337: Undercover: I Secret Shopped a Wedding Vendor…

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This week I went undercover and secret shopped a wedding DJ to expose exactly why so many wedding pros are losing sales before they ever get on a consult, and the answer has nothing to do with pricing. 

I'm walking you through every friction point I hit, from the bloated contact form to the consultation that left me more confused than when I started, plus the five fixes that will turn your leads into booked weddings. 

If you've been getting plenty of inquiries but not enough contracts, this episode is the wake-up call your business needs. 

The (FREE!)ASSUME Sales Training: 2x your wedding bookings in 30 days—step by step. Thousands of wedding pros have already used it to land more clients immediately! http://weddingproceo.com/freetrainingorg

A favorite book of mine: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz 

https://amzn.to/4lbqZFw

Another favorite book of mine: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell 

https://amzn.to/3ITKLb4

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EPISODE SHOW NOTES BLOG & MORE:

https://weddingproceo.com/secret-shopped-wedding-vendor/

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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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Transcript

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This week I secret shopped a wedding dj and I found out exactly why their close rate is dropping and the scary part, it has nothing to do with their pricing and everything to do with their sales funnel. So if your leads aren't booking, there's a good chance that you're doing this too. Let's break it down, starting with where most sales are lost before you even get on a consult. So I'm working with one of our high level students and they have a sales team, which was not converting the leads that were coming into their funnel. They're getting plenty of leads, but they weren't turning into bookings at a high enough rate, but we couldn't quite figure out what the issue was. So we decided to secret shop their sales team. here's what I did. I pretended to be a bride that was engaged and really just wanted to see what would happen from beginning to end. All the way from going to their contact page, to getting to a booking. To getting a contract. as we were setting this up, the owner of the company had to give me quite a bit of information to really play into it because they're in a totally different state than I'm in. I knew what venue I was getting married at, how many guests I was gonna have. Who referred me in the area. There was lots of fun research that went into this, and then we had to decide what type of bride would I play, because there's two types of couples that are gonna come into your funnel. One, they're ready to buy, couple, they're well researched, they've been on your Instagram, they know all your pricing, they've seen your packages online. They've read reviews. They know already that they're ready to book, and then. There's the confused bride, right? This is the type of couple who got referred to you by a friend or maybe a venue, a vendor, but they've genuinely done no research. They're not following you on Instagram. They've barely touched your website, and they still really don't even know what you offer or what your pricing is. But they know enough about you because they were referred to you to fill out your contact form. So, which bride was I gonna play? Well, of course I wanted to play the Confused Bride so that I could really understand what happens if I'm simply just inquiring and not quite ready to buy. The problem started pretty much right away because when I went on the contact form to get more information, I noticed two things. One, there was no option for me to just book a call. There was no scheduling link. I had to fill out the contact form, which is fine, except I already knew that because I was referred. I wanted to book a call. I wanted to get on a consultation, and I couldn't do that. So immediately there's friction in the fact that I have to fill out this contact form. The second thing that caused some challenge was that the contact form was obscenely long. There were almost 20 questions that I had to fill out just to get more information about this company, which was incredibly frustrating, especially on mobile. And so many of our couples are inquiring on mobile. They're doing it on their lunch break or when they get home from work. Sometimes at a red light, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to fill out that contact form or to move on to the next step with us. Once the contact form was filled out, I waited. And I have to say really great job on the part of this business is I immediately got both a text and an email. This was great because I was hot now I'm a lead right now. I want information right now. However, the email and the text were both throwaway and what I mean by that is they really had no valuable information in them besides, Hey, we got your inquiry. We're excited to send you more information. There was no information in them that was actually helpful to move me to the next step in the process. They were just an automated text to say, we got your inquiry and we're excited to learn more about your wedding. So. Both good and bad there, right? The next thing that happened was I got a text the next morning offering to schedule a consultation, but again, there was no scheduling link. It was, we would love to schedule a consultation with you. Let me know when you're available. That's a really open ended text and causes so much back and forth that has to happen instead of just sending me a scheduling link. This was a very slow process because I purposefully, again, I'm playing the part of the confused bride, the one that needs some prodding to move through the process. So I took some time to respond to them, and then I immediately got an out of office auto reply via text, which wasn't the end of the world because

