Show notes:

Making sales in your wedding business. The enquiry lands in your inbox…. now the question is, can you turn it into a sale? Today I am going to be sharing best practices and top tips to help your conversion rate increase. Limit ghosting and time wasters and start getting higher quality sales in your wedding business.

Want us to help build your CRM? See the Wedding Pro Agency info here.

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Time Stamps:

00:04 – Understanding the Customer Journey

03:58 – The Customer Journey: Response Time and Automation

14:34 – Automating Customer Interactions and Follow-Ups

23:05 – Next Steps in the Sales Call Process

Transcript:

Becca

00:00:00.240 – 00:33:07.950

Your email pings, a brand new inquiry lands in your inbox. But now what? Welcome to part three of our summer series, all about the Customer Journey.

As we’ve been breaking it down into each section of the Customer Journey, and today we’re going to be talking about how to turn an inquiry into a sale. I’m Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you’re listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast.

I’m here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.

If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you’re in the right place. Let’s get going with today’s episode.

Before I dive into today’s episode in this miniseries all about the Customer Journey, I just need to take a moment to share something incredibly exciting with you.

Now, I record this a bit ahead of time, so you may have already seen this on social media, but for those of you that haven’t, I wanted to share with you as my loyal podcast listeners. So a couple of weeks back now I found out very exciting news that Wedding Pros who are Ready to grow.

Yes, this very podcast has been shortlisted in the business section of the British Podcast Awards.

Now, just to give you an idea of the size and scale of these awards, some of the people I’ve been nominated up against in this in the same awards ceremony, not necessarily in the business category, include Louis Theroux, Lily Allen, some huge names in the podcasting world, and little old Becca Pountney is on the list. Now, I’ve been shortlisted in the business category. I believe there’s six or seven podcasts overall that have been shortlisted in that category.

So again, for me, absolutely huge achievement. And if you look at the names of the other podcasts I’ve been shortlisted against, it’s a little bit overwhelming.

Like the Times Newspaper, Bloomberg, the Economist, and then again, Becca Pountney. Now, what I love about these awards is the awards are not about the size or scale of your podcast, it’s about the quality of the content you produce.

So they’re listening for the quality of the show. And so for me and my team, it’s an incredible honor that we’ve even made this shortlist among these massive media giants.

Bearing in mind I’m recording these episodes in my home home office alone. We’re just editing them ourselves as part of my team. We’re not part of a massive media corporation.

We’re not working for BBC or global radio or anyone like that. To be able to be in the category with those giants and to be recognized alongside those people is a huge honor.

I am really passionate about creating great quality content for you to listen to for the wedding industry.

Yes, we may be niche, it may be a small audience in terms of how many people are interested in growing their wedding business, but for those of you that are part of this audience, I want to make sure sure that we’re bringing you top quality content that rivals those massive media brands. And so to be recognized as doing that is a huge honor for me. Thank you for continuing to listen and support the show.

A couple of things you can do in light of this I just believe more wedding pros need to know this podcast exists.

There is so many great nuggets of information, great guests, great pieces of content on here and maybe your fellow pros and venue owners don’t even know about it.

Whether you’re based in the UK or further afield, why not share your knowledge about this podcast with a friend, with a fellow fellow professionals, share it on social media or just tell them about it because this recognition shows that they absolutely should be listening. The other thing is, it’s been a while since anyone left a review on the podcast. I know you guys love listening.

If you’ve never left a podcast review on whatever your chosen platform is, why not help me out? Take 30 seconds out of your day to day. It will mean the world to me. I will keep you updated. The final ceremony isn’t until October.

It’s happening in London. We are planning to be there, me and a couple of members of my team, to go and celebrate that evening. Am I expecting to win?

Absolutely, absolutely not. Am I thrilled that I’m just going to get to be in the room and have the opportunity to have even been shortlisted amongst those media giants?

Of course, and there’ll be loads of content along the way too. Anyway, enough about the British Podcast Awards. Let’s get on with today’s episode.

