Podcast

Do you WANT one?!?

If your answer was "YES!", here's your guide!

If your answer was "NO WAY", here's me trying to change your mind. Lol

For many wedding pros, the ultimate goal of growing your wedding business is to get it to a point where all of your weddings are booked through word of mouth.

It's a huge advantage because your awesome reputation goes ahead of you in building trust with your future couples.

It does more for your business than just make booking easier, faster, and at a low to no cost for marketing. Leaving room in your marketing budget for either more profit, or for you to do some gifting or nurturing your referrers, or even some freedom to take care of a couple going through a tough time.

It also brings you couples who already trust you. Can you imagine each couple coming to you ready to book, and trusting you the whole way?

No more trying to prove to them that you really care and have a heart to help them.

A word of mouth couple is less stressed because of this built in trust level, so in turn they have a better wedding planning experience, so they're raving about you to their friends without any prompting. Imagine the snowball effect this has for your business!

Similarly, they're also the ones leaving you the most gushing reviews.

Any thoughts on what else it allows? That's right, the confidence, and caliber of clients word of mouth brings along with it, also brings the ability to do the price increases needed to give you the freedom you want in your lifestyle also!

A word of mouth lead can be anywhere from a warm lead to a hot lead.

Let's talk about the definition of a lead, it's a pretty general term that is taken a lot of different ways.

Lead: The most general meaning in sales is contact with a potential client.

For wedding businesses, there are many different levels of leads, many different qualities of leads, and even different points that someone who you come into contact with becomes a lead.

Some consider a potential client a lead, from the time they do any inquiry or make any contact with you.

Some consider a potential client a lead after a meeting, call, or showing.

Some consider a potential client a lead after they've said they want to do business with you but before they have signed a contract and/or paid a deposit.

What IS the same across definitions, is that a lead has the potential to become a future client.

A recommendation, or referral, as we say more often in the wedding and events industry, can come from a past client, another wedding business, a friend of a friend, or even a potential client who you handled so gracefully, that even though there was a circumstance that made you not the best fit for each other, they still love you and trust you enough to refer you to their friends!

These leads are great! They're of course, #goals!

Of course, all 3 need to be nurtured and taken care of. Often the warmer they are the easier they are to take care of, and the happier they are.

Also often the warmer they are, the higher the profit margin. The higher end couples tend to book their vendors by word of mouth, either by referral of their friends, or other business' preferred vendor lists.

Preferred vendor lists can feel difficult to get involved in, but we have a process that makes it easy.

We talk about this a lot in our VIP group, The Vendors Circle. I'm there to cover creating and connecting with warm leads. As you've seen here, it really is the most powerful and strategic way to serve more couples, while growing your income and freedom to life changing levels.

Hot tip: Growing your business to the point that it becomes fully word of mouth can even just be a mindset shift you need to make so that you know it's possible.

Other important mentions: