Tag Archives: Wedding Planning

Do You Know If Your Business is Offering Pain or Gain?

Posted on 03/26/2012 by admin
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In a post the other day I mentioned that customers primarily only buy for 2 reasons – Pain (avoidance) and Gain. Now in the Wedding Industry we are mainly on the happy side of things and the customers are buying for Gain, but WHAT are they gaining – a new dress, a cake, a photographer? Well yes all those things but the psychology behind it is a whole lot more.

When I talk about Pain and Gain what is meant? Well Gain is when people perceive they will gain from the purchase, they will gain things like peer admirations, higher standing in their social circle (why many people buy certain cars), makes you look better, makes you healthier etc. And Pain is reasons such as looking bad amongst your peers, losing money, losing health etc etc. The reason women spend billions on beauty products is to look better, but also because they don’t want to look old. The reason we all fork out on insurance is because we want to avoid the nighmare of NOT having it!

So what are your brides buying? Fancy stationery yes but more than that they are buying romance, one-upmanship on every other wedding they’ve been to, something that will add to the perfect day. In some way they believe that al the small things will make them look good, make the day happier and if they start married life with a perfect day then the marriage will be perfect too…..

Wedding planning is a perfect example of something that is booked because of the avoidance of pain – they don’t want anything to go wrong! And so is photography to some extent, yes the gain is that they have gorgeous images to remember the day but the pain avoidance is that they wont FORGET how they felt that day!

So, when you are marketing to your brides, instead of telling them what your selling, tell them what they want to buy – tell them what problem you are going to solve for them, tell them what they are going to gain from your product or service and tell them what pain they will avoid by working with you……

 

Claire x0x

 

If you want help with your business, I can offer marketing, mentoring and coaching all rolled in to one. Book your first FREE Breakthrough session, email me now claire@bombshellacademy.com

 

What’s Your Income Ceiling??

Posted on 08/04/2011 by admin
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I don’t know about you but when I first became self-employed one of the reasons was because the skys the limit on your earnings. My Dad has said to me more times than I care to remember ; “you’ll never get rich working for someone else”  Well this is true of course but I wonder how many of you actually work harder than you ever did working for someone else and I’m sure some of you don’t even earn as much money.

The problem with self-employment is that most people have a self-imposed ‘income ceiling’ and this is the very maximum you can possibly earn. I realised while working in my Wedding Planning business, it got to a point where I was working almost every weekend and what seemed like 24 hours a day during the week and then it suddenly dawned on me that if I wanted to earn any more than I currently was then I could either increase my prices (yep, this was possible but realistically I couldn’t double or treble them because I was already charging an amount I was happy with) OR I had to find another way to generate income that didn’t require MY time! I could do this but employing people (which I did) but the better way for me to do it was to productise something so that not only could I make money while I slept but I could also make money from the people that would NEVER be my wedding planning customers.

Now that I help people with their marketing one of the things I’m really keen about is to help them find a way for them to make money while they sleep so that they don’t have a CEILING on their income.

I know you love what you do but how can you make money out of the knowledge and expertise you have alongside what you are currently doing? If you look at some of the most successful people in the Wedding Industry they have no confined themselves to doing the thing that they first started out which was trading their precious time for money, they branched out in another direction that brings them a great income on top of all this.

 

Claire xox

 

If you want to explore how your Wedding Business can bring you maximum profits from your time AND bring you money while you are asleep, on holiday, having a day off then get in touch because the highly praised Wedding Wealth Program can help You!

Is Your Website About You or Your Customer?

Posted on 04/24/2011 by admin
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I love looking at peoples website, when I meet them on Twitter, Facebook, at a networking event one of the first things I do is look at that website to see how pretty it is and how much business I think it gets them. I actually did this before I started my wedding planning business, I had a look at local and national companies to see what their websites were like and to see if I thought they would be much competition and I was amazed at how bad a lot of them were and to be honest thought that some of them must be very good in marketing in other ways because there was no way they would get business through the website.

When the internet first came about people had websites almost like online brochures, they gave out information about the company and that was about their only purpose, but now that the the whole way we shop has changed and most of the focus is on the net unless your website has changed too then you are being left behind and there is pretty much no point in having a website at all!

One of the biggest website crimes I see is that the website has too many ‘I’s’ and not enough ‘You’s’ -it should be all about your customer and not about you because on the website you are normally only just beginning your relationship with your new, potential client. They actually don’t want to know about what you are doing, they want to know how you can ease the pain or increase the gain of the problem they are currently seeking to solve. By all means reveal yourself and talk about yourself on the About You page, if they click on that and read it its because they want to find out more about the person behind the product or service but the rest of the website should be about your customer.

I wont go into the whole ‘features’ and ‘benefits’ lecture again, I’ve previously written a blog post just about that but when you next look at your website, look at your home page and go through and COUNT, yes COUNT everytime you’ve said ‘I’ (or ‘we’ if theres more than one of you) and everytime you’ve said ‘YOU’ – ideally you should should have mentioned your customer  (the YOUS) FIVE TIMES more than you’ve mentioned yourelf, yes thats right, FIVE TIMES!!!!!

 

Ok – so get counting right now and see how you can immediately improve your website.

 

Claire x0x0

 

If you need help with this or any other marketing problem you have and what to increase your sales and your clients effortlessly then get in contact and join the Wedding Wealth Program - 100% of my clients have said that they were glad they did…..

