The 5 Booking Patterns Costing You Wedding Clients

Transcript: The 5 Booking Patterns Costing You Wedding Clients

Heidi Thompson:

There are five booking patterns I see over and over again with wedding pros.

Are any of them happening in your business?

Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson. And I am here to help wedding professionals just like you book more weddings with clients you love. and if you’re like most wedding pros I talk to, I know you’re out there doing stuff. You’re posting, you’re networking, you’re answering every inquiry as quickly as possible, but your calendar still has gaps in it and somewhere along the way you decide the problem is you. It’s not.

It’s just that half the advice you’ve been following stopped working a few years ago and nobody sent you the memo. I have watched hundreds of wedding pros run themselves ragged on a playbook that expired and it makes me a little bit crazy every single time. So today I’m walking you through the five booking patterns I see over and over. If one of them is in your life right now, you’re gonna feel called out. Good. That is where the fix starts. So I asked wedding pros what booking actually looks like for them right now in their business. These are real people, real businesses. And here’s what they told me word for word.

Pattern one, I feel like they’re just collecting quotes and not booking. So you send the inquiry response, you send the pricing, you think you’re close, and then they just kind of disappear. There’s nothing. They were warm and engaged on the call. They understood the price. And now your ghost story. So you make it up in your head that it was your prices. It’s almost never your prices. They got the number. They realized they had no idea if you were worth it because they didn’t know how you work. They didn’t know what makes you different. They didn’t know why they should work with you and not the seven other people they emailed the same day. Handling someone that much money as a stranger is kind of terrifying.

So they were unsure. They froze and they went quiet. Pattern two. I don get any reply after I send them a message Now for this one an inquiry comes in you follow up and you get silence so completely across the board that you start to wonder, is your email broken?

Did something actually not send? But it’s sent, and they read it. But they couldn’t tell whether you were the right person for their wedding.

So they moved on to the planner or the photographer or the venue or the wedding painter whose message actually sounded like they understood.

That’s the difference. And I think a lot of people don’t realize this. It’s not talent. It’s not price. It’s whether your words made them feel like you understood what they wanted and their specific situation. Everyone thinks they’re a special snowflake. I see this all the time in my own business. But if your words make them feel seen, like you have the solution to their problem, like you understand their specific situation, they move forward.

If they don’t, that’s when you don’t hear the reply.

Pattern three is I don’t know where to start. And this one comes from wedding pros I’ve talked to who know that there’s something off in their business, but they can’t quite name it.

So maybe you are posting, you’re networking, you’re updating listings, you’re answering all the inquiries, you’re doing everything. you’re doing a lot and it’s not working so you freeze because how do you fix a problem you can’t even point to you don’t even know what the issue is you just know that it seems like nothing that you do gets you more bookings and if that’s you this is very common it can be very difficult to see what the actual problem is. And for a lot of people, the thing that is holding them back is that they don’t stand out clearly as the go-to person for their ideal client.

So your ideal client winds up having 20 tabs open with you and your competitors, and they genuinely can’t tell the difference because all of your websites sound the same. All of your images kind of look the same. So really, they don’t have anything left to compare you on other than pricing, and that is naturally what they’re going to do. Pattern four is I want to book higher budget couples who actually get it. Now, this is the pattern I see people in when they don’t just want more inquiries. They want better ones. Couples who understand that you not just a warm body filling a space that you are the right person.

And this is an interesting pattern to be in because you might be getting inquiries and they might just not be the right people You want more people who value the work that you do and who are willing to pay what you’re charging without flinching at the number. But instead, you get price shoppers and people who are one tutorial away from doing it themselves, and they’re just gathering information. Pattern five is the wrong people find you, and the right people can’t tell you’re the one. You’re visible, people see you, they find you, and then nothing happens. Or the people finding you aren’t actually the people you would want to work with. This is the one that kind of just makes me want to throw my laptop at a wall. You are out there working your tail off, and the people seeing you either can’t afford you, don’t want what you do, or flat out cannot tell that you are the person for them.

