Somewhere in your business there is a booking form. An agent fills it out, picks a package, picks a date. It lands in the scheduler, a shooter gets assigned, the work goes out the door, the invoice follows it. Nobody ever speaks to the client.
That is an order-taking business, and it is a comfortable one to run. It is also the reason your average order value has not moved in three years.
One operator in these sessions described his first several years exactly that way: straight-up order takers, deliberately staying as far from sales as possible on the theory that doing good work for enough agents would generate referrals. It did generate referrals. It did not generate margin, and it did not keep pace with the payroll he hired to service the volume.
Here is the arithmetic that makes this the most under-worked lever in a real estate media agency. Take an agency running 200 to 250 bookings in a busy month. Say half are agents who know what they want, are on a budget, and are getting photos and drone and nothing else. That still leaves roughly a hundred projects a month where a conversation could change the order. Even the crudest version of that conversation, a note mentioning a fifty dollar promotion on a floor plan, converting a quarter of the time, is over a thousand dollars a month on work your crew is already driving to.
The real version is a different order of magnitude. One workshop walked through a booking that arrived as a $250 drone photo job on an unusual property, an island listing with no structure on it. The initial consultation ran fifteen or twenty minutes. It became a project worth over $1,500, and it kept growing after that, because the conversation kept going.
The margin on that difference is unusually good. You were already sending a crew. The incremental cost of a floor plan, an extra hour on site, or a second deliverable is small next to the incremental revenue, which means upgrade dollars fall through to EBITDA far more cleanly than new-client dollars do. Average order value is the cheapest input you have into your own valuation.
The call has a shape
The most useful thing in the full Consultations Evolved workshop is the order of operations, not a script, because nearly every failed consult in the live role plays failed by doing the right things in the wrong sequence.
I like to use the word upgrade, because everyone likes to be upgraded. No one likes to be upsold.
Open with the person, not the project. Ask how they have been. Ask about the vacation they posted. It feels like a throwaway and it is not: the workshop cites an analysis of a hundred thousand sales calls finding that opening with rapport and stating a clear reason for the call roughly triples the odds of a productive one.
Say why you are calling, then ask for the time. "The reason for my call is to understand this listing so we do not miss anything and we maximize the result for you. Do you have five or ten minutes?" This is you planting your feet. Agents move fast and will happily let a call be ninety seconds. If they are genuinely rushed, book the ten minutes for later in the day rather than compressing the consult into the gap.
Then ask, and keep asking. Tell me about the listing. Is it staged. New construction or a remodel. Anything nearby worth capturing, parks, water, walkability. How often do you get listings like this one. Do you have a portfolio piece for listings of this kind. Have you ever lost a listing to an agent with a better marketing package. Every answer is a rung. By the time you make a recommendation you are not pitching, you are reflecting back what they told you.
If you're showing genuine curiosity, if you're there to try to help, there's nothing wrong with asking more questions.
Recommend from the top down. Once you know it is a new-construction listing near the water and the agent rarely gets one like it, you do not walk the price list upward from cheapest. You anchor: based on what you have told me, and on what agents with listings like this tend to do, I would go with the luxury package, you on camera, Twilight included, which lands around $2,500 to $3,000. Either the budget is there, or it is not and the thousand dollar package now reads as a bargain instead of a stretch. That single mechanical change is what moves average order value.
Close with a sample, not a statistic. Ask if they are near a computer, send a link to a genuinely comparable property site, and walk it with them. The workshop's position is that stories beat statistics, because a number invites the question of who says so and a finished listing does not.
Where operators get it wrong
The live role plays produced the same handful of failures on repeat.
Recommending before you have earned it. The most common one. The consultant asks a single question, gets one detail, and starts prescribing. The recommendations may even be correct, but they land as upselling because nothing in the conversation established why this listing needs them.
Leading with price. In one role play the agent asked what the packages cost and got a thousand dollar number in the first ninety seconds, before anything had been established about the property or the seller. The agent balked, and the rest of the call was spent defending a price rather than building a case.
Selling the add-on instead of the solution. Pitching the agent intro, then the neighborhood b-roll, then the Twilight, one item at a time, is three separate asks and eventually the client stops listening. Make one informed recommendation for the whole package and give a reason for it.
Discounting when you should be asking one more question. One role play had an agent say a previous video cost a thousand dollars and felt expensive. The consultant immediately offered six hundred. He never asked what the agent got for that thousand, never asked to see it, and never asked what number would make sense. As the coaching noted, that is bidding on a job without knowing what the other contractor did, and in that scenario the agent would have paid eight hundred and fifty.
Taking cash when the better currency is on the table. Some clients genuinely cannot pay. That opens a different conversation rather than ending one. A discounted package in exchange for a testimonial and a warm introduction to their broker is often the better trade.
Maybe if you did the video for 400 they can introduce you to their broker, and instead of hiring a salesperson you've hired an ambassador.
There is a sixth failure that is quieter and costs more. One operator had trained his studio manager to run consults while he was out shooting. She was doing it, and it was working. He had never tracked the upsell revenue and she had no share of it. Behavior you do not measure and do not reward stops happening the first busy week.
What changes when it works
Three things, in order.
Clients get retrained. An agent used to booking photos and drone ten times a year at a few hundred dollars does the full package once because you asked the right question, then again, and then their sellers start telling them the marketing is the reason the listing performed. Now the full package is their default and you never have to sell it again.
The consult becomes the front door to a brokerage. Every one of these calls is an opportunity to ask who else is on their team and who runs marketing at their office. That path, one agent to a broker introduction to twenty agents, is how Aerial Canvas got to multiple seven figures. Not a new channel, not a rebrand. The same bookings, worked properly.
And it costs less capacity than owners expect. A hundred consults a month at half an hour each is roughly fifty hours, less than a third of one person's month.
The honest caveats. This is a skill, not a policy, and skills need reps: role plays, recorded calls, someone giving you feedback on where you gave up the price too early. It has to leave your hands eventually, because an owner-only consult function caps out the week you get busy, and your team's best will not match yours for a while. Track the upgrades, pay people for them, and set the standard by doing the calls yourself first.
The whole method comes down to one substitution. Stop answering the question the agent asked, which is what does it cost, and start answering the one they did not, which is what should we do with this listing. If you want to see what an extra few hundred dollars of average order value across a year does to what your agency is worth, you can run the numbers on your own agency in a few minutes. The second Consultations Evolved session runs the full playbook live, objections and all.