And today is the third part of my mini series that I’m running all through August. All about the different parts of the customer journey.

So if you haven’t yet listened to part one and two, you may want to go back to the last couple of weeks first before you listen to this.

But if you have and you’re on track, we are now at part three in the customer journey and that is all about what happened happens once you get the inquiry and how do we Convert it into a sale. So the first thing I want to talk to you about is response time.

I honestly believe in 2025 and probably beyond response time is one of the most important aspects of inquiring to replying to an inquiry and is what is going to set you apart from your competitors and is what’s going to just give you that little extra edge in getting the sale. Now, when I talk about this to people, sometimes they freak out and sometimes they get very defensive. And you may be having those thoughts right now.

So the freaking out people are saying, becca, that’s all very well, but I’m busy. It’s wedd season, I’m out and about. People are inquiring late at night, how can I possibly get back to them quickly?

And the defensive people among you are saying, actually Becca, I’m really good at getting back to people. Normally I get back to people within a couple of hours. Well, my question to you is, what are your competitors doing now?

Often I run marketing reviews. So people pay me to review every aspect of their marketing. And when I do that, one of the parts of that I do is a competitor analysis.

So I ask them for their top competitors and I do an analysis to see how their competitors are performing against them them. And one of the metrics that we look at is response time.

And more often than not, when I do that piece of work, the competitor’s response time is much quicker than the person that I’m reviewing. Obviously that changes once we’ve done the review and we put different things in place.

But just because you think what you’re doing is great doesn’t mean that it’s keeping up with your competitors. Now you may think again, Becca, what’s the difference between my competitors and me replying an hour later?

Well, I’ll tell you what it is for the couples, quite often it’s overwhelm, right? We make it really easy to inquire. We talked last time about how to make sure we get rid of some of that friction, make it really easy.

Whether or not that’s through a directory, whether that’s direct through our website, through social media. But because it’s easy to inquire, quite often couples will inquire with a number of different people at the same time.

And what happens then is all of those different vendors and venues come back to them and all of a sudden their inbox is flooded and they feel overwhelmed. Now when we feel overwhelmed, we don’t necessari really read everything to its fullest.

So if you are sending an Email back in an hour, but three people have sent one back in five minutes. Well, by the time they get to yours, they may be overwhelmed and not even reading it. They may be deleting it.

They may have already gone down the customer journey track with the first person that replied and they don’t want to do too many at once. There are many reasons why that response time is really important.

So if at the moment you are doing all of your responses as a personalizing, as in it’s you personally or one of your team actually responding to the inquiries, let me encourage you right here, right now, to add some automation into this part of the process. Now, again, I can hear some of you shouting out to me because I get this pushback all of the time.

Yeah, Becca, but we want a personalized experience and I get it. And I want to say to you, you can do both. You can give them the automated response and the personalized experience and this can work really well.

Now, of course, when we do an automated response, the person at the other end probably knows it’s automated, but that doesn’t really matter because they still get the dopamine hit of getting something back. And depending on what we’ve put in that, even better.

I talk about something which is completely unscientific, that I made up called the excitement curve. But it definitely tracks what goes on with a couple and with us when we are looking to buy something.

So when we sit down in front of the TV or in front of Netflix on Friday, Saturday night, and we’re scrolling through our phone and we’re thinking about planning our wedding, we’re thinking, right, I’m going to look for the perfect venue, the florist, the cake, whatever it is, we start looking and we start researching and we start finding people that we’re interested. Our excitement level is at an all time high. We are in wedding planning mode and we’re excited to find the vendors of our dream.

However, as time ticks on, that excitement curve drops. So from the moment that they inquire with you, that is when they’re most excited about working with you.

But over the next few minutes, hours, days, weeks, they’re back to their normal life, they’re back to their jobs, they’re doing something else, and all of a sudden that excitement level is gone down. So we want to hit them right back with that dopamine. The moment that they inquire, why?

Because that’s when their excitement level and their willingness to act in their wedding planning zone is in place.

Now, for many of us, that time is happening and night on a weekend when it may not be convenient for us to reply to them straight away, which is why automation is crucial.

So whether or not that automation is something just directly on your website, or as we’ll talk about later, you’re using a more comprehensive CRM system. It is not that difficult to make sure an inquiry form on your website gives people an instant reply.

So if I go to your website now, I look at all of the packages and products you have on offer, I’m excited to work with you. Is it clear what I do next and can I do it and get an immediate reply?

So, for example, if you send me to a contact form on your website, I fill it out, what happens next?

Now, sometimes people say to me, yeah, there is an automated reply, but when I test it out, it is literally just a reply that says, hey, thanks for your inquiry. Again, we want to give it a little bit more than that. We want to give them something else to hang their hat on.

We want to give them a next step to do while they’re in that excited mode. Now, depending on your business, this will be different for everyone. The next step is going to be slightly different.

Now, obviously, when I work with people one to one, we go into this in granular detail, but for the sake of the podcast, I’m going to give you two different routes because every single one of you will have different processes.

Route 1 is that the next step you want them to take after inquiring is to book a call with you, as in you want to get them on a venue tour or you want to get them on Zoom to have a chat with them or on the telephone if you fall into that camp, that is the next step you want them to do.

Then let’s make sure on that immediate reply, you tell them that’s what you want to do and you give them the link so that they can go ahead and book using a system, something like calendly. Or maybe you’ve got a calendar inbuilt to one of the systems you already use.

So that I inquire on your website, I’m interested in talking to you about your flowers. I send in the inquiry form immediately. I get a message back, hey, Becca, super excited to talk to you about your wedding flowers.

I’m sure it’s going to be amazing. The next step is for us to jump on a call together. Here’s the link to my diary.

See if you can find a time suitable for you immediately while I’m at the top of my Excitement curve. I can now make the next step. I can book that diary call even if you’re away for the weekend, in bed asleep, it doesn’t matter.

Your system is doing it for you. And I can do the next step while I’m excited to do it now for other people.

Getting people on a call or booking a venue tour isn’t the next step they want. Maybe you want a bit more information. Maybe you need to send them some more questions. Maybe you need to go away and check availability.

If that is the case, then still send an automated email and still explain what’s going to happen next. For example, hey Becca, thank you for inquiring about our cocktail bar. We are so excited to hopefully work with you or to work with you.

We will now be checking our availability and we will be in touch within whatever you can manage 24, 48 hours to confirm our availability and to walk you through the next steps. Now this is important. Still give them something to look at.

So you could say, if you haven’t yet had a chance to look at our pricing guide, here’s a link to our website or to see the latest cocktails that we’ve been developing and pictures from recent events. Here’s a link to our Instagram TikTok.

Give them something else that they can do while they’re at the excitement level to to buy into your business even more so again, like I said, that’s quite generic. I know lots of you will have different processes, but there’s two examples there of what you can do in that initial reply.

Make it exciting and give them something to do next. Whether it’s book a call, visit your social media and be clear on the next steps.

The other thing that’s incredibly important when we’re trying to convert these inquiries is that your response is not too long. A big long email with lots of text isn’t going to be read. Keep it short, keep it snappy, keep it to the point and make it interesting.

Make sure they know what’s going to happen next. Text so that they’re really clear and there’s no confusion there and give them that next step.

If you send an email and it’s just got tons and tons of text, it will be overwhelmed, they’ll ignore it and they won’t do what you want them to do because it’ll be lost in the body of the email. Now for those of you that were saying earlier, yeah, Becca, but we want to make it more personalized.

We want them to send them a more personalized response. Let me Tell you that is possible to do both. I’ve seen some suppliers and venues doing this really well.

So you go fill in the website form, the customer gets the immediate response at the all time high.

Then as soon as physically possible, depending on the day of the week, when it is that they inquire, whether it’s the middle of the night or the middle of the day, you then follow up as well with a personalized email and something personalized about what they’ve put in their message and reiterate what the next step is you want them to take.

