Wedding Pro CEO | Building Profitable Wedding Businesses

265. The Perfect Sales Funnel Explained

• Brandee Gaar • Season 6

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In this episode, we tackle the biggest pain point wedding pros face—losing leads—and share the step-by-step framework for creating a sales funnel that converts effortlessly. 

From building awareness to closing the sale with confidence, we cover practical strategies that help you book your IDEAL CLIENTS without the overwhelm.

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Wedding Pro CEO Podcast. If you find these strategies helpful, make sure to share this episode with your fellow wedding pros. And remember, in the world of weddings, it's all about building genuine relationships and showcasing your best work. Until next time, keep shining, CEOs!

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Brandee Gaar:

Are you constantly losing leads and wondering why potential clients aren't booking? In this episode, I'm breaking down the perfect sales funnel that solves this problem once and for all. No more frustration, no more wasted effort, just a step by step guide to building an automated system That converts leads into high paying clients effortlessly. If you're tired of watching clients slip away and ready to finally see results, this is the strategy you've been missing. Hey there, CEO, you're listening to the Wedding Pro CEO podcast, the podcast to help you grow and scale your profitable wedding business. I'm your host, Brandee Gaar, and over the last 17 years, I've grown one of the largest planning firms in Orlando, Florida, and grossed more than 6 million in revenue. I have refined our sales process to make it flow so smoothly and ensure that we have five figure months every single month. And I'm here to show you exactly how to do that too. If you want to grow and scale your wedding business in 2025 wedding pro, you have got to stop playing small. You've got to be different than the bulk of the wedding pros that are out there who are just hoping that they're going to hear that ding that they just got a new sale into their business. Smart CEOs don't run their businesses on hoping the economy will go their way. We create strategy. We understand what moves the needle, how we get more clients into our funnel. And 100 percent we know exactly how to close them so that we can convert more of those warm leads into paying clients. Today, we're breaking down the perfect sales funnel. This is the sales funnel. That's not only going to help you to survive the changing landscape of our industry and our economy, but it's going to help you to thrive through it. If you're ready to build the perfect sales funnel for your business, let's get into it. So first things first, let's talk about what a sales funnel is, because to be honest, I didn't really start using this terminology until really the last five years, because in the wedding industry, we don't really talk about Sales that often like we do in terms of like, Oh, I want to make more sales, but it's almost like you are money hungry if you talk about sales. And I came here to break that stigma because I think we need to be talking about sales. We need to be talking about money because guess what? If you don't have sales, if you don't have money coming into your business, you don't have a business at all. So I want to stop being afraid to talk about this. And I want to really drill into exactly how you're going to build out that sales funnel so that you start increasing your profit. You start increasing your revenue, right? What a sales funnel is, is it's simply the process of moving people from unaware that you even exist to becoming a paying client and really understanding the steps that need to be taken to move them through each of those phases simply and easily so that it's not this tug and pull of getting ghosted and constantly being behind your computer and trying to be the first one that responds and all these different crazy things that can make you really start to slow your sales because you get so overwhelmed. by it, right? What we want to do is we want to create a sales funnel that flows smoothly without you interacting too much in it so that you can be booking new clients when you're at a wedding or when you're at Disney with your kids, or when you're sitting on the couch trying to recover from a wedding hangover, whatever else you're doing, we want your leads to still be able to flow through your sales funnel smoothly so that you're consistently booking new clients. Okay, so there's three phases to your perfect sales funnel. the first phase is going to be the widest. It's going to be the biggest. This is where we're just getting awareness. We're getting more people to learn about us, right? So this is where Networking and social media and all of your marketing efforts are going to combine to really start to fill your funnel with these ideal leads. So that's Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook. If you advertise on Facebook or do any kind of marketing on Facebook, Tic Tok is a huge one. LinkedIn could be in play here. Those are all your social media sites. Other things that you want to be thinking about are going to be networking efforts. Never ever forget that relationship marketing will always, always, always be a massive piece of the puzzle here in this awareness phase. Having other vendors and venues aware of who you are and what you do is going to be such a player in that referral piece of your business. So we want to make sure that we're also adding networking into this equation here in this awareness bucket of our funnel. And the last one I want you to consider that I think is Hugely overlooked is going to be PR. You want to make sure that you're submitting to publications, whether those be online or in print, You want to be able to be quoted as an expert. You want to be able to be published and have your work published. So this is a really important piece of the puzzle. And one of the players that we really love in the