Because the message you are marketing with isn’t… So let’s talk about the pattern behind the patterns here. Here’s what ties all five of these together. It’s not your effort. You’re working plenty hard. That was never the question.

It’s also not the thing that determines whether you’re successful or not. The question is who your effort is reaching.

Because you’re either pulling in the wrong people or the right people land on you and they can’t tell that you are their person. That is the diagnosis. And it’s the exact opposite of what everyone tells you to do. Everyone says, you got to get out there.

You need to do more. you need to market more, you need more visibility, post more, run ads, network harder, just be everywhere. And I get why you feel like that’s what you need to do. You grind, you hustle, you burn out, and somehow you’re still getting the wrong inquiries at the wrong price. Why? Well, it’s because visibility was never the thing that was broken.

Your message was. Most people think they have a visibility problem.

They think they’re just not in front of their potential clients. But really, they have a message problem. You’re in front of them. They just don’t understand why they should care.

So they don’t. every one of those five patterns is fixable and it’s not fixable by posting more showing up more being more visible running a bigger ad budget by getting so specific about who you actually want that the couple reads three sentences on your website and says oh my god this person is in my head I need to work with them That is how you solve this problem And then making sure you show up where those people are actually looking.

Take Kay Northrup, for example, a wedding planner I worked with. Brilliant destination wedding planner. She hit a point she describes as crying on the kitchen floor, staring at the stove.

Then she did one very, very important but unglamorous thing.

She interviewed her actual favorite past clients to find out who they really were, what mattered to them, and where they spent their time. And it turned out, for her people at least, Instagram Reels was where they were. So she stopped making safe, careful content, the kind that every other wedding planner was making. And she started making reels that said exactly what was going through their heads, all aimed directly at these specific people.

What came back was not just a flood of bookings, but a flood of the right couples, the untraditional ones that wanted her specifically to plan their destination wedding because she spoke directly to them when no one else did. She was the same person, the same level of talent, the same business. She just got really specific about who and where. Most people don’t do this, and it’s why most people struggle. And I see this a lot. most people will just try to hard work themselves out of this problem. I’m going to post more, I’m going to network more, I’m going to do all the things. And this is the entire reason the Book More Wedding Summit exists. It is coming up again, August 17 through 21.

It’s five days, it’s 34 wedding business experts, five tracks, all built around what is working right now to book the couples you want. The different tracks that we’re covering map straight onto the patterns that I just named. What’s changing in weddings so you know what couples care about now. Standing out so the right people can tell that you’re the one. They can recognize that. Getting found so you can reach them in the first place. Turning inquiries into booking so the ghosting stops. And working smarter so you’re not just wrecked by the time you get to the wedding. Now, I am so excited to be running Book More Wedding Summit again. And if you are struggling, even if you’re not struggling, if you just want to attract and book more of the right people, and you want to tap into what is changing in weddings, what is working right now, I invite you to come join us for Boo More Wedding Summit. It’s free to attend.

It’s virtual. You don’t even have to get dressed. And if any one of these five patterns just like hit you in the gut, it was built for you. Go grab your free ticket over at bookmoreweddingsummit.com. Or if you’re over on my Instagram, I’m Evolve Your Wedding Business over there, you can comment the word summit on any of my posts, and I will send it straight to you. During this summit, we are going to be solving this problem of why am I not getting the right inquiries? Why am I not getting the right bookings? Maybe you’re not even getting inquiries and bookings.

That is what we are tackling. If you want to book not just more weddings, but more of the right weddings without having to constantly throw spaghetti at the wall only to see that nothing sticks, you definitely need to attend this event. Like I said, it’s free to attend. It’s virtual. We have people who join from around the world. and you can grab your free ticket at bookmoreweddingsummit.com. I’ll see you there.