The First Meeting

There is so much discussion about selling.  How to win a client, what will turn the business to you, etc.  Overdone, myopic and intensely plastic.

Not that I am grateful for the pandemic, but in this sense I am.  Finally, the gravitas of emotion and the desperate want of art has overtaken the functionality of it.  Most people need a sofa to sit on.  Now they know they need THE sofa and, more to the point, they need the entire environment to speak to them.  Enter professionals who know just how to tell that story for that client.  The question is how you will build that relationship so that you can tell the story.  Selling the shiny penny (at least the one shinier than the one next to you) will not work.  Rom-com in an age of introspection is just tone deaf.  So now to contemplate what your first meeting really needs to be about.  Nothing I have not discussed many times.  Then again diamonds are always there ready to be discovered in their own time.

In the moments before your potential client contacts you for the first time, their perception of you is all they have.  Even today.  This is marketing.  Everything from your website and all things social media to your reputation among past clients and vendors alike makes up what your potential client knows about you, your art and your creative business.

Except they cannot possibly know you.  The actual you (including your art and creative business) is vastly more diverse, nuanced and, hopefully, interesting than the illusion you have worked so diligently to craft.  Please do not make your first conversation about the details of what you will do for your potential client rather than talking about who you are and, more important, listening to who they are?  You do not sell things, you sell creation.  Pretty obvious especially given the idea that you do not know what your work will look like tomorrow.  Being present to the moment is critical and talking about the elements instead of the moment is a fools errand.

Creative business is fundamentally about the construction and maintenance of meaningful, trusting, intimate relationship.  Your past art is not a short cut to that relationship and the pandemic has made it largely irrelevant.  The work you created pre-pandemic will only translate if you can demonstrate relevance post-pandemic.  That challenge is enormous, if not insurmountable.

If you are to be successful, you are going to have to reveal yourself to your potential client and have them find comfort in the revelation.  It makes no difference whether you design hotels or weddings, photograph a product or babies, style flowers or chocolates, your art is meant to transcend the vision and ability of your client.  Why else would they need you?  So the first step has to be to move beyond the objective “here is what I will do for you” and into the subjective “I understand you, see you and am the one to bring your vision to reality”.  Empathy, conviction, introspection and purpose.  Can you deliver those qualities in the first five minutes of speaking to a potential client?  If you cannot, go home.

Practically then, how about working to ask questions that shake your potential client’s understanding of who you they know you and your creative business to be?  For instance, if you are a florist, instead of first asking your potential client’s budget, favorite flowers and colors, what if you started your conversation with a discussion about her nail polish or shoes?  Think about it.  If a client wants to talk to you about your work today, they REALLY care.  Fashion really matters to them, it defines them.  Ignoring that reality because it is not about your work can only be alienating.  You must disrupt your potential client’s perception of you so that the actual you can have the opportunity to come through.  Real conversation allows you to show (i.e., not tell) your client everything about you, your art and your creative business.  

Every artist I have ever known lights up when they start talking about what drives their art and what they hope to create.  When the reality is that that art is being taken or warped because of the world we live in, the desire to create only grows.  Live in the emotionality and communicate the depth of your yearning.  Just be professional, else it cannot be heard.  

Make the future infectious not by assuming the art but focusing on the validation. Your story for them is what they seek.  It makes ultimate sense to me that you would start your conversation in a manner that draws upon your enthusiasm, your bubbling passion for your next project.  If your potential client engages your enthusiasm, then the logistics will take care of themselves.  

Yes, your willingness to start with the implicit truth, the fabric of who you are and what drives your impulse to create will open the door for iconic process.  The wrong client will reject your enthusiasm out of hand no matter how much they like your work.  The right one will be inspired and will inspire you to do your best work.  Such is the foundation of trust, even today.  The whole point of your first meeting is to engage in the first of many promises, to earn trust not that you will do amazing work when given the chance, but simply that you will earn the right each day to come back tomorrow.  Such is the value of connection.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether you want to allow your clients to see beyond the illusion you present to the world.  To which I will say again, the pandemic has laid bare that your unwillingness to do so will be your demise.  Instead, focus your first meeting on trust, connection and community.  Trust is based on faith in the relationship and that among all else, you will honor that relationship with your wisdom, experience and talent to tell a story yet unknown.