marketplace is OFD Collective. They have a great PR opportunity for wedding pros where you literally get fed PR opportunities. Weekly by their team that you can just submit your information and they will then farm it out to all the publications. It's a great way to get more eyes and social clout on your business. this is a really big one as part of awareness. So in this first stage of the funnel, it's all awareness What I want you to think about is stop focusing all of your efforts on the bottom of the funnel because if we're not first focused on the top, there's nobody to sell to anyway, right? So all three stages of this funnel are massively important so that they can all work together, right? So the first stage is awareness, and we've got to be hyper focused on that awareness stage. in the second piece of the funnel, this is consideration or what we might also want to call the nurture stage. This is where your follow ups are going to come into play. This is where that automated email funnel is going to come into play so that you're consistently nurturing them. This is where your story posts are really going to come into play because in this stage, you're going to really want to nurture those leads and the stories come into play here because people are now already following you. That's part of the awareness phase, right? You got them to follow. You got them to kind of come along for the journey. They're aware of you, but they don't. like you yet, right? they're trying to figure out, do I like this vendor to be part of my wedding? And remember you guys, they're following you for a long time, right? So these story posts are coming in to really nurture, to show that you are humans behind your brand. If you have a team, that's great. Showcase your team, showcase the fun side of you, showcase what makes you unique. speak to pain points. Make sure that you're showing who you are so that you're really drawing in the ideal client, right? You want to make sure that the people that are in this consideration phase are really self selecting at this point. That's a really big piece of this stage of the funnel. We want to help them self select whether they are the right client for us Or they're not. And that comes with nurturing and showing who you are so that they can decide, like, yes, I really like this. I resonate with this or no, I don't. And this is also the stage where you're going to want to share your pricing. If you haven't already done that on your website or part of your awareness stage, you really want to make sure that your pricing is front and center during this consideration stage, because again, we want them to self select, right? So if they are not within the budget range that we typically book clients, we want them to be able to self select that they're not going to reach out to us So this consideration phase, what we're doing is we're nurturing them, but we're also helping them to Self select whether they are right to move forward in the next stage of our funnel. Okay, in the bottom phase of the funnel is decision. And this is typically where your consults are coming in, right? So awareness and consideration are moving them through. We're trying to get them to get to a consult, right? here in this bottom phase is where you're going to have your consult. And this is where you shine Wedding Pro. We want to make sure that you, here in this stage, understand that they are 80 percent of the way sold in at this point. Okay. So this is where you're going to bring out social proof. This is where you're going to speak directly to their pain points. This is where you're going to tell them exactly how your services fill exactly what they need for their wedding. And you're going to be confident. You're going to know that your pricing is right on par because you've already shared it with them. They wouldn't be at that consultation if they couldn't afford you at this point, right? So pricing is not a consideration at this stage. We're already past that. At this point, it's making sure that they're a good fit for you and you're a good fit for them. And we lock up the contract. If you've done your funnel correctly at this stage, it should literally be the simplest thing to close them because your funnel has warmed them so much that this piece of the funnel is literally only 20 percent of the buying process. Because at this point, if they've gotten this far, you've made a very short list of pros and all you need to do is close it up. Okay. So now you know what a funnel is and how it's made up, but I want to also talk about why most wedding pros fail at building funnels and having really great funnels for their clients to move through. So the first one is because there's no clear path. And this I would say might be the number one thing we see when wedding pros come into our program. It's one of the first things that we audit is your sales funnel. We want to understand how people are moving through your sales funnel and not having a clear path is such an easy fix for us to show you, but it's probably the number one reason that the sales funnel is broken. And what that means is that when you're on social media, when you're in the awareness phase, you're doing PR, you're doing marketing, you're doing network relationship marketing, you're doing social media, All of that awareness phase, there's really no path, there's no clear path that we're telling them to move into that consideration phase. And so what we want to be doing is we want to make sure that there's always a strong call to action on our social media posts, that there's always a direct next step. So if you're doing social media, we want to always have calls to action. To move into that consideration phase, right? And so that would be double tap if you agree, share with an engaged friend, save for later, DM us to talk more about your wedding. That's a huge one, right? That's a strong one. Click the link in our bio to book a consultation. Like there's all these. things that we can do to move them into that next consideration step. Now, if you're working on relationship marketing, you're doing networking to get those referrals, same thing here. You really want to let your vendor partners know, like what is the next step for a client with them? Do they have clients that are looking for what you do that you could partner with them on, right? Like, how can you be a good partner to them? How can you move into the next step, of being considered either for part of their vendor list or just to partner with them on a client. Now, what I don't mean here in this piece is to say, how can I get on your vendor list? That's gross. Don't do it. But what we do want to say is, do you have any clients in mind that you think would be a good fit for both of us to work on together? Because I'd be happy to look at possibly discounting my services so that we can work together on a wedding because I'd love to show you how I'm different. Right. I think that's a really good one. Or, tell me more about your services because I would love to refer a client to you so that we can work together and you can see how my services are different, right? or how unique we are. Like, these are all ways that you can make sure that you're moving into the next phase versus just being like, Hey, thanks for meeting. It was great. I hope we can work together one day. No, always be looking for how am I moving this person in my funnel to the next stage. Okay. The second one really is very similar to the first and that is weak calls to action. And in this one, what I'm really talking about is your email. So now we're in the consideration phase. And one of the things that I see all the time when we're auditing sales funnels is I see wedding pros send these great emails out. They're beautiful, but they have no substance to them whatsoever. They're really not providing the client any additional information that they need to make a decision. Cause remember, we're in the consideration phase here. We want to move them to the decision phase. They also have no call to action. I see these emails go out and I'm like, well, what do you want the client to do when they get this email? And they're like, well, I really want them to book a consultation. I'm like, but you didn't even put the consultation link in here. So they'd have to go find your website again to book a consultation or hit reply, which they're not going to do. So we want to make it simple. We want to make it one click. Remember that most of our clients are reading these emails from their phone as well. So we want them to be short, sweet, to the point. We want them to have value for them and we want them to know what the next step is and it'd be right there for them to do. So you want to make sure that you have a link to book a consultation with you right there. Every single email, every single email that you send out or every single interaction you have in the consideration phase is to move them into the decision phase. Please don't miss this point. You're constantly, always 100 percent of the time when you're interacting with a lead, you are trying to move them to the next step in the funnel. That's it. If you think about it that way, instead of thinking, how do I get this person who doesn't even know about me to book with me? If you just think, how do I get them to move to the next stage in the funnel, I promise you sales will become so much easier and a lot more fun. Okay. And the third thing that I see. All the time when we're auditing sales funnels is there's no follow up and every wedding pro that I've ever interacted with knows follow up is important, but they don't do it. And a lot of times that's not on purpose, right? I would say most of the time it's not on purpose. Most of the time it's because you're busy, you get busy running your business. You forget to do follow ups. You don't have time to do follow ups. You don't know what to say in the follow ups. So you're just kind of like, I don't know if they want to book me, they book me right. And the reality is. Our clients are busy. That's why they're looking for professionals to help them with their wedding. Our clients are busy. And so we have to stay top of mind because they're not only short on time, but they're interviewing multiple wedding pros, or they've at least reached out to multiple wedding pros. So you staying top of mind, understanding where they are in life and helping them to make it easy to. Book a consultation with you to move to the next stage is going to be really, really important. So we want to make sure that we've got great follow up emails that are going out consistently. And I don't think this is any surprise because I preach this on this podcast all the time, but you want to have great Follow up texts. And this is so massively important in this new generation that's moving into our marketplace because they will much more likely read and answer a text than they ever will to an email. So we want to make sure that we're really focused on great email follow ups and great text follow ups. If you aren't sure what to say and you really struggle with this, you're just like, Brandee, I have no idea what I'm supposed to say in these follow ups. It's so overwhelming to me. I actually created an entire script for your sales funnel. It's a full 30 day script with email, swipe copy, and exactly what to say in your text and when to send all of it. You can just head over to brandegaar. com slash emails and grab that swipe copy right there. It's a literally a Google doc that I give you. You can copy and paste all of it right into your own emails. You can copy and paste your texts. It's really, really simple. I know how difficult it is sometimes to figure out what to say. And so I've made it easy for you. Again, it's brandegaar. com slash emails. Go over and grab that. And Hey, if you've gotten it before this has been updated. So if you've gotten this before, you should have the new updated version. So make sure that you grab that. So now you know what a sales funnel is and why so many wedding pros fail at creating one. But how do you create the perfect sales funnel? Okay, there's five easy steps to it. I'm going to pop through them quickly because they are so so simple. And once you see what goes in each phase of your funnel, you're going to see how simple it is to set this up. Here in this awareness stage, what we're doing is we're speaking directly to their pain points. So in any area that you're bringing awareness into your business, we're speaking to the pain points. You want to be the expert. You want to make sure that you know exactly what it is that your ideal client struggles with, and you want to speak to it on Reels, on TikTok, on Instagram stories, in your feed posts. in your marketing, in your relationship marketing, in your PR, in your expert advice, all of it should be speaking to the pain points that your ideal customer has and posing yourself as the solution or the expert to that problem. Okay, the bridge between the awareness stage and the consideration phase is your contact page. This is where they're like, I want to learn more. I want more information about this wedding pro, right? Your contact page needs to have no fluff. If they've made it to your contact page, they're ready to fill out your form. So no fluff, no junk above the form. Just put the form on your contact page, make it short and sweet. We don't need to know their hobbies. We don't need to know how they met. We don't need to know their budget. We don't need to know all of these things Because at this stage, they are just information gathering. So we don't need to send this big custom proposal. It doesn't need to be all unique. It doesn't need to be crazy. They want more information from you. So make your contact form easy to fill out a couple of questions. I say five questions, max, make them not required except for their name and email address and no other fluff on this page. Okay, now they're in the consideration phase. So what are we doing here? We are sending them those emails and those text messages that we talked about. Again, make sure you grab my swipe copy if you don't already have this set up for yourself. And let's make sure that we get you these emails and these text messages that are actually going to move people through your funnel because now in this stage, what we're trying to do is we're trying to move them into that decision phase. So here we're nurturing them. That's our Instagram stories. That's our email sequences. We're nurturing them. We're trying to get them to understand like we are the perfect pro for them. And we want them to make a decision to book a consultation call with us. Okay, on the booking stage, this, you guys, this is massively important. Do not make it difficult to book with you. I still see so many wedding pros that are manually booking appointments. Please, I beg of you, it is almost 2025. Get an online scheduler. I don't care which one you use. There are a million out there, but stop making it difficult to book a consultation with you. Send them the link to book a consultation. Make sure they can click on the link easily and find a time to book a consultation with you. Simple, clean. They can do it from their phone. We want it to be easy. Okay. And the last one is your sales call. You guys, I'm telling you, you've got to make this sales call confident. I want you to think about your sales call is that 80 percent of the work has already been done. We talked about that earlier, but your sales call is the last. Tiny little nugget. And I want you to be super confident here. If the rest of your funnel has done its job, they are so close to buying already. So in this sales call, you are confident, you know, that you're the pro for them. You explain exactly how your services are the perfect fit for them, and you assume. That they want to work with you. And this is what I call my assume method. If you're like, I want to learn more about this assume method that you talk about, you can head over to brandegaar. com slash free training. I break down exactly how to handle your consultation so that you convert your clients every single time, because here in this last stage, your sales call is massively important. You're just going to head over to brandegaar. com slash free training and jump right in to learn exactly how to use my assume method to make sure you're closing those consults every single time. And the last piece of your entire sales funnel is just automating it. You want to make it so that you can book calls, make sales in your sleep. And you guys, I created an entire episode on how to hook up all of the tech behind this. You can head over to episode 260 and learn exactly how to set up all of the tech, because we want you to be able to make Sales while you're running your business, while you're sleeping, while you're doing whatever else it is in your business. That's so, so important while your sales run on automation. So go check out episode 260. And CEOs. The perfect sales funnel is your ticket to scaling your business in 2025. If you build it right, it will work for you on autopilot, bringing in dream clients while you focus on doing what you love. But here's the kicker. You have to start, you have to take action. Build your funnel and stop leaving money on the table. You are the CEO of your business and it's time to take control. If you love the no fluff education that I bring to you here on the podcast, imagine how quickly we can scale your business inside of Wedding Pro CEO. If you're driven and ready to make 2025 the year that you completely transform your business, head over to BrandeeGaar. com slash apply and apply to work with us inside of WeddingProCEO. We take our client results very seriously, which is why all of our programs are by application And we want to make sure that it is the perfect fit and that you are ready to take the tools that we give you and put them into action to double your revenue or even more in 2025. CEO, thank you so much for being here and I'll see you next time.

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Brandee Gaar

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