Your top priority is increasing art sales and revenue. Your art gallery needs a sales strategy designed to succeed.

You want to choose a sales planning approach that aligns with your gallery’s sales and business goals, as there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Flexibility and the ability to adjust your sales strategy based on feedback from your whole gallery team are also important factors for success.

I think it is important to regularly review and evaluate your approach to ensure it fits well with your gallery’s market conditions, organizational structure, goals, and resources.

Here I will give you some tips and tricks to do all that.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• Gallery sales consultants are performing inconsistently with new prospects.
• Sales tools are not being used to their full potential.
• You’re chasing unqualified leads.
• You’re reacting to outside forces that are beyond your control.

Let’s make these problems a thing of the past. You can’t afford inefficiency.

Here are four common reasons that cause even the best-laid sales strategies to fail.  Let’s talk about them here so you can better avoid them.

1 | Disorganized Sales Priorities for the Gallery

An art gallery’s success often hinges on its ability to strategically focus on key sales priorities. These can include:

• Mapping out an effective buyer’s journey, designed to understand and facilitate the stages a potential buyer goes through before finalizing their purchase.
• Expanding markets involves reaching out to new collectors or previously untapped markets.
• Nurturing repeat business to foster a loyal collector base willing to return for additional purchases and provide referrals. This requires not just exceptional art but also an exceptional customer service experience.
• Improving leads from online marketing channels. By leveraging social media, email campaigns, SEO, and other digital tools, your gallery can increase traffic to your websites and convert visitors into buyers effectively.
• Expanding the artist roster is yet another crucial aspect of a gallery’s sales strategy. By representing a broader range of artists, the gallery can appeal to diverse tastes and preferences, keeping the inventory fresh and exciting for collectors.

These are great priorities for sales strategy and worth considering. However, if your sales associates are bombarded with too many initiatives or conflicting strategic directions, it can lead to confusion and a dilution of effort, which in turn can jeopardize any potential progress. This is especially true with a very small team.

To avoid these pitfalls, it is essential to select sales priorities that tie into your overall gallery strategy and align with the resources you have available to execute. It is also useful to articulate how each staff member contributes to the strategy’s success.  This sharp focus will allow for a coherent approach and enable your gallery associates to execute plans with clarity and purpose. You want to be driving toward a cohesive set of objectives that bolster the gallery’s market position while enhancing profitability.

 

2 | Lack of Clarity and Collaboration

It is natural for priorities to evolve. But be cautious.  Like having too many priorities, continually shifting your gallery’s sale priorities to chase new opportunities, or reacting to outside forces without proper due diligence will cause your team to be inconsistent and unmotivated to perform. How can they succeed when expectations are changing?

Clarity among everyone involved in implementing the gallery’s sales strategy is crucial.  Ambiguity creates a workplace culture of tension, power plays, and deceptions that snuff out teamwork, enthusiasm, and progress. You want gallery staff working together towards the common gallery goals as well as individual goals. Clarity is an excellent panacea for an overly competitive sales culture.

For a sales strategy to be truly successful, it is imperative that every aspect of the gallery’s operations – encompassing marketing initiatives, sales processes, and customer service protocols – operates in a seamless symphony. This synergy extends to all involved parties, including artists, collaborating partners and contractors, and anyone who might play a pivotal role in bringing the strategy to fruition.

 

3 | Leadership Problems

So many art sales strategies fall short of achieving greatness because leadership neglects the crucial role of offering consistent guidance and support that is essential for triumph.

As you know, obstacles can often affect a strategic approach. There are also market factors that leaders do not thoroughly address or account for. Sometimes that can potentially derail even the most well-thought-out sales plans.

This is preventable by actively soliciting and thoughtfully incorporating feedback from those on the front lines—the gallery sales associates—as well as from the creative minds behind the artworks—the artists themselves. This feedback is invaluable as it illuminates the key challenges that may be hampering the effective implementation of elements of the sales strategy.

A collaborative approach can foster a sense of unity and shared purpose as well. This allows everyone involved to contribute to an actionable plan designed to overcome whatever the art market throws at you.

 

4 | Inconsistent Gallery Sales Prospecting Routine

An art gallery sales strategy must include a prospecting methodology or routine. To boost sales, you need to continuously attract new buyers. Implementing a structured prospecting routine is valuable. Your routine will expedite the sales process and ensure that potential revenue opportunities are not overlooked.

Here are five things you could consider including in a structured gallery sale prospecting routine.

1. Dedicate time to enhancing your database of clients and prospects by updating missing information and accurately ranking or tagging top sales prospects. Consistently maintaining and refining this database will help uncover valuable leads already within your network.

Establish guidelines for uniformly maintaining client records among your sales consultants or anyone who interacts with clients. Use tags to categorize and filter the database for potential sales prospects easily.

2. Consider setting a minimum number of weekly follow-ups or personal calls to past clients or potential buyers. This helps nurture relationships while ensuring you don’t get distracted by other tasks and momentum slips.
3. I also recommend incorporating weekly team meetings into your routine to review sales prospecting activities. This helps keep everyone accountable and is beneficial for problem-solving and improving sales skills. And it’s the perfect time to celebrate sales closed.
4. Setting monthly sales goals and outlining detailed action steps is an effective method for staying focused and avoiding feeling overwhelmed. Based on your preference, break down these goals further into weekly or daily tasks. Sales goals don’t always need to be revenue-oriented.
5. Schedule assessments regularly throughout the year to track progress toward meeting sales objectives. If you fall behind in any month, update your sales plan with strategies to regain momentum and achieve annual goals.

 

To the Point

A good sales strategy should guide gallery sales associates’ expectations, justify resource allocation, and focus your decision-making on every aspect of gallery management. A bad sales strategy, on the other hand, instills ambiguity and blurs priorities for the success of your gallery and artists that depend on strong sales.

Your gallery’s leadership should provide strategic direction to keep your plan on course while motivating and inspiring the team.  It is the leadership’s responsibility to understand the gallery’s business objectives and collaborate with all involved in sales to create an implementable sales strategy.

Most importantly, communicate that sales strategy with crystal clarity and remain consistent.

 

Here are a few more tools to Fuel your gallery sales.

Tips for Selling Art and Enjoying the Process

Checklist: Art Gallery Online Sales Strategy

Use this Art Gallery online sales strategy checklist to help you build a fully integrated online sales experience.  The checklist includes actionable steps for your gallery to take in these areas of your business.  It will help you improve your gallery’s online sales and marketing strategies.

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