Your NEW Most Important Metric

In this episode of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick discusses essential strategies for boosting art sales in 2021, focusing on tasks that don’t scale and the importance of video. He draws inspiration from a Sun Tzu quote to emphasize leveraging your current business strengths. Key advice includes spending time on personal touches like handwritten thank-you notes and one-on-one video calls with potential customers. Patrick underscores that personal interaction, even through video, significantly enhances sales potential, especially for higher-value pieces. He urges artists to incorporate these tactics into their daily routines and reconsider their reliance on their websites being fully autonomous. The ultimate goal is to book more private art consultations, which Patrick identifies as the new most important metric for success. Additionally, he encourages leaving reviews and subscribing for more valuable insights.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Morning show. You wanna sell more art in 2021, one thing you are likely not doing that you need to start doing and specifically the things that don't scale video and your new most important metric. (dramatic music) All right, welcome to another edition of the Art Business Morning show, the show that will put you on the path to a six-figure-a-year art business or die trying.

I wanna start out talking about the things that don't scale and setting this one off, I pulled up a Sun Tzu quote 'cause I've been thinking, I've been thinking a lot about this recently and just sort of looking at the landscape of where our customers are. What is art like? What do art and photography sales look like in 2021? What are the most important things? It sort of builds on the last episode that I recorded too, about, where I got into the cactus analogies, which I'm quite fond of.

But Sun Tzu has got this quote and let me just read it. And then I can kind of sort of wind it down from there. But, and I quote, "If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is superior in strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate them, pretend to be weak that he may grow arrogant. If he is taken as ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them, attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected," unquote. And I think there's a lot of ways that you can interpret that quote, that you can think about it.

But for me, it sort of speaks to taking the facts that are on the ground, that are specific and unique to wherever you are in your business and marshaling your forces such that you can succeed, right? And stated another way, it's just because you are, insert whatever reason that comes to your mind, why you are no match for your opponent, and realize it can actually be a strength that's leveraged in battle.

So, your shortcomings, your weakness, whatever you're lacking in terms of getting your business off the ground or to the next step, it can actually be a strength if you understand how to marshal it. And what is your battle to take it away from Sun Tzu and war, it's selling more of your art or photography.

That is your battle. Who is your opponent? It is all of the reasons that you tell yourself that you think get in the way of you actually selling more of it. And so what are your facts on the ground, right? And again, I think the facts that you think are a weakness but that we can actually turn into a strength, that we can actually turn into a strength.

And so here's a fact, you're not selling 50 pieces a month. You're likely not selling 50 pieces a month. If you were, you would be bogged down in admin, you would be limited by your human body needing sleep, by the human mind's inability to have 15 conversations all at once, right? I mean, if you're getting 50 orders multiple a day sometimes the emails, the keeping up with it, the having the phone conversations, all of it, that's a lot, right? In that situation, if you are in that camp, by the way,

you need a really competent website, we have those, come and see us 'cause it'll help automate a lot of that. But for everyone else, you have time on your hands, okay? You're not getting 50 orders a month, right? Multiple a day, several, several, several a week. So, you have more time than someone in that situation.

And you have the time to do the things that don't scale. What do I mean by that? The things that you couldn't do at scale, you could not be spending more time with your potential customers if you had thousands of them, you just don't split that many ways. And so you do the things that don't scale that take too much time.

What is the thing that doesn't scale? Handwritten thank you notes. At a certain point in time, you've got enough orders coming in. You're not doing handwritten thank you notes. You couldn't write all those things, right? Your wrist would give out on you, you couldn't do it. So those are the things that don't scale.

What is an example of things that don't scale? Having one-to-one conversations between you and potential buyers. Spending more time with potential buyers, with collectors, showing them your art, merchandising your art, talking about it, having discussions with them, and what do I always say on my art business workshop? What is the best way to sell art? My favorite trick question.

Is it via NFTs, non-fungible tokens that represent a cryptographic way of storing value? No, it's not. I'm gonna get more into that on future episodes for the uninitiated. It's like the topic of these last couple of days in NFTs. But anyway, is it selling directly from your website? No, no.

The best way to sell art or photography is in-person face-to-face, hence the trick part of the question, right. Now, of course, the particular coordinates GPS, in which dictates what corner of the earth that we all occupy sort of limits the number of in-person face-to-face interactions that we can have, right.

Video, on the other hand, okay. Video, what most of you guys are watching right now that are seeing this, maybe not on the podcast later, solves for this, okay. It really does solve for this. Video, by which I mean one-to-one, face-to-face, video calls on whatever platform, the platform doesn't matter. Zoom, Hangouts, Team, FaceTime, Slack, Discord, whatever it is, or something that everybody understands that everybody can do.

I regularly have 80-year-old artists on my art business workshops, and they figure out how to unmute themselves and have a conversation. I mean, regularly, like, one or two a month but still the point is that video just works. Everyone understands how to use it. You can be leveraging it. And we believe very heavily both in our marketing and art storefronts what we're teaching our customers in the premise of video being the most efficient and effective way to get things done outside of in-person face-to-face,

video is just that good at what it does. So when we combine what we have, right. The forces, the facts on the ground, we talk about what we're not doing currently. And then I wanna get into sort of your new most important metric. So, you're not selling 50 pieces a month, okay. Not several a day, you've got time.

You've got the time to spend, to do this. You know you need to be doing the things that do not scale the writing, the thank you notes, right. Which you can't do when you're getting thousands and thousands of them. And let's just say that you also agree with me that the best way to sell art is indeed in person, is indeed face-to-face.

And the next best way to do it is with video face-to-face, okay. So, if that's the case, if that's the case and you agree with all of those things, why are you not booking one-on-one appointments? Why are you not booking more one-on-one private arts consults, private art shows, one-on-one viewings, whatever you wanna call it.

Hey, Patrick, interested in a private one-on-one art consult. Great, fill out this form, get some time in my calendar. You're not doing that currently. You don't have buttons all over your website offering this as an option. You do not post about it on your social media sites all the time, private art showings available.

Let me know, get on my calendar, you can book here, right. You're not putting it in your email copy, PS, wanna book a private art show? Let me know, I have times available, right. The last time for many of us, many of you guys, that you had a one-on-one art consultation over video was never stated another way.

I have a website, you have the website, Robert the Facebook comments here, he has a website, okay. Who's Robert, I don't know, he's in his Facebook comments, What's up, Robert, how you doing? Our websites, okay, are effectively our retail stores on the information superhighway. That's a very, very good way to think about them.

Take everything back to retail just because we're online, just because we're digital, it all goes back to retail. All the same rules apply for the most part. So the conventional wisdom out there, okay. And that we all sort of bought into over the years myself included, the premise that we have in our heads is that, our retail stores are just so effective at what they do that they made themselves, they made themselves, they're autonomous.

We have to do anything. We throw the store up, people can come whenever they want, it's really, really effective to taking care of everything. We don't have to do anything. It's like walking into the McDonald's of the future, where they already have the robots to serve the Coke. They already have the robots to take the order the little kiosk machine.

Next thing you're gonna look at robots back there flipping the burgers and doing the French fry thing and everything else like our stores are just somehow completely autonomous. And they just deal with things on their own, right. That is the premise that we've all sort of been sold on the concept of a website and being there doing all of these and sort, right.

And it's really like a romantic notion in somewhere, right. Like the store is open, it's open 24 hours a day, and you and I are art, sat in the beach chairs

 down at the beach, sand in the toes, a rum drink umbrella on the side, right. Like who wouldn't want that, that sounds fantastic, I'll take two.

