The One Wedding Industry Myth That Is Dragging You Down

Today I want to bust one of the biggest myths I see in the wedding industry. For some reason, a lot of wedding professionals think that they need to hold back on their website. This might mean not providing their prices, packages, how they work, etc but the the goal is always to get people to contact them in order to get the information they need to make a purchasing decision. This doesn’t work and it’s actually kind of shady.

When you withhold information, you’re actually doing a few things that you may not be aware of:

1. You’re pretty much acting like a Venus Fly Trap. You lure people in and then try to trap them. That’s not cool.

2. You’re wasting a ton of your time on people who are never going to work with you anyway.

3. You’re scaring people off because they assume if they have to ask about your pricing, they can’t afford you.

4. You’re putting your potential customers in an awkward position. If they call you or book a consultation with you and it turns out you are out of their price range, they either have to admit that which can be embarrassing for some people or lie to you and say they will get in touch which leaves you waiting to hear from them.

5. You’re scaring off your ideal clients because they do not want to call you and get into a sales conversation before knowing if you’re right for them. People are lazy, you have to make it as easy as possible for them or they’ll just move on to the next person.

Photo by BotheredByBees available under a Creative Commons attribution license

In my opinion, withholding information is only ethical when you actually have to speak with a prospect to determine what they need. Even in this case, I would suggest putting what your prices start at on your website so that people know what to expect. When you don’t put this information out there, you invite hagglers to come waste your time. Not everyone is your ideal client so don’t worry about people who will see your price and bail. This is a great way to weed those people out. Do you really want to spend your time talking and meeting with people who aren’t willing to pay what you’re charging?

All you have to do to book more of the people who visit your site is:

1. Be clear on who you want to work with

2. Demonstrate your value and position yourself as an expert

3. Be confident about your value and secure in your pricing. Just be straight with people. No one likes it when someone beats around the bush.

4. Be helpful. This alone will put you ahead of 95% of the rest of the wedding professionals out there and will skyrocket your perceived value.

You don’t have to say “It costs this much take it or leave it”, but don’t think that you have to trick people into getting in touch with you so that you can try to talk them into working with you. There are far better ways to do this that don’t involve alienating people. That is important to keep in mind because even if someone doesn’t hire you, you don’t want them to go tell their friends how pushy and cagey you were with them. The more you give, the more you’ll get and the more people will trust you which is gold in business.

Just put yourself in their shoes. How would you respond to someone only giving you some of the information you need? Would you want to be the fly in that Venus Fly Trap?