Selling Art - Thoughts from a Sleazy Drug Rep
JUNE 23, 2024
For most of my adult life, I worked in the pharmaceutical industry in the field of outcomes research. I was one of those guys who monitored patient experiences with both experimental and approved drugs to quantify both benefits and risks from use of the pharmaceuticals made by the company I worked for. In the process of my work, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of sales and marketing people as I would liaison with them on customer visits to help doctors, pharmacists, insurance companies, and healthcare regulators understand complex data analysis that was often above the ability of the typical sales representative to communicate.
Being who they are with little understanding of what I did, my ex and youngest son like to refer to me as the 'sleazy drug rep'. I guess that works in their black and white world of limited understanding of the health care decision-making process. I used to be offended by the label, but now in pursuit of my art, I have really grown to embrace that tag.
Let me explain.
Yesterday, I was one of the exhibitors at Asheville's 'Art in the Park' summer art shows. As I walked around the venue to look at the various artists' work, I came across this one exhibit where the art looked very familiar to some pieces I recently saw in a Hendersonville, NC Art Gallery. So I stopped in to ask the artist if her work was in that gallery. She turned out to be very shy, and as I tried to engage her, all I got was one word yes and no answers. This woman's art was pretty good, and she was on the main thoroughfare while my exhibit was tucked away in an offshoot area of the venue. At the end of the day, she certainly had a lot more foot traffic than I did. In spite of that, my sales were quite good, and I don't think she sold a thing even though she had the venue advantage.
I thought a lot about my interaction with her and my sales success from the day while reflecting on traits of the 'sleazy drug rep'. If I learned anything from my years of work with pharmaceutical sales people, there are really 2 things (aside from having a good product) that have to be understood to make a sale.
First, rejection is the norm, and one has to be mentally prepared for it. As a rule of thumb, one has to put a product in front of roughly 100 customers to make a single sale. Even the best products (art) in the world will have a difficult time selling themselves. The likes of Warhol, Stingel, Muro, Barcelo, and others would be among the first to admit this. Good marketing and selling skills are a necessity for success.
I will never forget the day I was in Columbus, Ohio working with a local sales person and every single health care person we called on that day refused to see us. At the end of the day, I went home, and two days later, got a call from headquarters to ask when I had last seen that sales rep. Turned out I was the last person to see him alive. After dropping me off at the airport, he drove out into the middle of a cornfield and blew his brains out. In the past, suicide was not an uncommon occurrence in pharmaceutical sales as many individuals were not adequately prepared for rejection. These days, hiring managers go out of their way to weed these people out of the potential hire pool. A good thing.
In analyzing what went wrong on that day, aside from me not recognizing a severely depressed individual, I concluded that we did not really engage in the second, and more important key to sales success - getting to know our clients on a human level before even attempting to make a sale. Over the years, the most successful sales representatives I worked with were the ones that understood and knew their customers. They knew where their kids went to school, what their customers liked to do with their free time, what they liked to talk about, their job challenges etc. And they didn't need a written cheat sheet to remember this information.
Customers buying art are no different. It is making that emotional connection between the person and my art that makes the sale. I am a bit like a match-maker attempting to match a piece of art up with a person's personality. Unlike the shy artist on the main street, I try to understand my potential art buyer and relate their interests and personalities to my work. As a result, I consistently do better that the 100 interactions per sale rule.
So yesterday in Asheville, I talked to people about topics like their attire, tattoos, CBD gummies, aspirations of the children that were with them, baseball, soccer, animal health, eyewear, statistical analysis, biochemistry, Juneteenth, cell phones in schools, combatting heat exhaustion, rising sea levels in Florida, Fake Street skateparks, USB sticks, lawncare maintenance, gardening and many other topics. As consequence of getting to know my customers a bit before attempting to sell art, my expectations went from one-in-one hundred to a reality of about 7 in one hundred sales per visit.
So, if like me, you are an artist trying to sell your work, there are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Is my work appealing and unique - not just to me and my friends, but to total strangers?
- do I have the mental make-up to accept a lot of rejection before a sale occurs?
- can I accept the need to be just a bit of a 'sleazy drug rep' to put my work into the hands of others?
Thanks and best wishes from a Sleazy Drug Rep,
D'Day