Now obviously if you’ve said in your automated email it’s a check availability, then before you send that personalized reply, check the availability and make it clear in the email, great news, we’ve checked our availability, we are free that day. Here’s the next step. And then give them a very clear, short next step. Is it you need them to tell you something else?

Is it that you need to tell them a price? Like what is it you want them to do next?

If it’s just that your call to action is to book a call, then again send a personalized email immediately as soon as you possibly can, saying hey, I’m Becca, blah blah blah. Put something personalized. Really excited about your wedding on the X date at this venue. I love that venue. I’ve worked there loads of times.

I’d love to jump on a call. We need to get to know each other. Here’s the link to book a call. And again, you can put the same link in the email.

So just because you automate something doesn’t mean you can’t send a personalized email as well. It is better to do both. People expect the automated one. Everything we do now when we do stuff online is automated. We expect automated replies.

So build that into your process and then go a step further and follow up with that personalized response as well. But the key things are you’ve got to keep that email short and to the point and you’ve got to give them a very clear next step.

Now what if they inquire in a different way? Maybe they inquire via social media DM, maybe they inquire via WhatsApp.

If it is a different route, talk to them in the place where they’re inquiring and do the same thing. So if your next step is to book a call, reply to their WhatsApp message with the link to your diary to book a call.

Don’t say go and fill in the form on my website. You’re putting in an unnecessary hoop.

So wherever they reply email, you reply to them there and still tell them the same next step that you want to go ahead and do. Okay, the next step in the automated process is that and you can do this personalized as well.

But again, if you do set up with a CRM system or something like that, you can automate this to save yourself time and to make it consistent if the person who inquires does not take the next step. For example, you sent them that email saying book a call. Two days have passed, they haven’t booked a call.

You now want to make sure you’re sending them a series of follow up emails encouraging them to book the call. Right. Maybe two days later, three days later, five days later, seven days later, something like that.

And you keep on sending some follow ups asking them to do the same next step, don’t mix it up, don’t start giving them other ideas of what they should do. We’re trying to get them to take that very clear next step.

Whether it’s replying to our email with more information, booking a call, telling us something else, whatever is, we want to make sure we’re following up with them. So have it set what you’re going to be sending them roughly on each of those days. Can you automate it via a system? Now?

If you want to get really techy, then depending on the system you’re using, you can give it rules. So for example, I’ve just recently set up a CRM for a venue and what happens is the inquirer, the inquiry comes into the CRM.

The CRM will send them an automatic reply back as we spoke about earlier, encouraging them to book a call. Then the wedding coordinator will also send a personalized email asking them to book a call.

Two days later the system will look whether or not a call has been booked and whether or not there’s a date for that call inside the system. If no call has been booked, it will send them the first follow up email. A few days later it will do the same thing.

It will look, have they booked a follow up call? No. Right. We’ll send them email reminder too. So what’s happening is it’s only sending the email reminders if they haven’t booked the call.

If they book the call, obviously it doesn’t send them the email reminders.

So even if you automate this stuff, you can make sure that you’re doing it in a way that is not sending emails to people when you’ve already got them to do what you want them to do, if that makes sense.

The worst thing you could do though is not follow up at all because again, people are overwhelmed, people are busy, people might put your email to the side and think, yeah, I must book that call later. A million other things happen and they forget.

But if you send them a reminder two days later, just remind her to book that call, we’d love to chat with you about it, blah, blah, blah, then it might just spark that interest.

Now on the automated system I set up for the venue, once we get to something like 14 days and we’ve sent them three or four reminders, the last one is, is the Allen Berg Last Stitch Empty mill where we basically say, you know which option best describes you A, B or C and just try and get them to reply with something. If they reply with something, great. If they don’t, after that point we mark them as lost and that’s it.

But at least we followed up with the multiple times. They may come back in the future, they may not, but they’re now out of our sales journey.

