The Second Immutable Law: create true believers

After you have your flag fly­ing and folks are see­ing it they have to know whether the flag is worth hunt­ing down.…people won’t buy your stuff if they can’t tell whether it works for them. That’s the job of our find abil­ity thing. Here we are wor­ried about mak­ing sure we are bring­ing the right peo­ple through the door, by right I mean peo­ple who have an inter­est in check­ing you out, peo­ple who likely have the prob­lem you solve bet­ter than any­one else.

This law is all about three things:

Trust

Rela­tion­ships

Nar­row­ing the field

Trust

Peo­ple gen­er­ally won’t buy unless they have some way of  know­ing that your stuff lives up to its promise of solv­ing the prob­lem they have today. Estab­lish­ing a rela­tion­ship with them, and no we’re not talk­ing about BFFs, we’re talk­ing about tak­ing enough inter­est to find out just what it is they need and whether your stuff, will help them.

Other than being friendly and wel­com­ing, what else can you do to build trust and help poten­tial buy­ers? Before I go on, let’s be clear… the goal here is to help those folks who might like your stuff learn more so they can decide if indeed  it is worth their time to fol­low your trail of bread­crumbs. One of the best ways to help this process along is to pro­vide sign posts and rest­ing spots along the trail to your store, site, booth or gallery.

Let’s assume you want to guide folks to gal­leries that a dis­play­ing your work, think of the trail as the time line needed to alert folks lead­ing up to your show. So, just as trails like the Appalachian have Trail Blazes (signs mark­ing the way) you can do the same with tweets or Face­book sta­tus updates that men­tion your com­ing gallery open­ing and drive folks to teaser posts on your blog or on your Face­book Fan page. Once you get closer to the show, you can start dri­ving peo­ple to spe­cific posts that describe your work and more about the gallery and maybe link­ing to the gallery’s web site.

Your blog  or Face­book posts are the rest­ing spots along the trail, they’re short posts that let poten­tial buy­ers know about your work and see whether it fits them. This level of trans­parency helps to build not only your cred­i­bil­ity, but also trust from prospec­tive buy­ers that you aren’t going to try to sell them any­thing they don’t want or need.

Rela­tion­ships

Once again, to reiterate…we aren’t talk­ing about becom­ing BFFs although that is pos­si­ble, in this con­text, rela­tion­ships are the next step after trust has been estab­lished. A rela­tion­ship with a poten­tial buyer is also a pre-requisite for becom­ing a true believer in the good­ness of your stuff, and pro­vides  buy­ers with the nec­es­sary beliefs and knowl­edge to cred­i­bly evan­ge­lize your goodness.

This rela­tion­ship thing hap­pens over time and is based on your will­ing­ness to guide new buy­ers through their buy­ing process by let­ting them pro­ceed at their own pace. As they con­tinue down the trail your reg­u­lar con­tact can takes as many forms as you can imag­ine, espe­cially if the strat­egy synchs with the val­ues and prob­lems of your poten­tial buy­ers. In sim­ple terms, it can just be let­ting them know where you’ll be, when you’ll be there, and what you are work­ing on. In this way you empower them to choose when they are ready to buy more of your stuff and while let­ting them know you value them.

This stage is par­tic­u­larly effec­tive for Etsy folks or any­one sell­ing their stuff on-line, just watch some of our Fea­tured Artists on Twit­ter and Face­book and you’ll see how the mas­ters do it. If you are on Twit­ter fol­low our Fea­tured Artist list @bwphoto/featured-artists or join the Face­book page and friend some of the folks there.

Nar­row­ing the field to focus

This part of the Sec­ond Law is all about know­ing that you can’t be all things to all peo­ple. To be effec­tive, you need to weed out some peo­ple and by that I mean have a way to sep­a­rate not only the look­ers from the buy­ers, but also, the one time buy­ers from those likely to become true believ­ers. This process of elim­i­na­tion helps you focus on your reg­u­lar buy­ers and helps them know more about your work and when some­thing you make might be some­thing they’d like.

If you have a way that folks can eas­ily learn whether there is a poten­tial match made in heaven you’ll both save a lot of time and worry. The cri­te­ria and method depends on how wide or nar­row your focus is and who your stuff is designed for.

Ways to focus

• Make it painfully obvi­ous who your stuff is meant for. So if you are sell­ing stuff to left handed bowlers with elbow  and thumb pain, you’ll not want to spend time on bowlers with bunions on their right foot. The way you com­mu­ni­cate this is up to you but the best way is to be as spe­cific and nar­row as pos­si­ble, like say­ing your stuff is ideal for left handed bowlers with elbow and thumb pain.
• Describe who your stuff is for and what those who own it experienced…what it did for them. So using the left handed bowler exam­ple above you might say that left handed bowlers with elbow  and thumb  pain expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cantly less pain when using your gizmo. To add cred­i­bil­ity you’ll also need to add pho­tos or quotes from those folks you helped.

Now that you have the idea you may ask how does this apply my stuff as an artist? Well…the process is no dif­fer­ent. If you’re a jew­eler your work helps the per­son wear­ing it feel bet­ter about them­selves, by increas­ing their sense of attrac­tive­ness. Your beaded bracelets help that young hippy woman bet­ter iden­tify with her val­ues. Your abstract paint­ings that are full of color not only brighten up the walls and rooms they become a part of,  but also, rein­force the buyer’s love of color.

So…as that col­or­ful abstract painter, you might describe your work as full of rich­ness that turns any drab room into haven of sen­su­al­ity and bright­ness. Peo­ple who bought your work expe­ri­enced more joy by hav­ing it in their home offices dur­ing dark win­ter days. Sup­port your claims fur­ther by hav­ing pho­tos of your work in the homes and offices of those who now proudly own it.

If you make funky jew­elry that is best worn by women who tend to be veg­ans and grow their own food, your work is going to rein­force their val­ues espe­cially if you use hemp. When you describe your work describe it in terms that attract those young and old hip­pies. Rein­force your descrip­tion by inter­view­ing a few of those folks and let them tell how much your funky bead work adds to their lives.

The Sec­ond Immutable Law helps you see how build­ing trust, rela­tion­ships and nar­row­ing focus is impor­tant to get­ting more of your work out into the world and increas­ing your abil­ity to sup­port your­self from it.