How many of you would enjoy a few hours photographing a cool new food product?

OK, how many of you would enjoy creating a quote for a day of executive portrait sessions?

That’s what I thought.

Given a choice, most of us would rather be shooting. But any small business needs more than a product to sell.

Once you’ve attracted new customers (an art form in itself), you’ve got to present your product, negotiate and close the sale. None of this happens without some conversation. It definitely takes more than just a couple email exchanges.

Too Many Portraits In A Day?
A new client expressed interest in my photography services. After some preliminary emails and phone discussions to establish my fee for executive portraits, she asked in an email, “We need pictures of our entire staff, all 50 of them. How much would your quote be for a day to shoot them?”

The answer depended on much more than my fee. I had to answer a few other questions before I could make a realistic quote with any chance of acceptance.

But the first thing was the fee question. I’d already approached this client with estimates for a couple other jobs. The first one was for food photography. I produced sample shots of one of the client’s new food products to get in the game.

Job Mismatch = No Job
The client loved several images, but when she asked about my fee for work like what I’d done, my time-based quote was too high. The client needed less artistry and pictures of many products on short notice.

For the second one, the executive portrait, the client accepted my proposal estimate. Before we got to a specific agreement with dates, she decided to add more executives to the list and asked me to wait for her to arrange it.

A couple weeks later, she got back to me with the question about portraits for the entire staff.

Patience Pays - And How Fast Can You Work?
That’s the first point - be patient. Your client is busy, and you’re not her top priority. If you wait, she may give you more than you expect.

Then you need to know how long it takes to do the work. I knew executives and managers needed a little time to arrange their clothes and appearance, but couldn’t spare more than a few minutes. 10 to 15 minutes per portrait was enough for photographs of vets with their pets at a veterinary hospital, much more challenging sessions. I figured on 15 minutes for execs and managers, and 10 minutes for staff.

Shot Design + Lighting = Memorable Story
That didn’t include setup time to choose camera angles and place lights. That’s the difference between professional photographs and Aunt Mary’s snapshots. The pro listens to the client first, then picks the location and a camera angle. He chooses lighting that will highlight the subject and show her relationship to her work. That could be anything from docs looking at X-rays to execs holding a product development meeting.

A well-composed photograph tells a story, and lighting gives it a memorable impact.

The client’s 50-person staff broke down to 40 staff members plus 10 execs and managers. That meant a total of just over 9 hours of shooting, and didn’t include transportation, visualization, lighting setup and teardown time.

So I called the client and said more than a day would be needed for 10 execs and managers plus 40 staff. I also asked about final use of the pictures to get a better idea of my post-processing time.

She responded with, “You’re the expert. How long should it take to shoot 50 portraits?” She agreed that a day and a half with the same light setup and composition for all portraits was fine. I ended by saying that sounded very doable, and told her a proposal would be in her hands in 24 hours.

The main point?

Talk to the client to craft a proposal that works for both of you. Your professional advice is part of the service you offer.

I’ve been interviewing customers on the phone and writing case studies for a data storage system vendor. When I finish recording an interview with my digital recorder, I upload it to the project site on www.basecamphq.com for the transcriptionist to work on. When she’s done, she notifies me of the uploaded transcription. I download it, write a draft, and upload that to the project site for my client.

The editor calls and we discuss revisions on the phone. Sometimes there aren’t any, but if there are, I make the ones we work out. Then I upload the second draft for the client to read, and the client uploads his edit request. I make those edits, upload the final draft, and the client takes it for publication.

The whole process goes a lot more quickly than even email submission would.

I don’t recommend rush jobs based on this, but I’ve been turning around 1,000 word case studies in a week or less from interview to final draft. Most of that time depends on the work load of the transcriptionist, the editor, and the client.

Some people have reported problems using basecamphq.com with large group projects where they do everything online - and I mean everything: to-do lists, task reminders,  searching large hierarchical project files. For a smaller project and team, it seems to work fine.

I never trust any online data repository completely, so I always have local copies of my own work. And so do my other teammates. With the very linear project flow from one of us to the other, it works fine.

A recent almost-client brought this home to me in excruciating detail. This North American sales manager was looking for someone to tie his overseas company’s technical documents and presentations together in marketing collateral for their expansion into the U.S.

Over the next two months I researched the product and its competitors, generated proposals with detailed outlines for four pieces, and requested information. I left a lot of voicemail, and got very short email replies without anything definite. I met with him at a local technical conference to discuss the projects, and his marketing budget approval process.

Finally, after he’d conferred several times with his CFO and sent me more terse emails saying no decision yet, they chose someone near the company’s overseas headquarters to do the work.