it was 8: 4:23

00 PM when I responded, but I also felt maybe wasn't necessary. The problem actually started the next day when I got a human text that said, great, we would love to schedule this consultation. It was before office hours that I got that. And so when I replied and said, yes, that time works for me. I got an autoresponder again saying our office is closed, and then I got an autoresponder again. So what I was experiencing as that bride is every time I replied to the human that was talking to me, I was getting an out of office reply because they were replying to me while their out of office was on. Very frustrating, very frustrating. One more challenge as part of their pre-consultation was that I needed to change the time of my consultation. Now again, I did this because I wanted to see what would happen and if anybody would actually respond. And they didn't. I asked if I could change the time of my consultation two days before and no one ever replied to me. So that was a huge challenge because no one is actually live watching the text funnel. And so when our couples think that they're talking to a live human, but they're not getting any responses, that's another reason that it can be frustrating and you're adding friction to your sales funnel before you ever get on the consult. Let's fast forward to the actual consultation. I have to say I enjoyed this consultation so much from a personality perspective. The DJ that I met with was a doll. He was everything that you would want in your dj. He was so personable. He had so much energy. He was such an expert in my venue and in what they could do for my wedding. Where the consultation broke down is that he knew absolutely nothing about me. My fiance or my wedding by the end of this call, and that meant he couldn't pitch me because he didn't ask anything about discovery. He knew where my venue was because I'd put it in the discovery questionnaire, but he had no idea how many guests we were gonna have, what type of wedding that we wanted, what we wanted our wedding to feel like. He didn't know what time our ceremony was, what time our reception was, what ballroom we were using. He really didn't ask a lot of questions. Where he spent most of the time of the consultation was telling me about their company, their reputation, the things that other couples say about them, the awards that they've won, why they get referred by so many venues. And while this was fun and helpful and showing that they had expertise, when it got to the end, when it was time for him to pitch me something, he wasn't able to pitch me. And this is where the biggest piece of the problem came in, is I kept asking. Well, what package should I get? How can you help me? Can I book DJ services, but also book some of your other things? How would I do that? How do I know what I need? How do I know how many hours I need? Do I need additional microphones? I was asking all these questions like I had no idea. Because I wanted him to discover, I wanted him to lean into what do you need, how many people, all the questions, right? So that at the end he could pitch me because we didn't do that at the end. What he said was, I'm gonna go ahead and send you our catalog of all of our services, take a look at everything, and then you know what, we can jump back on a call in a couple of weeks and we can decide what you wanna move forward with. There's two problems with this. Number one is that because he wasn't able to pitch me anything, I left even more confused than I came in. And this is a massive, massive issue with wedding industry consultations. We are so afraid to sell, we're so afraid to pitch or to sound like a used car salesman. We don't sell at all, and we leave a client confused at the end. I had still no idea what I should actually be purchasing. And as somebody who's having my first wedding, I don't even know what questions I don't know to ask. So it's our job as the vendor to lead our clients to the service that best fits for them. He wasn't able to do that. The second problem with how we ended this consultation was we had no follow up date. He said, I'm gonna send you our brochure, take a look through everything, and in a couple weeks we can follow up to see what you're ready to do. That's so open-ended. What does that mean? He had no idea when I was gonna be ready to make a decision how fast or how maybe I wanted to sit on this. I could be ready to buy tomorrow and just get this knocked off of my list, but now I have to go back, wait for a brochure, read through the entire thing, and then in a couple weeks either I have to follow up with him or he's gonna follow up with me. I don't even know. So all to say I left with more questions than I had answers to, which is never gonna lead to a sale. Okay, so how do we fix all of this? Right now? I've given you all of the things that went wrong as part of this shopping experience, but how do we fix it? The first thing I want you to do is I want you to secret shop yourself. This is by far the number one thing that can help you to understand where the glitches are in your funnel. Little things like an autoresponder going off during business hours, multiple times when you're conversating with a bride. You have no idea that's happening if you are not running through your funnel. That was simply an automation mistake. That is all it was. That was such an easy fix that was causing friction in their funnel. So first things first, I want you to go through your funnel like you are a