Date: January 21, 2020
To: CCS Customers
From: Jack Counts, Jr.
Improving “participation” is a common goal among volume photographers. Clearly, the more subjects you can photograph and the more of them that buy from you, the better your chances for business success.
When volume photographers talk about “participation rate”, they are often referring to the number of people who bought out of the number they photographed. For example, they might have 200 buyers out of the 300 subjects they photographed – resulting in a 66% participation rate.
Some pre-pay sports photographers don’t photograph a subject at all unless they prepaid. So, in that case I guess 100% of the people they photographed “participated”. In reality, the subjects that did not buy individual photos still might have been in the team’s group shot. If that is the case, one should compare the number who bought compared to the number of players in the group shots and come up with a “participation rate”.
We believe that participation rates should be looked at in a broader sense. We believe that a photographer should first look at the total number of teams and players on the league’s roster to compare with the number photographed and number buying. We have noticed that photographers often don’t photograph many of the teams in a league. They may shoot 300 players on 30 teams out of 400 players on the league’s total number of 40 teams. So, they may be “losing” 25% of the overall participation before they ever photograph anyone.
Don’t kid yourself. If you would photograph 300 players on 30 teams and sell to 200 of them, you may consider that a 66% participation rate. However, in reality you really are only selling to the 200 of the 400 potential buyers in the 40 team league, or you really only have a 50% participate rate.
By focusing on the total potential, you will end up photographing and selling to more players. You need to work to photograph everybody on every team – then look at the percentages you photograph and the percentage that buy from the total number. You have to push to get all the teams photographed. You have zero chance to make a sale to an individual if you don’t photograph their team.
When we started looking at the total roster for an I-9 league in OKC we immediately learned that we were not photographing the majority of its soccer teams. We used PhotoMatch and were given the complete roster by I-9 so it was evident that we were not shooting a large number of teams and players on their roster. After a meeting with the local I-9 league we learned that many of the teams simply did not have the time on their Saturday only schedule to come to our “tent” on some of the large soccer fields. The league wanted us to have higher sales so that their commissions would be bigger. They suggested that we start going to teams – where they practiced right before their games. We started doing that and our sales got much better – 89% better.
The I-9 league communicates directly with 100% of the teams on their roster. They now let the coaches know when we will be at their fields (where they are practicing before their games) to take their pictures and they explain our risk free, ViewFirst program. This has resulted in a MUCH higher percentage being photographed. We believe that part of the improvement was that we were offering ViewFirst instead of a prepay program.
Our photography technique had to change. Since we were moving to the various soccer fields, we lost some control of our backgrounds. We now basically turn the subjects so that the sun is behind them and try to avoid any people in the nearby background. Importantly, we began using “high speed synch” and blurring the backgrounds. We have also used the same strategy on some of their other I-9 sports besides soccer – like baseball, flag football, and even indoor basketball with similar major sales improvements.
We changed our approach and we improved our results. We are all in control of the success of our businesses. Our results are determined mostly by how our events are executed. When a league conducts their operations in a certain manner, we may need to adjust and change to get the best results. We could have walked away from the I-9 league because our “central tent approach” was not working in their environment. But by adjusting our methodology – becoming mobile and going to the teams on the different fields – we made doing them much more worthwhile. Last fall’s sessions went from 314 players to 652 while our sales increased from $5,155 to $9,743 – an 89% increase!
Sincerely,
Jack Counts, Jr.
