What Sales Taught Me About
Being a Better Artist, Part I
“Urban Sunflowers” Augusta, GA, July 2020
Hello Friend,
In December 2025 I was fortunate enough to be invited to be on Matt Payne’s podcast F-Stop Collaborate and Listen. Episode 462 went up on his Patreon site a few weeks later. It will be coming out on his YouTube chanel, on Spotify and iTunes this week. We covered many different topics, and some of them will be subjects of my next few weeks of blogs. There will be some overlap, though, I be going in different directions and adding a few things here. Please take the time to give his podcast a listen, because Matt has greats guests on each week, and he is a masterful interviewer.
As I have written about here a few times, I started out as a photojournalist, and that I left that career in 2000. What people might not know, is, I left it to go into sales for 12 years. For the first five years I was in advertising for the same newspaper and then their city magazine. During that same time, I went back to school at Augusta University to work on an MBA. I found I really enjoyed marketing and business strategy.
I left publishing completely and ventured into selling copiers for three years. And yes, selling copiers can be as cutthroat and annoying as you can imagine. Since I’m such a serious introvert, I never felt very comfortable in an office full of extraverts. Because of this, my managers never completely believed it when I was consistently in the top 10 for our region monthly and in the top 25 annually for the nation for my level of salesperson. (Basically, the ones who call on the local businesses and not the large corporations.)
“Sunflower and Cloud” Midway, UT August 2021
In 2008 I left outside sales to take a job doing inside sales for a local fiberglass manufacturer. (Outside sales is where I would directly meet with my customers. Inside sales I would contact them from my office by phone and email. Thus, I didn’t need to leave the office much. A step in the right direction for the introvert.) Then in 2012, I left sales completely to do my current career as a pricing analyst. Though, I do interact a lot with our sales team and better understand the struggles they face. And my position helps the divisions I price for set some of their strategies for each of their marketplaces.
All of this is a way to set stage to let you know, that even artistic, introverts can benefit from being in sales and learning about marketing. Though, maybe the few things I will be sharing might help you without you having to dive into that career – unless you want to. And what I’ll share are not sales “tips and tactics”, but more selling thoughts and philosophies that you can look at from your own perspective and maybe find useful as you are creating or marketing your creations.
Being tenacious: This might seem like an odd one to start with. But really, I think anyone who wants to breakoff from the well-worn path needs this and needs to cultivate it. I made a lot of my sales by just tenaciously moving forward. Even when I got no’s and maybe’s, I would persist and not let them get in the way of finding someone who would say yes. I could not fall apart because someone didn’t want to buy from me, or buy what I was selling. I could not take it too personally, otherwise there would have been no moving forward.
“Roots and Water” Hickory Knob State Park, April 2021
And for artists these no’s and maybe’s can come from ourselves as much as the outside world. In fact, aren’t we often the first ones to tell ourselves our ideas aren’t really any good? Maybe there is a subject you want to explore, a project you want to begin, and you start hearing those no’s and doubts from yourself. You need to push through them. Even later when you have a finished work, and you are looking for where it might belong, you will hear those no’s again. You’ll need to push through them. We have all heard the stories of the artists and writers and entrepreneurs who kept pushing against the no’s to make something wonderful. If it is something that is important to us, we’ll need to get past both the internal and external no’s that we run against.
Ask good questions and listen to the answers: In sales, this is one area where introverts out do the extraverts. The “typical extravert” wants to be part of the conversation, if not the center of it. And they want others to hear their point of view. The “typical introvert” will want to observe and listen to the conversation. Though, they can often direct the conversation by asking probing, open-ended questions. This was my strength in sales, and what my extrovert managers didn’t seem to get about me. When I asked the right questions and paid attention to the answers, my clients and potential clients would tell me exactly what issues they were facing to run their business better. Then they were surprised when I presented them with a solution that actually helped them solve that problem. The people that were most surprised were the ones I told flat out, I did not have something for them. Why are both of these important? It meant I was paying attention to what they were saying and not what I was hoping they would say.
Patrick Krohn
February 2026
P.S. Some of the other upcoming topics will be on networking, marketing yourself, understanding who your customers are, what’s in it for them, and even what a “Purple Cow” is. To be continued…
“Around the Trees on the Tenth Hole” Hickory Knob State Park, April 2021
How often in the creative world do we hear stories of artists being “too creative” to be bothered with following through on what they said they would do? It could be as small as replying to an email or phone call to confirm an appointment. Sending out the proofs at the time requested. Or the big ones such as showing up late to an appointment without letting the client know. Missing a deadline for your part of a project – or the project as a whole.
When the little ones start to add up, or a big one hits, that’s when people start saying things like, “They make great work, but they are difficult to deal with.” Is that really the reputation any of us wants to have? Is it sustainable for both us and the people around us? Not likely. We all know, life and unexpected things happen. Most people will give anyone a little room if something doesn’t get done when expected. But there better be a good reason, good communication and it was a one-off event. But if it becomes consistent, watch out. This doesn’t mean giving the client everything they ask for, or going out of your way to do things that aren’t your responsibility. It’s about doing the things you said you would do. So, if you say you will show up and deliver something on Tuesday, you and it better be there on Tuesday. Wouldn’t you rather have people say this about you: “They make great work, and oh, my, they are easy to work with.”
I hope with this and the other blogs I’ll have on this typic, I don’t want to turn into some smarmy salesperson. Maybe in the process, you’ll see that being more “sales like” in your creative process will be beneficial for you and your practice.
Thank you, and keep creating what you do.
“Leaf Among the Rocks” Hillsborough, NC October 2025
Why do creative people need to ask good question? We just make things right? To that, I say, let’s ask the most powerful question to ourselves about what it is we do make: “Why do we make it?” Every creative person who really wants to make something meaningful will need to at least be asking this question consistently. The answer may take awhile or change over time, but it will need to be asked. Heck, I’ve been around photography for 40+ years and a serous landscape photographer for 6+ years, and I’m only starting to get a handle on this one. Mostly because I hadn’t spent the time really asking and trying to answer it. (Thus, a big drive for why I even started this blog at all!) There are many other tough internal questions as well, such as: What medium(s) will I use? When will I create? Where will I create? How will I get my creations out there? I know there are many others we can think of.
The more we ask and answer them – and pay attention to the answers – the better we will be at presenting ourselves and our work to the external world. We will then have a better idea what questions to ask potential clients, galleries, publications, collaborators, employees and basically anyone we want to have involved with the work we are doing. Good questions get us and the people around us to really stop and consider what it is we do. Lastly, pay attention to what the actual answers end up being, and not what we were hoping they would be.
Do what you say you will do: Whenever I started a new sales job, or changed territories, the first thing I would do was visit our current clients. When I would introduce myself, one of the first thing many of them would say was, “I hope you do what you promise you will do. The last person never seemed to follow through.” I hated hearing this because it reflected badly on my company and our product and service. I also loved hearing this, because I knew this was a way to keep these people as clients. If I showed up, did what I said I would, they would be happy repeat clients. It’s amazing how often the requests they told me about were small things that were easy to do but still didn’t get done.
