Four Ways to Stimulate Your Fine Art Sales This Summer!

Summertime is by far my favorite time of the year. I love the sunshine, the swimming pool, lemonade and most importantly… my ‘creative time’. I enjoy envisioning the upcoming fine art season. The month of August is a time for groundwork, research and homework. Many fine art galleries are preparing for their opening night galas. The large auctions houses like Sotheby’s are organizing ‘works on consignment’ for their brisk fall season art sales. Painters and sculptors around the world are preparing to participate as exhibitors in fine art fairs.

You may be asking yourself as an art professional, “How am I preparing for the upcoming fine art season? What can I do now to make sure I catch the art sales wave during September, October and November?”

Try these four easy and painless activities:

1. Mine for New Leads. It’s your job to find new ‘hot’ trade and consumer buyers. If you are an art gallery director or gallery consultant, you should be preparing yourselves by matching your gallery’s ‘stable of artists’ with new leads. Here are a few ideas:
   A) Always ask your clients for referrals. This is the easiest way to stimulate sales growth.
   B) Trade your gallery leads with other neighboring art gallery owners and work with them together on split sales.
   C) Specialized directories: these are sales lead directories targeted to a list of individuals according to profession. This is a great source if you are specializing in a certain style of art. For example, medical artwork to doctors or interior architectural renderings to interior designers, engineers and architects. Hey, this is your commission check and the fall season is the most important time of year throughout the art world! So your preparation time is a must.
2. Clean up your Database. It’s the old 80/20 rule… in this case, 80% of your fine art sales will come from 20% of your database. Keep it clean and don’t over burden your laptop with dead weight. And as you lose the dead weight of non-buyers, you will need to constantly add new “hot” prospective buyers everyday. I was taught in the fine art sales game that an art consultant needs to contact a new prospective buyer 3-5 times before an art sale is made. It’s true!
3. Ramp up Online. Creating and maintaining your website should be a top priority this summer. A website is more important than a business card these days. Give your prospective art buyer the opportunity to learn about you, your artists and especially about your business. As I see it, the beauty of our fine art industry is this: we are visual businesses and websites are tailor-made for the visual experience. If you would like to visit a professional fine art website with all the bells and whistles, just have a look at artexponewyork.com
4. Promote Testimonials. Over the last few decades of selling artwork, I have noticed a constant in our fine art industry and that constant is third-party testimonials. Yep, it has not changed! Why? Because everyone has an opinion and fine art is very subjective. Always ask for testimonials from your collectors, testimonials from fine art magazine editors, testimonials from fine art publishers and my favorite: testimonials from other artists. An artist with an opinion will always make you laugh, but to an art collector, a testimonial from art insiders is the gospel truth. Use their quotes on your website! You won’t be sorry!

Now the summer is half over and you look tan, trim & very healthy! Let’s order another iced tea by the poolside and get to work preparing for the best fine art season of the year. Shall we?

-Mark Shapiro is an Artexpo New York Sales Manager.