The pressure to sell more art can be overwhelming for galleries, with bills to pay and people relying on their success. However, the traditional sales approach may not effectively connect with prospective buyers. To increase sales, galleries should shift their focus to a client-centered strategy.

This approach, commonly used in luxury industries like cars and fashion, taps into buyers’ basic needs and unconscious desires. By emphasizing how owning art can fulfill personal desires such as happiness, social distinction, or cultural commitment, galleries can create a more personalized sales conversation. Asking the right questions and telling stories about the artwork can help establish a connection with the buyer and uncover their motivations.

Adopting a client-focused approach and aligning art with buyers’ desires is crucial in today’s competitive art market. It is also easier to do consistently when your team has one place to capture what you learn about each prospect, the stories you tell, and the follow-ups you commit to, so the conversation does not reset each time.

Perhaps it is time to change a fundamental element in the way art is presented in your sales conversations with new prospects.

Selling more art is a far more abstract process than selling other luxury items.  The sales process needs to be attuned to the benefits for both basic needs and unconscious desires.  It comes down to being able to effectively emphasize these benefits as they pertain to that individual collector.  Speaking about art from the art collector’s perspective should become a greater focus of the sales conversation, while interweaving the artist’s or gallery’s perspective, as it aligns with a specific buyer’s needs.

Asking the Right Questions and Telling the Right Stories

The difficulty comes when you are presenting a work to a brand-new client.  You don’t know them well enough to align the art with how it meets their life desires.  Your detective work is to uncover how owning an artwork will project an image about the life desires that the buyer identifies with.  How do you do that?

Telling the story of a work of art can often help connect with a very personal viewpoint or feeling that the artist and buyer share.  That connection can align with emotions or pre-existing desires for their life.  Often simply telling the story of an artist’s body of work and what character a particular piece plays in the story can help get a client engaged and provide clues to you about what most resonates with them.

Along with telling stories about a piece, smart, open-ended questions is also a good way to start the conversation.

When a new collector comes into the gallery and is greeted with a question like “May I help you?” or “Do you have any questions?”  It is too easy for the collector to answer with the dreaded “No, thank you. I’m just looking.”  Instead, develop with your gallery sales staff a few open-ended questions that are more productive to get a real conversation going.  If you can develop a few that are exhibition-specific, even better. Examples might include:

• What interests you about this piece?
• What space are you looking for an artwork to complement?
• This show is all about _. What are your thoughts on that idea?
• How will this piece fit into your home or collection?
• What brings you into the gallery today?
• What do you know about this artist?

The answers to these kinds of questions should prompt the prospect to start talking and enable you to ask more targeted questions that give you a glimpse of why they are in your gallery and what motivates them.  The challenge is being able to effortlessly ask multiple open-ended questions that all get you closer to your goal.

You will be able to create a personalized sales process and align the art with their desires.  When the client understands why a specific artwork could be important to them, it helps build upon the emotional experience of collecting art and the desire to continue to do so.

This is also where a gallery operating system can really support the work. If your team records the best questions, the notes from the conversation, the artworks discussed, and the next actions in one place, you build momentum instead of relying on memory. The collector feels understood because the gallery remembers.

To the Point

Learning how to tap into unconscious desires and tailoring your presentation of art to align with them is a fundamental element in winning today’s luxury buyers. Doing this does not come naturally to most people. You need to practice and be prepared with the right questions and stories.  It all goes back to knowing your audience and what motivates them to make a luxury purchase.  For further inspiration, study how other luxury retailers are doing it.

Check yourself often to ensure both your sales and marketing messaging are client-focused vs. gallery or artist-focused. And consider whether your internal systems are helping that message stay consistent. A simple, connected workflow for contacts, notes, follow-ups, and content planning can protect the most valuable part of the process: what you learn about people, and how well you act on it.

 

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