Now, the premise okay, of a website, your website, my website working that way, okay. It actually makes sense. It does work fantastically well when you need it to do that, okay. When you are asleep in your bed, okay. When you have 27 people on your website at the same time, that is when the website needs to be completely autonomous, that was the one you needed to take care of business for you.

When you have, when you're selling the 50 pieces a month, you need it badly in those situations, okay, critically important. But if our websites are our retail stores, okay, that we own, and it was an actual retail store, and somebody came walking into the store, and was looking around on the merchandise, would we not go over a conversation with that person? Would we not? Hey Patrick, how you doing? Hope you're having a great day, If you have any questions about anything, let me know, right.

We wouldn't just be sitting around. So I think that's an important way to think about it, right. Like of course we would go up and talk to that person and it takes us back to the Sun Tzu, right. The store should only be operated autonomously if we can't handle the volume, right. If three people come into the store at the same time, that's gonna be a problem, right.

That's when you would need some other employees or the store, the automated machines take care of it for you, right. So, I think that's just like an incredibly important way to think about it, always take it back to the retail version. And I would argue that the highest ROI of our time, and this is especially true for any of you guys that are selling pieces that are over 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000 above thousands, right.

Like there is no higher ROI for your time. If there is somebody in your store potentially interested that might buy a thousand dollars plus purchase a $500 plus purchase. Like, there is nothing more effective than you can be doing with your time, then spending it right there, right. Don't be working on an email, don't be working on a social post.

Somebody is in the store, go and talk to them, go and talk to them immediately right now. So, what is your most important metric then? Right, what is your most important metric? Of course, it's sales. Okay, of course, it's sales and revenue. But what is the number one thing to worry about if that's your goal? The number of art consultations you can book, the number of one-on-one video chats with potential customers and collectors obviously that need to be qualified that you can, right.

That's a really, really interesting way to think about it. Let's take it out of that world and put it into the dialing for dollars telephone sales guy, okay. Just, I know that mortifies people but just track with me. Do you know what a salesperson is ultimately judged on? Of course, it's the amount of sales that they make.

But there's metrics that are a little bit higher upstream, right. And one of them is dials. How many dials is that sales rep making in a day and making it a week? And why do they track that? The more dials you make, the more revenue you make and is mortifying as that is to most artists and photographers thinking about dialing for dollars and being salespeople.

I know your brains don't work that way. The maths do pencil, okay. If you have a bunch of sales guys or girls, the number of dials they have, is directly correlated with how much revenue they're gonna earn usually in most cases. So the same is true for you in your art business, okay. The more one-on-one consults that you have via video, showing off your pieces you're talking about them, and you're building a relationship, the more art or photography you're gonna sell.

I know that's profound and it's true, right. Like the more consults you have, the master got a pencil. If that was the case, what would you do? What would you be doing? More importantly, what should you be doing right now? Like starting today, you should start asking for them. You should start asking for them.

It is very easy from a tactical standpoint to start asking, okay. For a one-on-one consult to start offering them via everything that you have at your disposal. Put it in the PS in an email, see what happens, post it on the socials, see what happens, right. Get a button on your website, see what happens, right.

Now for us, art storefronts as a business, right. What do we realize? That I now have to make this as easy as possible for our customers. By which I mean, so stupid easy I can't even begin to tell you how easy. So, what I'm gonna say is, stay tuned especially your customers. We're cooking up some amazing on this.

But I genuinely believe, okay, going back one episode previous, right. Where the age that we're living in 2021 right now, and again, I'll just focus in on my customers, but it's for all you guys listeners too. You have to be like a cactus, okay. You have to be like a cactus in the desert. What is a cactus in the desert? Really, really good at doing, getting the most out of the tiniest amount of water possible, okay.

What is the water in this case? It's attention. We're all at war for attention. The entire ballgame is attention. And it was interesting because last night, what is the date? It's the 25th when I recorded this last night. And our business is selling art and photography, okay. Obviously we keep our ear to the ground and we hear everything.