So those follow up emails are an also important part of this inquiry and sales process. So we want short emails, we want no overwhelm, we want to be clear and concise, give them clear next steps and follow up.

Now, I mentioned Alan Berg and his short emails. He has done a great training all about replying to inquiries inside of the Wedding Pro members lounge.

He did it a couple of years ago now for us, but it is still so good and so relevant and I always send my members there. So if you are a member and you’re looking for that, let me know, I can point you in the right direction.

Or if you want to listen to that and you’re not a member, then either reach out to me directly about purchasing a copy of just that training, or why not join the members lounge, hum along and listen to that training. Because we have some incredible training in there and Alan Berg is great on this subject.

I love hearing him talk about it and he talks about how to get people to respond with those short sharp questions. We want to make sure we’re limiting hurdles every step of the way.

And as I’ve said already, I think a CRM system at this stage in the journey is really important.

Now if you are dealing with a very low number of inquiries or a very low number of sales, you know, less than 10 bookings a year, less than five bookings a year, you probably don’t need a CRM system.

But as soon as we’re talking 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 a year, or even a month for some of you, if you’re a venue, then using a system is going to save you so much time and headaches. If you don’t know I’m talking about. A CRM system is a customer relationship management piece of software.

We did a great episode on the podcast all about CRMs and talked about different ones and different systems you can use. That’s episode 15 5.

If you want to go back and listen to that podcast and if the tech feels overwhelming, you think, yeah, I can see why I need a system like this, but I don’t get it, then chat with me. Because at the wedding, pro agency system strategies is one of the things we are really good at.

And so what happens is we jump on a call, or I personally jump on a call with you, find out your requirements, we build out a strategy of what your system should do and then you pay us and we build the system for you.

So you literally go to bed one night and a couple of days later the system’s ready for you to start using and it’s doing all of these automations for you. We write the emails, we help you with all of that stuff as well.

So if you can see that you need this part of the process sorted and you need help with it, reach out to me, let’s chat and I can find out whether or not it’s suitable for us to help you with it. Okay, so we’ve got the inquiry, we followed up with them, we’ve got them to do their next step. What about if we get them on a call?

So again, this won’t be relevant to everyone. Some of you don’t do sales calls or in person meetings. You just book via email, going back and forth with those short emails.

However, if you are someone that does, then this part of the episode is for you.

Once we get someone on a call, there’s now more conversion tactics that we need to put in place to turn them from someone who’s interested to someone who’s actually going to pay us some money and book. And we don’t want time wasters.

Now, the thing to know about couples in 20, 25, 26 and beyond is we know that this generation of couples are people who do their research before they talk to us. So as we talked about in the last couple of episodes, by the time they get to a call with you, they’re probably already 90% sold on working with you.

Because if you’ve put prices on your website, if you’ve put pictures on your website, if you’ve got reviews on your website. They will have looked at all of that stuff. They’ll have looked at your social media.

Most of the time they will have done their research before getting on a call with you. And the call is kind of like their final thought is, do I like this person? Have we got good synergy? Do they like me? Can I see us working together?

Can we make it work for my budget or not? Right. So by the time they get to the call, this isn’t about hard selling them stuff.

This is basically about just showing them that you’re a good person and that you’re the right person for them. It may be you’ve got a class of personalities.

It may be that they didn’t do their research and they didn’t look at that information and they’re maybe not the perfect client for you. If that’s the case, you’ll work that out pretty quickly on the call.

So the key things to know about that sales call number one is the main thing you should do on that call is listen, ask questions and listen. This isn’t about you pitching your product, pitching your services, pitching how much it costs to work with you.

This, this is about getting to know them as people and seeing what their wedding’s like and how you can help serve them on their wedding day. Ask questions. Ask questions about what they want from their wedding day, what they’re looking for in their florist, DJ venue, whatever it is.

Ask them what they’re struggling with, ask them what their fears are. Ask them lots of questions and listen, listen, listen, listen.