bride, like you're an engaged couple, and just see what happens inside the funnel. Okay? So let's go all the way back to the beginning and start with the contact page. You have to have a scheduling link on your contact page. It is 2026, and please don't tell me anymore that a scheduling link is not personal. That is false. What's not personal is making someone go back and forth with you via email or text just to have to schedule an appointment. we have too much technology at this day and age, to make it that frustrating to book a call with you. So number one, put a scheduling link right on your website, on your contact form for people who are ready to schedule a consult. The second thing you wanna do is have a short contact form. So am I telling you to have a contact form and a scheduling link? Yes. Because there are different types of buyers coming into your funnel. One who's ready to book consultation with you and wants to get on the call, let them do that, and another type of buyer is not quite ready to give you their time. They're not quite ready to book a consultation, but they just want more information. Don't make them fight for it. Have a short contact form. Best practice that we share with our students is three to five required questions. And then if you wanna ask more questions that aren't required, feel free to. But when you ask questions like, what's your budget? Or What package are you looking at with us, they don't know those questions yet, and they're certainly not gonna tell you their budget before they ever actually inquire. So the main things that you need to know that you have to know are their name, their email address, a phone number if you wanna require it so that you can text them and you don't even need to require their wedding date because they might not have it yet. So ask it, but don't require it. Keep the form short. Fix number two is speed to follow up. Now I shared with you that this company did this well and that they automated both a text and an email to me, as soon as I inquired, however they were throwaway texts. What do we mean by that? It means that there's nothing of value to move me to the next stage of booking in that correspondence. So what I want you to do instead is your very first email should be automated, and it should have your full pricing guide a little bit more about your company. I love to do this in the form of an FAQ document that you can link, and most importantly, it should have how to move to the next stage in your funnel, which is scheduling a consult with you. If they didn't already schedule the consult straight from your contact page. Now they've gotten a little bit more information about you. Let's offer the scheduling link again in that first email. The first text should do the same thing. I prefer personally, for the first text to not be automated. I prefer that the email to be automated and the first text should be human. It doesn't need to be immediate because you've already sent the email, but as soon as you're able to get to your phone and you can shoot a quick text that says something like, Hey Suzy, I saw that you inquired with us earlier today. Super excited to learn a little bit more about your wedding. You likely already got an automated email from us, but I wanted to personally reach out and see if there's any questions I can answer for you. This humanizes the process and allows them to ask any questions that weren't already answered in the email, and it also helps you to ensure the email actually made it to their inbox because so many of our emails go to spam and they never even see it, so it helps you to make sure that that email actually got delivered. Fix number three is to master the discovery. Way too often, we do so much of the talking in our consultations because we wanna tell them all the things about our company, all the awards we've won, all of the great reasons they should book us, but we're not actually talking to them. We're just talking about ourselves. In a consultation, it should be the 80 20 rule. Your client should be talking. 80% of the time, and you should be talking 20%. A great way to understand if you're doing this incorrectly is to simply record your consultations. Click quick record either on your phone or on Zoom, and watch it back. Listen, are you talking most of the time or are they, if you are talking a lot, that means you're not asking enough questions. I literally spend the first 20 to 25 minutes of a consultation. I might talk a total of like, 5% of the time, because I genuinely have so many questions for them. I wanna know how they meet, what they like to do together, how they chose their venue, how they got engaged. When they got engaged, does their date have special significance? Is there anything they've seen at weddings that they love or that they hate? I just wanna get inside their heads because all of this is helping me build trust. It's also helping me to paint a story of what I'm gonna pitch to them at the end and how I'm gonna pitch it in a way that fills everything they just told me that they're looking for and is important to them about their wedding. So discovery is key. You cannot skip this part of the consultation. Fix number four is to keep it simple. When I started asking questions about the DJ service, he started presenting me with all of these other options that they could do, like photography, videography, lighting, dancing in the cloud, adding a DJ booth, adding all of these things that I didn't even know that