There is an artist, Beeple is his surname. There's a, as non-degree or whatever you want to call it. And he sold something like 3.5, $3.7 million worth of art via this NFT process, non-fungible tokens. Don't worry we're gonna do a complete episode on it, we're gonna get into it. But one of the cool things about this new out clubhouse is that, you get a bunch of really impressive people in a room.

And they start talking about how this whole process went down. So it was this guy, this Beeple guy in the room last night, and many of you would be like, who is this person? I don't understand, don't worry about it just kind of track with me on it. Clubhouse is a new app. There were a bunch of people in this room last night, like really impressive people, okay.

Like Beeple was in there, Gary Vaynerchuk was in there, the CMO of Artful popped in, Elon Musk's wife was in there talking. And it was funny because it was a bunch of really high-level artists, right. Like, the top 1% you could even go the top 1% of the 1%, right. And it was interesting because they were all talking about this new NFT and this tokenized situation and how it's awesome and everything else.

And again, don't worry, we'll explain this in a future episode, we've got one teed up. But what happened is I'm sitting here in this thing listening passively Nick, our CEO both of us were throwing ideas back and forth. And do you know what, every single solitary artist problem was on that call no matter how big they were, no matter how big they were, it was attention, it was attention.

I mean, these are people that have sold millions and millions and their biggest problem was attention. It was eyeballs and customers for their art, okay. And so if the problem is there, the problems for you, the problem is for us in the business, right. As art storefronts to grow our business, that is our biggest problem.

So, we have the ability to focus on getting more attention which we're always gonna be focused on. More email addresses, more traffic to our website, more social followers, more eyeballs, right. Or we can focus on getting more out of the attention that we do have. We can say, okay, I can attack this problem from two sides.

I can go out and get more attention, drive it to my website, hope they take a look at things, hope they buy, or when I do drive that attention to my website, I can instantaneously remove all of the friction and have the wait for them to get onto a video chat where I can explain my art, I can merchandise it, I can talk to them directly.

Just by asking, we are working there on getting more out of the attention that we do have, okay. That is a fundamental way to grow your business. And if you're selling 50 pieces a month, which I already know 99% of you are not, you've got the time to do this. You've got the time to do this just by asking.

You just got to ask. So I better eat my own dog food. Can you guys leave me an iTunes review? Okay, I haven't gotten an iTunes review in like weeks. I'm starting to feel like nobody's listening to these things. And then if you are, you don't like them. But in all seriousness, I would love an iTunes review or rating for the podcast art marketing podcast.

You can go on there, you don't have to leave a review. You just give me four stars, five stars, five stars would be better and leave me a review. I'm trying to grow those things and I would really appreciate it. But on that note, thanks for listening. And as always, have a great day. All right, YouTube, I

 left the beach bar for another beach bar.

I gotta get my mind out of the bar. What'd you think about that video on booking private consults? Good idea, is that the most important metric? Have you booked any, have you booked one, leave me a comment below. I am dying to know if anybody is doing this now or if anyone's even thinking about doing it.

So get down your comment. I will read and respond to everyone, that's number one. If you're enjoying the show, highly recommend you subscribe. You can come on live, you can leave comments live, you'll never miss a live broadcast. So the little motion graphics here will show you what to do. Subscribe, smash that like button, smash that bell, every YouTube says that we're you just have to say it.

I feel like an idiot saying it in all honesty. But I would appreciate it if you did subscribe. And finally, if you want to attend our business workshop, there are literally three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Central, 2:00 PM Eastern, freezing calls, you can jump on, we eat our own dog food video is the best way, most efficient way while we can't be face-to-face.

So you can come on ask any questions you like about what we do, tell me about your business, something that you're stuck on, any questions you have about any of it. And I'd love to respond. So, highly encourage you to do that, there'll be a link down in the description below that you can sign up for it, it's free and they really are fun.

I'd love to see you on one. And thanks for watching, have a great day. 






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