What can you learn from this?

Deal with the guy who has signature authority whenever possible. This avoids the long-distance committee problem.

If the prospect is eager to talk to you and responds to weekly contacts, he’s interested. If he’s hard to reach and makes one-sentence replies, he’s not.

Work with locals, or people who have a burning need for your one-of-a-kind solution.

If your proposal sits longer than six weeks, it’s a no-go. Smaller organizations should take even less time to get back to you.

If you see any of these, think hard about this prospect. You may be better off marketing to someone else.

Small and large clients are so overloaded they need to outsource. As a consultant and contractor, your problem is getting them to move on the work they need. We’re dealing with 20-year-old approval structures, from a time when executives kept their fingers everywhere and signed off on all of it. Now executive management has no time, and many department-level managers have no signature authority.

The end result is a bit like the gap between editorial acceptance and actual publishing in any magazine. The longest I’ve gone is eight months between the first discussion about writing a technical article and acceptance of the final draft.

When I designed and managed semiconductor products for the traditional analog, battery power and networking markets, I was constantly pressured to get products out yesterday. Schedules were unrealistically tight, but competition was heavy. If your product missed the market window, you lost market share.

Kind of makes you wonder what lowly place marketing tactics and collateral have in corporate and small-business America.

In fact, most people are eager to tell you why they like a good product.

But first, you need to figure out what to ask. Then you need to talk to experts and customers (not always the same thing).

If you’re working in a company, your management will help with the people to ask. If you’re a consultant, your clients will do it. Heck, they may even help with the questions. But the best source of questions may be your own brain cells.

I haven’t found any magic bullet for choosing questions. I usually focus my practice on areas like semiconductor electronics that I know from career experience. But when I’m faced with a subject I don’t know well, there’s no substitute for online research and actually using the product. I just follow my nose.

When I wrote web copy for Boinx Software’s FotoMagico, a digital image slideshow program, I knew a little about the market. I’d already suffered with PowerPoint, and I knew how put together a quick slideshow with FotoMagico. For the fine points, I read everything on the Boinx web site, and played with the program for a couple days.

Then I thought about why a customer chose the program, what competitive advantages it gave, and what features made it a must-have product.

Boinx put me in touch with their technical support engineer and five professional-level customers. I got some great answers. But I also got information I hadn’t expected.

Everyone mentioned how fast a show could be assembled, so I knew what the primary advantage was. But the emotional impact of smooth transitions with perfectly-synched music, the pan and zoom capabilities rivaling professional video editing suites - those responses were sparked by the original questions.

I always get something I don’t explicitly ask for. That’s what makes interviews so powerful.

In a blog exchange about marketing to engineers with advertising/PR agency McClenahan Bruer last February [2007], I made the point that surveys would never tell you what the customer values most. I acknowledged the agency’s point about interviews being limited to a few customers. I just couldn’t agree with their methods.

If you’re mounting an advertising campaign with mass-market techniques, surveys may tell you how old your customers are, their interests, and what they read.

But specifics - their special job challenges, biggest career problems, what gets them out of bed to go to work - won’t come from surveys. You need to ask them.

The best way around the one-on-one interview limitation may be a blog. Before a blog will work, you need to have readership. But it will be a targeted audience, through readers’ own self-selection. And you’ll get answers from more than a few people.

Mass marketing always had a high waste factor. A targeted list reduced it, but response rates higher than 3% were considered outstanding. AOL’s carpet-bombing mailboxes with their get-started CDs won them a large market share among early Internet users, but many of those CDs ended up as coasters or landfill fodder.

And you’re sick of unfocused mass marketing. You’re watching less TV and you always tune out or TiVo to avoid commercials. You ignore most magazine ads - no time to read them. When was the last time you actually bought something from a phone solicitation?

Today, blogs and websites cater to very focused people, folks who want to know about specific topics like marketing to small audiences or taking better wildlife pictures without expensive lenses. Paul Gillin describes ideas for interacting with your audience with social networking.

That interaction is the key. Once they start talking to you, your audience will tell you what they like or don’t like, what new features or services they’d pay extra for, and where they find your product. That conversation tells you much more than surveys, and goes far beyond the limits of one-on-one interviews.

It’s the two-way street that makes it work. Your audience has a chance to talk to you about their passion, instead of being shouted at with a message they may not care about.

Sure, maintaining a blog requires good conversational writing skills and a little technical savvy. So did old mass marketing methods. The time spent is the same. And I prefer talking with people to guessing what they want. The old hard sell is dead.