Selling Art Isn’t About Working Harder… It’s About Working Smarter

CRM software gives you the tools that you need as a dealer to understand the economics of your gallery better.

Art Business

Published Jun 17, 2021
Author Team ARTERNAL

Running a gallery is expensive. People cherish their time because it equates to money spent on their own labor as well as their staff’s, and when you waste time it equates to lost money. Art dealers are no exception. Every hour of their day must be dedicated to meeting or following up with the right people in order to make sales or working with artists whose work they want to sell. No matter where you look, you’ll find that the economics of running a gallery is pricey. The real issue is that most of the costs necessary to run a gallery are inviolable. You can’t change the price of shipping, crating, insurance, payroll, and rent.

Factored into the economics of running a gallery is time, such as time spent doing administrative tasks. The key to optimizing your gallery’s economy is less focus on admin and more time spent on sales. Admin tasks normally fall to a gallery assistant or intern. While this frees up a dealer’s schedule, it also inhibits those assistants or interns from helping with other, more pressing duties that make running a gallery easier. Dealers work several hours or even days to create and send out offers, and this doesn’t even include interruptions. If you can maximize the ability to get your offers out in 70–90% less time, you and your staff can do more things that contribute to your gallery reaching its goals, including interacting with current clients and connecting with new collectors.

As of now, no one has automated repetitive tasks that happen behind the scenes. However, these tasks take time and are expensive. Associates are pricey, but they are doing the tasks that dealers don’t have time for that must be done. Utilizing a consolidated inventory management and client relationship management (CRM) platform assists in eliminating these time-draining tasks. Leveraging data-driven art gallery software will greatly impact the entire art gallery team from the sales director to the registrar to external art liaisons.

Dealers today don’t value their time as much as they should. They’re accustomed to overcompensating for the ways they do things instead of resorting to much easier and quicker methods. In order to economize your gallery, you must use the most current technological practices, even if that means replacing your old ways with newer ones. Dealers are used to depending on their memory (which is fallible), keeping track of spreadsheets, and checking invoices to monitor and nurture leads, but this method wastes time whenever you’re trying to draw up a new list of clients.

Selling art isn’t about working harder, it’s about working smarter. To be economically efficient, you must cultivate collector leads in a more productive manner. Art gallery software, specifically client management and inventory management tools within one platform allow you to save time, work shrewdly, and make more sales. You should be outside engaging and interacting with clients, not sitting behind your computer inputting leads that you remember from previous cocktail parties and art fairs, and manually contacting hundreds of collectors one at a time.

Memory is Fallible

Dealers keep track of collectors in many different, non-centralized ways, but perhaps the most ridiculous is relying on their memory. You can’t possibly remember the names of every collector you meet, or your level of engagement with them. Memory is fallible, and therefore it’s one of the worst mechanisms for storing information. It’s the most ineffective way to use your brain in this day and age.

Cloud-based systems like ARTERNAL have become an extension of our brains. CRMs are cloud-based systems that you can access whenever and wherever, just like your brain! When a dealer tries to leverage their memory to figure out what they sold to someone 3 years back, they’re just wasting their energy. Instead, you should store that info all in a single centralized place, accessed via mobile, and that’s where relationship management comes in.

This point might seem tangential, but it is crucial for dealers to understand that they shouldn’t act like the guy in the video. Trying to enhance your memory is a waste of time, going out and chasing potential clients isn’t.