the scarcity and send an email. You can send an email, everybody sends one email. You're gonna send an email today. Almost every single solitary person listening to this is gonna send an email today. So you could send a sales email. Don't have a huge list, send it to your mom, right? At least you got one in the water.

So, you know, or best friend or partner or whatever. So you can start small, you can go up. So even if you do this and you don't sell a single solitary thing, you're still learning and taking a positive forward step in your business, in sharp contrast to those that don't, right? Some are going to execute on these playbooks as it comes up and they're going to do okay.

Not great, not bad. I wish you did better, but guess what? You're going to be really happy. You know why, why? Because you're going to be doing this for the rest of your lives in the art business, okay? You just got better at executing one and next one will be easier and easier and easier. You know, and some of you are gonna kill it.

You're gonna have the best Q4 you ever had. And it certainly looks to be the biggest Q4 we've ever seen. And I'm thrilled for you but even you at this high level, you have a huge sale, you do 30, 50, 60, $75,000 in sales this holiday season, which some of you are gonna do, you still have a lot to learn and get better, right? So that sets me up to talk about the pivot and you've heard us talking about the pivot a lot lately, it's gonna be a subject we are gonna be continuing to delve into because it is just critically important, right?

Because there's a lot of you out there that have great businesses. You're decent businesses but they're just not mapping to your ambition, right? And so this is where the question of the pivot comes in, okay? And, you know, here's how I frame this for those that are just listening to this. It's not gonna apply to you directly 'cause you're not a customer but it's okay.

It will allow you to see where our thinking is and get up to speed. So if you're a customer, here's what I know conclusively. None of you have a website problem, right? There's millions of millions of our millions and millions of dollars that are being sold through the Art Storefront Sites on a yearly basis.

Thousands of dollars were sold yesterday, thousands will be sold tomorrow and the day after. We know they work, the problem is solved, you don't have a website problem, right? We have as a business, Art Storefronts, as of today, a robust suite of playbooks, okay? That will teach you to execute all of the functions of the well-run sale.

Step by step by step. They are already very good, they're constantly getting updated, okay? We have a range of customers located around the world in every type of subject material, niche, personality, and circumstances, okay? Some people come aboard, they get their site live, they follow the playbook and they start killing it right out of the gates.

Right out of the gates immediately like, you know, first week. Others, it takes like a year and a half to get their first sale, right? And so we're looking at that scenario and we're saying, okay, what's going on here, right? In some cases, people are taking the exact same website that everyone else has, the exact same playbook, and they are thriving and doing incredibly well right away, right? So it's something that we realize as a business we need to work on, we need to break down and we need to figure out to see

if we can get people fixed like that people and stuff, right? Because we're in this together with our customers. So it's hard, it's the hard thing about hard things to put the Ben Horowitz book. It's like, you know, the first thing to do is I tried all these things, okay? I had the sale, I had the site live.

I followed your guys' advice and it's crickets what happened, right? It's really hard to be in that situation and not get emotional about it. Number one, to not get emotional about it, but number two to not look who to blame. Who can I blame for this, right? And sometimes we'll get blamed as a business, but we know it's not the website, we know it's not our marketing material because there's people that come in and use it to great success right away, right? So as easy for me as it is to say

you can't get emotional about it, everyone gets emotional about it. And we get that, I understand that, right? But the way that I look at it is if you have the website, okay? If you are following the marketing material and you're not coloring outside the lines and you're focused, then it's essentially just okay, I'm a mechanic, the car's come into my shop and it's not running correctly.

So what do I do? I start going in trial and error, bit by bit, Is it this system? No, that looks good. Is it this system? No, that looks good too. Is it this? Ah, it's that one, start wrenching on that one, right? The point is, it's a problem that can be solved. There's no need to get emotional about it, right? And so, you know, again, we know it's not the website, we know it's not the marketing material.

Okay, we've seen multiple people. And if you are customers, you've seen multiple people on the zoom calls and they're like, you're like, "How the heck are they doing this? How the heck are they doing this?" So okay, I'm the mechanic, we need to start diagnosing what in the wide world of sports is going on, why it's not working out for you.

Okay, and so we're gonna just go system by system, check by check and we're gonna figure out what the problem is, 'cause there's a solution. It's like getting problems, a complex problem, you break it down into the parts and you start solving. So number one, you don't have any inventory of any kind, right? If you're trying to sell things just based on an image and you don't have any inventory, that's a problem.