Don’t jump into saying, oh, well, this is how we can help you, xyz, get a really good understanding. First, ask them lots of questions. Ask them if they’ve looked at work on your website. Ask them if they’ve looked at pricing on your website.

Ask, you know, ask them questions and you will ask. Understand exactly what they’re looking for from you and from this call.

It may be that they say something like, yeah, we’ve looked at everything, we love your work. We’re just, we’re feeling a bit nervous about choosing the right person. Well, great.

You can reassure them with your knowledge and with the things that you’ve done before. You can tell stories about people you’ve worked with before and projects you’ve worked on. Build a bit of rapport with them.

You also want to make sure that you’re overcoming objections on the call. This is why asking questions such as, what are your biggest fears about your day?

Or what are you worried about when it comes to choosing your florist, cake maker, venue, dj, when you start talking about your services, you can overcome some of those objections and talk about it there. The other thing I really want you to try and do on this call is get an idea about their budget.

However, the last question most couples want you to ask is, what’s your budget? So if we can’t ask what’s your budget? How on earth are we going to know what their budget is?

Well, this is where it comes back to what we talked about before, being really clear on our website. We’ve got lots of prices and packages and different things on there. We can ask them the question, have you looked at my packages on my website?

What was standing out to you? Whereabouts do you see your wedding being? And what that does is it opens up a conversation.

You can even have that on a screen if you’re in person or on a zoom call. You can open up your packages and say, here’s everything we’ve got on our website. Which of these are you feeling drawn to?

Where do you see your wedding day sitting?

It’s basically asking for a budget without asking them for a budget, because then they can tell you that they’re leaning towards the basic package or the expensive package or the middle package, or the on the day planning or the full service planning, whatever it is that you do. Maybe they’ll show you a cake on your website that’s worth £5,000 with a price under it and they’re saying that’s what they want.

And immediately you can get an understanding about roughly how much money they’ve got. And that gives you a jumping off point to start working with them on their proposal.

So you’ve listened, you’ve asked lots of questions, you’ve built rapport with them, you found out roughly what their budget is. The final thing you need to do on that call is plan with them the next steps.

Just like we did in the email, we need to give them really clear next steps and we need to agree them with them. So again, ask questions.

Now, this feels difficult and often this is where people lose the sale because at the end of the call they go, okay, thank you very much. Be in touch if you’re interested. And then they just let their couple go off into the distance.

Now, of course, course we’re not doing precious selling. That’s not what we’re about. But we do want to know what the next stage is and we want to make it clear for them.

Indecision, no time limit, means that people just don’t Buy, they’ll just disappear, so agree with them. Great, you’ve heard everything from me. Would you like me to put a proposal together and send it over to you to review?

They’ll say yes or no, then you agree timescales. Great. I will send this over in the next 24 hours. It will be valid for seven days. So if you can let me know within seven days where that that fits.

Now, if you’re someone that can be quite flexible with your budgets, again, make it really clear, say to them, overcome the objection. If you get it back and it’s more expensive than you were expecting, then let me know and we can look at how we can work with it.

If you get it back and you want us to add anything additional on or give you different options, let us know within the seven days and we can update it. Now, it’s really important to keep remembering to use a time scale.

Seven days gives them something to work towards and gives you a reason to chase them. Because on day five you can say, oh, a couple, your quote’s still valid for a couple of days. Have you had any chance to look at this yet?

Do you want to go ahead and book? Day seven, your quote expires today. Do you want to go ahead and book or would you like me to extend it for a few days?

Okay, so we’re not pressure selling, but it gives us as vendors a reason to follow up with people.

So agree with your couple whilst you’ve got them in front of you, either on a call or in person, what the next steps are going to be and what they want to do next, and then make sure you follow it through, keep the boundaries clear, keep it clear how long it’s valid for so that you don’t give them a quote and then six months later they come back and ask to book and all of a sudden your prices have gone all. Make sure it’s really clear with them how long that that is valid for.

Obviously if they come back in six months, you still can work with them, but it may be that you need to amend or update their quote or maybe you can still run with it.