they did, and was really, really cool. But I was so confused by all of the options, and because he hadn't done the discovery, he wasn't able to clearly articulate what I should get. I left so confused. You never ever want to confuse a client. A confused client is a no. 100% of the time, they don't understand what they're buying. They don't understand how it's gonna be helpful to them, and so they walk away from the sale, simplify the offer. If you offer multiple things, you have to get to the discovery to understand what it is that you can pitch to them that they're going to want for their wedding. If you offer multiple things and they're not quite ready. As in this circumstance, I came for DJ services. They offer a lot more than that. I didn't know that, so I wasn't prepared for all of that. Sell on the core offer, get them in as a buying client, and then you can always upsell later something like, Hey, okay. So I know we've talked about a lot of things today, but you came here really for dj, right? You were referred to us for dj. We're vibing. I totally love it. I wanna be your dj. Why don't we do this? Why don't we go ahead and get you locked in for DJ services. That's gonna get you locked into our calendar. It's gonna ensure that I'm gonna be your dj. And then we'll set up a call for a couple weeks from now and we can start talking about things like photo, video, lighting, any other enhancements that you wanna make. But I wanna get you locked into our calendar Now, how's that sound? That's gonna ensure that you locked them in for what they came for You give them exactly what they needed and then you can work on an upsell once they're already a buying client. Fix number five is the one I love to talk about, and this is close it up with confidence. Too often we're afraid to sell. We don't wanna sound like a used car salesman. We don't wanna do the hard push, right? Here's the thing that you need to know. You'll never sound like a used car salesman if you're actually adding value providing what they actually came for. And you cannot do that if you don't understand what the client wanted in the first place. It goes back to discovery again. Can you tell that everything here is built on discovery? When you are understanding exactly what it is that's been difficult for them, or what's been challenging for them, or what they're really looking forward to at their wedding. When you spend that time in discovery with a client, it's so easy to pitch because instead of feeling like you're just trying to sell them something, you're actually able to paint the vision for the entire night. Something like, Susie and Mike, I've had so much fun getting to know you guys, and I can already see that that dance floor is gonna be packed that night. Like I'm gonna be behind the boards. I am gonna be mixing from one song to the next because I don't want anybody to leave the dance floor, and I want you guys to be at the center the whole night. We are gonna have so much fun. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna go ahead and send the contract over for DJ Services right after this consultation. You can review everything, sign it right online, and that'll lock us into the calendar. I literally cannot wait to see that dance floor packed and you guys just having a blast all night long. That is one, assuming the sale, you're gonna tell them exactly what's happening next and how they're gonna lock you in, but it's also doing another thing you just painted yourself. Into the imagery of their wedding night. You've told them exactly what's gonna happen. You've painted a picture, you've told a story. They're gonna be on the dance floor in the middle, packed all night. You already know that that's what they want because you talked about it in discovery and you've painted yourself behind the DJ booth. You are gonna be the one with expertise. You are gonna be the one spinning, you're gonna be the one keeping the dance floor packed. You've painted the picture of that night and now they're thinking. Yeah, of course. That's exactly what I want for that night. We are gonna have so much fun. Where do we sign? And you've already told them what the next steps are. That is a confident close. That's how you lead to a sale every single time. If you're watching this and you thought, oh my gosh, I think I do a lot of these things, listen, first of all, now you know you're not alone, but I wanna make sure that you take time this week, schedule it in to go shop your own funnel or have a friend do it. This is so important, and if you're listening and you're like, yes, I know that I need help with this, and if you want my team's eyes on your funnel, if you want us to shop your funnel, if you want us to go through and see where the gaps are in your sales funnel, I want you to book a call. We do free gap assessments, hundreds of them a month with wedding industry pros so that we can help you really spot what is it that keeping your leads from being able to become a paying client. You can drop down into the description below or head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application. Grab a time that works for you, and let's figure out why your inquiries aren't booking. And CEO. If you've got any value from this episode, please like and comment and share it everywhere. And if you're feeling extra generous, I would love it so much if you would leave a five star review on whatever platform you're listening on. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.