A Sensable Sales Model for Artists

His­tor­i­cally, the process of sell­ing goods and ser­vices fell gen­er­ally into what came to be called the Sales Fun­nel Model. In this model busi­nesses offered their goods and ser­vices through adver­tis­ing cam­paigns that were largely aimed at the con­stant stream of poten­tial buyers…this was a mass sales approach. Busi­nesses would “catch” poten­tial buy­ers as they stum­bled into the wide mouth of their sales funnel…it was basi­cally a mass approach to sell­ing. Once inside the fun­nel buy­ers were pitched on the  ben­e­fits of the busi­nesses prod­uct using a wide range of per­sua­sive tech­niques. This approach was the “law” of the sales world for decades, it was prac­ticed by every­body from the Fuller­brush man of the ‘30s to the ‘50s to car and appli­ance sales of today. Because of the neg­a­tive emo­tions asso­ciates with the words sales and mar­ket­ing many small busi­nesses found rea­sons to either not mar­ket or to cam­ou­flage their methods.

The Artists’ Funnel

Many artists  have failed to mar­ket pri­mar­ily because of the stigma asso­ci­ated with the word. Instead, they have favored del­e­gat­ing that task to show or gallery venues…often with less than stel­lar results because the shows and gal­leries have been using an adap­ta­tion of the sales fun­nel approach. The graphic below shows how that model looks and illus­trates the result which is a reliance on ran­dom sales.

The top level of the graphic illus­trates the flow of poten­tial buy­ers in the mar­ket, some of those buy­ers may “fall” into the fun­nel either by acci­dent or inten­tion as a result of the venue’s mar­ket­ing efforts. As these poten­tial buy­ers pass through the fun­nel some may choose to leave caus­ing the actual num­ber of poten­tial buy­ers “falling” out of the fun­nel to be less than those that entered.

From this reduced stream of “falls” through the fun­nel a ‘flow” of poten­tial buy­ers is cre­ated. At this level are the artist fun­nels doing the same thing the venue fun­nel is doing…trying to “catch” a large num­ber of poten­tial buy­ers in hopes that a few will buy.
Some artists have larger num­bers of “falls” into their fun­nel and some fewer, in any event the sales that do occur are mostly the result of chance. The graphic illus­trates that  artists’ final sales num­bers in terms of dol­lars don’t nec­es­sar­ily reflect the vol­ume of poten­tial buy­ers “falling” into the fun­nel mostly because the artists sales are not based on con­scious action on their part.

The fun­da­men­tal flaw of the fun­nel model is that it is not far from using a roulette wheel to make sales. There is no strat­egy to proac­tively attract or engage poten­tial buy­ers by using the val­ues, and metaphors that drove the prod­ucts’ creation.

The rise of com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools, and an unwill­ing­ness to par­tic­i­pate in per­sua­sion based sell­ing con­sumers have changed all this, as I have men­tioned in ear­lier arti­cles. More engage­ment is now and will be more and more expected. Fol­low­ing the old way will pretty much guar­an­tee fail­ure for 21st Cen­tury busi­nesses. Artists are posi­tioned well for this change because most if not all of our sales are made face to face and the energy we put into our work in most cases reflects our val­ues, style and metaphors. After sift­ing through all the pos­si­bil­i­ties I have come up with an artist focused strat­egy con­sist­ing of two mod­els that can be used sep­a­rately or in con­cert. The first is The Attrac­tion Model and the sec­ond is The Net­work Model.

Using Attrac­tion

The Attrac­tion Model is illus­trated below and is built around send­ing the “scent” of your style, val­ues and metaphors out into the world to attract those who are attracted by them. For this model to work you as an artist must do more than set your work onto shelves or gallery pedestals, you must

• Be clear the val­ues you instill in your work,
• Your style must be evident
• You must be con­scious of the metaphors and sto­ries your work tells.

Once you are clear about all of these you must now make sure that your work is dis­played in a man­ner that enhances your “scent” and rein­forces its story. You also need to make sure that the “scent” is attached to every­thing that touches your mar­ket. The more you do this the more you will attract ded­i­cated buy­ers who nat­u­rally see the value of your work and more impor­tantly be dri­ven by price because the value is already evi­dent. If your scent is strong enough you will also attract poten­tial buy­ers who may be just newly aware of their res­o­nance with your val­ues, style and metaphors.

The Con­nec­tion Factor

The sec­ond strat­egy, The Net­work Strat­egy, is more proac­tive and is built on you devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships with your buy­ers in all the venues your work shows up. This model requires you to engage your buy­ers in each venue by start­ing con­ver­sa­tions and then invit­ing them to your net­work. On a broad level this strat­egy can be one way on your part, with you using your chan­nels to stay in touch with each net­work. So if you are an Art Fair artist going to Cherry Creek you can start early using your blog to share what you will be bring­ing, and using Twit­ter, e-mail and Face­book to reach your Cherry Creek net­work. Using this approach you can not only keep your net­work informed you can also get feed­back from them so you can more pre­cisely pre­dict what they might buy. You can also keep them informed as to your booth loca­tion, arrival time, spe­cial net­work only sales etc.

I hope you can see that the motive behind these two strate­gies is to elim­i­nate or greatly reduce the Fun­nel effects ran­dom­ness and help you have more pre­dictable sales.