If you are leaving sales calls without a clear next step, without agreeing with them the next step in the process, then you probably are losing some clients.

The other thing that I think is really important when it comes to following up is once we’ve built that rapport with people on a call and we’ve sent them some emails, make it really easy for them to withdraw because if they decide they don’t want to go with you Often they’ll ghost us.

And that’s really frustrating for us as vendors because we don’t know why and we don’t understand and then we feel like it’s personal and we start stressing about it. Whereas what we want to do is make it really easy to withdraw.

Now, this feels counterintuitive, but actually will put them more at ease and it will help you in the long run. So say to them, if you decide not to go ahead, please let me know so I can offer the date to someone else after seven days.

If you decide not to go ahead, just let me know. There’s no hard feelings here. It’s just helpful to know that you know you’ve decided to go in a different direction.

Make it really easy for them to withdraw. You can even put in something a bit like an subscribe in an email if you’re using a system.

You can put something in that just says if you definitely don’t want to go ahead, click this button and it will click and it will notify you that they are a no and they don’t even have to reply to the email.

And it can be really helpful just to understand that they’re completely out the picture or whether or not they’re just busy and overwhelmed and haven’t got back to you yet. So do try and make it easy, even though it’s counterintuitive for people to withdraw from working with you too, and they’ll appreciate you for that.

Okay.

If they decide though that they want to go ahead, then the final thing is before we get this money is we need to make sure there’s no friction at the final part of the sale. We want to make the sale as easy as possible for someone.

If we want paperwork back quickly, if we want payments back quickly, we need to do it as easy as possible.

We’re used to buying things on Amazon in two clicks with Apple Pay and it’s so easy if we have to get our bank card out, if we have to start printing off documents, it’s overwhelming and we don’t do it. So again, if you are using some kind of CRM system, this can make the process super easy for you.

You can send them the digital contract and the invoice and they can just get it all in one go digitally. They can digitally sign it and it will come back to you.

They can digitally money very quickly in a couple of clicks using the buttons on your invoice or make you a bank transfer and it will send reminders to them if they haven’t paid that invoice. So that it’s not you personally reminding them, it’s the system saying, hey, don’t forget you haven’t paid your deposit yet.

Hey, don’t forget you haven’t paid your booking fee yet, whatever it is that you say to them. So again, another vote for me for using the CRM system.

However, if you don’t want to use a CRM system, have this process built out with templates that you’ve got saved on your computer computer. So that with every inquiry you get, even if it’s a few, you can follow them up in the same way.

And if you’re not someone that likes chasing for money, you can always set up a secondary email address, something like support at your business name or accounts at your business name, and send emails to them that feel a bit businesslike to you. From that email, pretend that you’re your own VA if you don’t have the money to pay a VA and send it at.

You know, we’ve noticed that this invoice is outstanding from X Person’s team. All right, you don’t have to do it yourself if you feel uncomfortable, but sometimes those reminders actually jog people’s memories to pay.

Because if you’re anything like me, you’re a busy life. You forget stuff. It doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want it. It just means that something else has come in the way of it.

Okay, let’s recap then, because this is a really crucial stage of your business transaction and this is where I spend the most work and time with people, when we’re working one to one, because it’s often where that this is breaking down. So first of all, are your response times quick. How are you responding? What are you responding with? Are you making it really clear?

Are you clear on what the next step should be for them? Are you making them jump through too many hoops or is it one clear Next. Are there ways you can automate this process, make it easier for you?

Are you using a CRM system, a digital calendar? We don’t want to be going back and forth with people saying, are you free Tuesday at 6 o’? Clock? No, I’m free Wednesday at 2 o’. Clock.

Oh, we’re busy Wednesday at 2 o’. Clock. Can you do Friday at 10 o’? Clock? That is not what we want to be doing in 2025.

You need a digital calendar so people can make one click and book in and work with you. And once you get them on a call, are you Doing well in that process. Are you listening? Are you understanding that it’s not a sales pitch anymore?

