Ninety-Four Percent of Inquiries Beginning “What’s Your Best Price” Do Not Convert. The Remaining Six Percent Are Described as “Worse.”

Inquiries that open with the phrase “what’s your best price” converted to signed contracts at a rate of 6.1 percent, according to a three-season review of 4,100 first-contact inquiries compiled by Coverage from voluntary submissions across 212 studios.

The review covered inquiries logged between January 2023 and December 2025 in eleven regional markets, weighted toward the Mid-Atlantic and the Upper Midwest. Participating studios submitted anonymized inquiry logs, contract values where applicable, and a standardized disposition code. Studios were not compensated.

The 93.9 percent of inquiries that did not convert followed a consistent pattern. Median interval from studio response to inquiry abandonment was 41 minutes. In 71.4 percent of non-converting cases, the studio’s reply was the final message in the thread. Researchers classified the phrase as terminal rather than exploratory.

“It is not an opening position,” said Marguerite Vance, who operates a two-photographer studio in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and contributed 340 inquiries to the review. “It is a closing position. They have already decided. They are just being polite about the exit.”

The converting six percent presented a different profile. Median contract value among converted inquiries of this type ran 41.0 percent below the regional average for comparable coverage. Post-signature scope expansion — defined by the review as any documented request for deliverables outside the executed agreement — was logged in 62.8 percent of those engagements, against a baseline of 19.3 percent for inquiries originating from other phrasing.

Mean expansion requests per converted engagement stood at 3.4. The most frequently logged request was additional hours of coverage on the event date itself.

“The conversion is the beginning of the problem, not the end of it,” said Dell Ashworth of the Great Lakes Documentation Association, which reviewed the methodology but did not participate in collection. “Operators in our membership have described the six percent as the more expensive outcome. We have no position on whether that is correct.”

One participating studio withdrew from the review in its second season. In a written notice to Coverage, the operator cited “exhaustion” and asked that prior submissions be retained but not attributed. The request was honored. Its 118 inquiries remain in the sample.

The review did not measure inquiries beginning “just checking availability,” which studios have separately identified as a category of interest. Coverage intends to examine that phrasing in a subsequent collection period, pending participation.

Full methodology is available to subscribers on request. Coverage corrects errors of fact promptly and in place, with a dated note appended to the article.