Photo By Cj Schmidt
As a small company we understand why it can be useful to have head shots in your sales staff and upper management but it is also extremely useful for techs. It allows the potential client to see who you are and it allows them to put a face with the calls or email before they meet you in person. The style of the head shot also can say a lot about you. If a potential client was to look at mine it might say, he likes to have fun or he missed his calling as the second pitch man for the Oxiclean Company. For you company though head-shots may need to say more than we’re just a smiling face, but we’re here to help, or get the job done and we are professionals.
For a smaller trade company, it can be a great tool for their customers and for their staff. Say for example you run a trade(plumbing, HVAC, etc) company whose focus is on home service, head-shots of your techs would allow the office scheduler to send an email to the client. Thus saying these are the techs who will be arriving to perform the service today with a photo and possibly a short bio on how long they have been with the company or in the industry. By doing so, it allows the client to better know who is coming and can make the client feel more at ease with who will be knocking on their door ready to perform the designated service. It can also serve to cut down on scams by saying they are from you company and coming back to do a follow up. In the last few years in the Midwest we have seen an increase in these sorts of scams especially with older clientele.
These head-shots also come in handy for your sales staff who work in office, drafting proposals and making calls trying to obtain more lucrative long-term contracts. Having worked with several companies in the past who do this, I asked how they use the photos once our company delivers their head-shot besides the standard bio on a web page or on a face of a business card. It was interesting to hear on several occasions that person who was writing the proposals had their photo on the letter head or a cover page. They did this with the idea potential clients could put a face with the sales person they were working with to give it a more human touch rather than just reading a standard email or letter. The other reason foe doing so was the chances of the potential client and sales person meeting were very slim due to distance. Hearing that had me thinking that was a great idea, so many times in my industry I get emails from people trying to sell me print deals or try to get me to upgrade my current production gear or some other service and to be able to put a face with the voice or the text rather than feeling like it is just a scripted call or robo email.
Photo by Vagabond Photography.
Consistency is key, over the years as employees come and go, we understand you might just take a quick photo up against a nice convenient back drop so it can be put on the website or on a business card. But consider updating your photos so that everyone on the staff levels looks the same. It goes along way to promoting professionalism. Though photographers also understand that its is not sometime cost effective to do head-shots when one new member joins the staff once you just had the whole companies head-shots done. It can get expensive to bring out a photographer for one person at a time but it is something you might want to consider once you brought on five or more new members to you staff. Most photographers will do a group discount if they have to do more than a few at one site and it doesn’t hurt to ask. This way when you do updates to your website, social media or business cards you have the photos on hand.