They’ve probably done a lot of research. It’s about them building rapport and getting to know you and trusting you. Are you ensuring that’s happen on the call?

Are you trying to find out their budget without asking them the number? And are you being really clear on what the next steps are in the process?

And once you agree those next steps, whether it’s signing a contract, paying the deposit, are you making that super simple and digital for them? Or are they still having to print off a form and fill it in, scan it in, take a photo and email it back?

Because again, in 2025, people want it to be easy and we don’t want to lose it. If they’ve agreed the price, if they’ve agreed the quote, we want to make it as easy as possible to get that money and contract sign.

Before we close, there’s a couple of things I want to talk about, about how we measure these statistics, because these are the stats I want you to be measuring every single month. So you need to measure how many inquiries are coming into your business in a month. So how many people are actually inquiring with you.

And you need to measure how many conversions you’ve got. So for example, if you get 10 inquiries and two of them turn into sales, then that’s your conversion rate is 2 out of 10, right?

So make sure you understand your inquiry numbers and your conversion numbers. The other thing to is that not all inquiries are created equal.

So sometimes your numbers will be skewed, especially if you use online directories, because often online directories will generate you a number of inquiries, but the conversion rate on them may be lower than if someone inquires via your website.

The reason for this isn’t because directories are rubbish, which is the easy thing to say, but actually it’s because directories are making it really easy for couples to inquire with you. And so often couples will inquire with 10 different people on a directory and then they get overwhelmed and can’t respond to to everyone.

So it doesn’t mean that the directory is not working for you, but you do need to understand that it will skew your conversion rates.

If you’re looking at directory figures, often you may get loads and loads of inquiries, but what you really need to look at is how many of those inquiries turn into a sale. Obviously, the amount that turn into a sale need to be equivalent or more than the amount you’re paying to Be on the directory every year.

If they’re not, that’s another question and a whole nother episode to talk about.

But just because you’re getting 50 inquiries and only making one one sale a month doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing because you’re still making one sale a month.

I would expect your inquiries to conversion rate to be much, much worse on a directory than if it’s via your website, via social media, via word of mouth, because they’re warmer leads.

Your conversion rate should be much higher if someone’s inquiring via your website because they’ve taken the time to find you specifically and inquire. Whereas in a directory it may have just popped up. Here’s five other people you should inquire with. Click yes.

And then it just sends off the the inquiries to people and they may not have even looked at your business and it makes it harder to convert.

However, still go down the same route, still try and send them an automated reply if you can, or quicker reply as possible, still follow up with them and still mark them as lost if they go so that you can keep a track on your numbers. That conversion rate metric is so, so important in your business. Are you tracking it?

Are you tracking where your inquiries come from and how often they convert so you can start to see where your best converting leads come from? From and sometimes your metrics are important to see what the real picture is on the business.

I recently worked with a one to one client whose inquiry levels had dropped significantly, but actually their amount of sales had remained quite similar. So their conversion rate had actually gone up, although their inquiries had dropped.

Because what was happening before is they may have 50 inquiries but only make two sales. So the conversion rate was terrible, but they don’t get so many inquiries now.

But if they get four inquiries and make two sales, suddenly their conversion rate is 50%. That’s actually much, much better. So I know it’s not an exciting part of the business, but those metrics are so, so important.

You should be tracking them. If you’re.

Again, if you’re in the members lounge with me, my wedding pro members lounge club, every single month at the end of the month we have a lounge call where we do exactly this and I walk you through your metrics and your tracking if that would be helpful for you. Why not find out more about the members lounge? Come and join us. It’s only 37 pound a month. It’s an absolute bargain.

And I will walk you through these conversion metrics so we can do it. Together every single month.

Next week is our final week in this mini series and we’re going to be talking about all about the customer experience and how we can get repeat business or referrals on for repeat business. I hope you found this session really helpful. If you’ve got questions, if you’ve got thoughts, let me know and also go leave me a podcast review.

I’ll see you soon.