Submitted by gail on
Hello Everyone,
Are lots of potential customers 'passing through' your business without placing an order?
It's a common problem. You receive calls, traffic shows up at your website, you get emails from potential customers that you reply by email to straightaway, but they never seem to reappear and place an order. Does that happen to you? Frustrating isn't it?
My 'Tip of the Day': "Get PERSONAL - put yourself in your customers shoes so that you know what it's like for them to plan for this big day"
Start thinking about how you can MAKE a customer instead of how you can make a sale.
When a couple start planning their wedding, they usually set a wedding budget. They allocate a portion of this wedding budget to everything and hope they are able to stick to it. Then they start looking around, to find people who can help them with this budget.
N.B. Only 3% of the wedding market (in fact any market) aren't worried about money, so, 97% are.
But most of the businesses they check out put up a rate card or display a price tag, and the couple believe it's unmoveable, inflexible. It's fixed and the more they ask for, the higher the price.
Their only solution is to keep looking till they find a supplier who has a price that does match their budget. Hard work for them, and a headache to boot. So, shouldn't we as wedding suppliers ask what our wedding customers need from us, and what is best for those wedding customers, then create a package around them.
After all, we accept that no two weddings are the same, so perhaps no two customers are the same either.
Try this for one month: put your rate card aside and get to know your customer first. Find out what they have in mind. Get to know what makes them tick, what their concerns are and limitations, what part of their wedding budget have they allocated to your service, and create something personal to them.
For one month, make your mind up to get an APPOINTMENT so you can gauge what is involved to get the order. Make it your intention to match your supply or service to what they are looking for. Meet them in a coffee house or even a fast-food outlet. Better still. their venue.
It's likely that when you propose a package to them that meets all their expectations, the price issue melts away, because a couple relates your price to your VALUE, so booking or buying from you has become reliable and comforting. You are making customers.
Look out for WEDDING SOS, by White Wedding Pages. This is our latest service (introduced at the start of 2014) whereby we ask a couple what they are looking for, what is their wedding budget for this service, when they want it and where. Once we have all this information, we post it to our wedding supplier community so they can rush to help.