We see that time and time again, right? Like yes, our websites go to great lengths to solve that but I'm thinking of the hundreds of photographers and artists I talk to on a weekly basis that say they wanna be selling and then you ask them, "Do you actually have any inventory, physical inventory?" Because you're not selling the two-dimensional image on your Instagram account, right? Like you need to have the finished product.

I'm not buying the two-dimensional image. I am buying a finished print or an original that I can hang on my wall. If you don't have that inventory, you're not even in the game. But let's just be honest, you're not. Perhaps you're not doing the work. If you're not following the plan and you're not marketing consistently and you think you just throw your stuff up on the website and boom, people come and they buy it, then that's a huge problem, right? Next, it can be you're coloring outside of the lines.

You read the playbook, you attend our sessions whether it's a member ones or not and instead of following the plan to a T, you start coloring outside of the lines and getting creative. And this is a normal human tendency. The problem is that these things are stacked with nuance and trade craft and one little thing, you know, little hinges, swing big doors.

So a lot of times we see that it's coloring out of the lines. For some, it's straight-up perspective, it's perspective. Somehow you have a notion in your head that your problem as an artist or photographer was something other than marketing. That somehow you launch and boom, you're just off to the races and selling.

Meaning you are marketing for the first time in your life. This is especially true. Now that we're in this COVID situation, this new COVID reality where you had a business offline that was working and you had a system and it was great. And, you know, you were selling well and doing your thing and now you're like, "Wait a minute, I have all this history.

I used to be able to sell so well, now I'm online and it is

not working." The internet, sadly, excuse me, does not care what you did before. All they care about is the aforementioned equation that has attention is the multiplier, if you don't have attention, I don't care if you're at the top of your craft, the internet doesn't care.

The internet doesn't care if you're at the top of your craft, the internet doesn't care that you've done 35,000 shows over the last 20 years and sold over $3 million. Well, the internet don't care, okay? They don't care. Meaning, just have a lack of perspective, okay? You ran a sale and you didn't make any money, okay? The attention piece wasn't there, you are not understanding how long it takes to build that piece up.

Once you do, things are amazing, it's incredible, you have a business but you have to build it up and there's no shortcut, right? You have to build up these marketing muscles. So this one is a killer, the perspective one, and it affects so many people and it's literally a cancer because you think you come in under these assumptions, you know, with this crap stuck in your dream.

So how you're going to be a big deal right out of the gates and when you don't get the results, what it ends up doing, it's a cancer in your life. It's just killing you from staying consistent, staying focused on the marketing. Like when you're just getting started, it's hard. It takes time, you know, you might fall flat on your face.

This Q4, you might fall flat on your face, the next Q4 and sell two pieces and it might not be until year three till you get a hang of it, right? But that's how it goes. That's how it goes in the internet worlds these days. So that's a huge one. The next step though I think after that, after the perspective, right? After you're coloring outside of the line, after you're not doing any marketing, after you don't have any inventory, that's when we get into validation, right? Is your art well and truly validated?

Have you sold your art or photography to people not named mom, dad, brother, sister? That is a critical piece, right? And you know, we have some older customers. I know that have come on board, even some recent ones because it happens that, you know, have not sold their art period, have not validated, have never determined if their art in its current look and style is something the market wants.

They switched out the market. Okay, which let me be clear is the only entity that can answer this question for you, okay? Attempting to sell it directly to people you do not know and having them buy it, okay? They've swapped out the market with somebody else. It could be someone on our outreach team. It can be a family or friend that have told them repeatedly that their art is awesome.

It can be a juried show you got into that you think is validation but it's not, okay? The only thing that validation is, is when dollars change hands from strangers, okay? It could be, you know, extended strangers that, you know, you got to know a little bit but then they write your art. There's a little wiggle room there but that's the market and only the market can tell you, right? So that's validation at a high level, but there's levels to it as well, okay? And I use the restaurant analogy all the time,

gonna use it again. Some of you have validated your art, okay? You have a restaurant that is open and customers are coming in from time to time to eat. Yet the overall results of the restaurant are just not what you're happy with, right? You're like, "Yeah okay, the restaurant's opened but I can barely afford to pay the rent.

I'm grinding myself like crazy. This is just, I can't keep going like this." Something is gotta change, right? It's the restaurant is not growing the place that you want. So what's called for? This is where the pivot comes in. You need to start cooking some new dishes. Some new dishes, some new styles, trying some new things, experimenting to try and get some dishes that can take your restaurant from where it is struggling to another level, right? Another level.

Another way to think of it is like a lot of people have a niche that can sustain a restaurant that is very small and it will never grow big. It just won't, it's too small of a niche, there's not enough people out there, you know, it just never grows into a big business. And, you know, I remember earlier in my career, a buddy of mine was really tall, okay? And he built this business for tall people to put brackets on the bottom of their car so that it would slide all the way back.

So you can basically take your front seat and like put it all the way to the back seat, right? So, you know, a six foot six person could drive into a Prius. And I helped him market on that business a little bit and I was at it for like a year and at the end of the year I realized like this is just a really hard business to grow.

This market is not that big. You know, most of these really tall people, they buy big cars. They don't wanna fit into these small cars. And so is there a business there? Yeah, there's a business but it's always going to be a small business because it's just a small niche. And that's what it is.

And for some of you, the niche that you're in is just a small niche. It will never be a big niche. It's not easy to market it, right? It does not have stock raving lunatic fans. So if you're in that situation, you need to either be comfortable with it or you need to understand that you're gonna have to have a pivot.

You're gonna have to have a new style, a new way of doing things, a new photographic subject material, a different way of holding the camera, different lenses, different lighting, you know, maybe you get into HDR as your photographer, whatever the case may be. There's thousands of niches out there, you just need to figure out a new one to leverage, exploit.

Exploit is not the wrong word. So validation has levels and that's really important to understand that. And I think when we talk about validation and especially the pivot, the fine formula is sort of as, you know, testing these new styles and formats that will potentially sell better than what you currently have.

I think that's actually just a critically important part, a system in practice and yet another muscle. It's yet another muscle within the thousand pushups. And I really do believe it's important, conceptually. Okay, for those that have never sold a piece as it is for those that are selling well into six figures and above.

And I've been saying this one all the time when Picasso died, he had 45,000 works. He never sold 45,000. What do you think he was doing that entire time? He was testing new ideas, styles and pivoted. Not all of them were hits, that's the game. All of those 45,000 pieces were all likely steps on a path to finding one that was a home run for him that everybody wanted.

There were the biggest pieces that he's ever created. And you look at his styles and they're so different over the years, right? So he did a ton of it. So it's critically important, this concept of rapid testing, iteration and pivoting, which we're going to get into a whole lot more on this show, because I think it's so fascinating and something that you naturally do when you're a marketer anyway.

But it's so important for you guys always to be testing new styles, always seeing if you can find something else that will have a much bigger niche, a much broader audience, a diehard set of people that just want it so bad. So how to create that system, to create the next hit? What are the technological ways to focus on that? How do we leverage social media? How do we leverage polling? How do we leverage Instagram stories? All are things that I want to delve into in the future and dig into.

But I think also some important questions are the personal ones, right? Which is if you've got an art business, a photography business and you're not selling well. It's been a couple of years that you've been working at it. At what point in time do you make that call to pivot, right? At one point in time, do you say, "Okay, I've marketed pretty hard, I've done the work on this, I'm not getting the results that I want, no one's saying I'm a crappy artist or a photographer

but the market is clearly telling me that the style of work that I am producing currently is not ever going to make it, right?" And at that point you have to be brutally honest with yourself. You can potentially say like look, maybe this is just a hobby, maybe it's time to hang them up, maybe I shouldn't still keep marketing as diligently because the market has told me or, you know, you pivot at that time.

So I think trying to set some sort of loose framework, some sort of loose foundation for how to look at that, how to evaluate that, you know, how to ask yourself the question, how to hold up the mirror and say like, "Okay, this is how much time I've given this thing. Is it time to make the pivot, right? Is it time?" So I think that's a subject that we're gonna delve into more, one that I'm really excited about and one you have to ask yourself even right now because Q4 is coming.

But I do think as Q4 comes, as it rolls through, the most important thing even if you think you're gonna pivot, right? Is get the sale on the water, try a couple of them, follow the playbook, start developing those muscles and see where you end up. So I

think we leave it there on that note. Thanks for listening.

And as always, have a great day.