How Creating High End Packages Can Help Your Sales?

Posted on 04/12/2011 by admin
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I was introduced to the concept of ‘High End Packages’ a few years ago by a brilliant marketing lady called Bernadette Doyle, I’ve known her for about 10 years and learnt so much marketing wisdom from her in that time but I can not begin to tell you how introducing a ‘High End Package’ (from now on I’ll abbreviate it to HEP! lol) helped accelerate my wedding planning business to bring in much more profit for me. My standard wedding planning packages started at £3000 and I introduced a super deluxe package for £9000, yes, three times my usual rate ! It was scarey stuff and I was convinced no one would go for the package but when I introduced it in the June I sold 2 of these packages within the first  months! Just 2 sales brought me the revenue the work of my usual 6 sales!!! So thats how producing a HEP helped me, whats the logic behind it?

Well, the best analogy I’ve come up with so far is flying! When we go on holiday most of us tend to fly economy class, this is OK, it gets us to our destination but we ALL know that there are other classes available, Business Class and the Ultimate First Class….. Now if we were to go somewhere for a REALLY special occasion and we wanted to treat ourselves we might really push the boat out and travel Business Class and we’d think we were in seventh heaven, but we would still know this is NOT first class but thats ok, just the fact that the ultimate First Class travel exists and we are a bit closer to it is enough. If there were only TWO classes to fly, business and economy most of us would actually be happy in economy. Its a psychological thing that we always aspire to the highest available but we tend to settle for the next one down.

So – in a business context, when we create a HEP we give our potential customers something to aspire to and in doing so we automatically INCREASE the value of our standard packages that we are already selling. Potential clients see you as someone that provides this Higher class service, even if they can’t afford it and so they feel much more comfortable booking you at your standard service rate and see you as someone that is high value.

Get creating your High End Package and let me know how it goes!

 

Claire xox

 

If you want help creating your very own High End Package and many other fantastic marketing tools and techniques to bring you more clients and more business then join my Wedding Wealth Program, my current clients are RAVING about it!

How To Answer – You’re Too Expensive…..

Posted on 04/05/2011 by admin
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How many times have you heard that? When I was  Wedding planning I used to hear it from people all the time and do you know what I said? YES!!!!  Were you mad I hear you say? Well maybe just a little but after I said yes I continued….
YES, I AM too expensive if my service was like that of every other wedding planner, but its not…… and then I went on to explain why my business and service was better than everyone elses, and do you know what? I almost always got the job!

One piece of advice I was given many years ago that proved invaluable and really thought-provoking was that people only say no to what you are offering if they don’t fully understand how you will benefit them. The excuses they say, such as your too expensive or they need to think about it are just ways of saying that you haven’t explained your offering enough.  Now this advice is hard to get your head around but when you do it is SO true – think of something in the past that you REALLY, REALLY wanted that was expensive, I bet you managed to find the money for it? I do it all the time with my passion which is shoes! I see a pair of shoes that I ADORE and they will be a ridiculous amount of money (I wont embarrass myself by revealing the actual figures involved but some have cost me a small fortune! ) I will do ANYTHING to get them, I will save the money or figure ways to raise the money until I’ve bought them, but show me something practical that costs 20 quid that I need but don’t necessarily want and I’ll think its expensive!

You will always get brides that set themselves a budget and really need to stick to the budget but if they take the time to have a consultation with you and THEN tell you its too expensive then the problem is NOT the price!

So how do you deal with this objection? Well you need to explain the VALUE of your product, whether its a cake, stationery, photography, whatever your service is, if you’ve spent the consultation time listening to the client and finding out what is important to them, then you can use this to demonstrate how you can fulfill their needs  in a way that makes them appreciate the VALUE of your service and therefore makes them happy with the price you are asking.

Be confident about your product and service and confident about your uniqueness and communicate this to your prospects and price will never be an objection again……

 

Claire x0x

 

Do you need help to put together a Marketing Strategy for your business that will make it SOAR! Are you ready to Step Up??? Click Here NOW

Are You Sabotaging Your Own Success?

Posted on 03/24/2011 by admin
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Years ago when I had one of my first businesses I realised I was always doing ok but never really great, it seemed that I would get a breakthrough and then something would happen to scupper it and this cycle continued for years. It wasn’t until I started studying NLP and become a Master Practitioner in it that I learnt to do some real soul searching about the pattern of my success…..

At the time I was in a ‘challenging’ relationship to say the least and the person I was with earnt a LOT of money and was very controlling, he helped me with training courses but when my business started doing well he resented it and it caused problems in our relationship that led to terrible arguments. I eventually realised that because of this I actually started sabotaging my OWN success! The relationship was important to me and so was my success but the two just weren’t compatible and sub-consciously I chose the relationship. It wasn’t until I really looked within myself and decided that actually my relationship was NOT how I wanted it, I wanted someone that WOULD support me and be happy for me when I succeeded and so I decided that I would really put everything into my business (by this time it was Wedding Planning) and that if my relationship was a casualty of my success then so be it…… it was!  My long term relationship (16 years!) collapsed and I ended up with a thriving business and a single life, which has turned out just perfect for me now because I am now in the fabulous position of having the man and relationship of my dreams and a successful business to boot!

The point of my long, rambling story is that sometimes you have to really look within yourself and be uncomfortably honest with yourself. Is the business empire you dream about REALLY compatible with the life and relationships you currently have? Does it mean you will have to spend less time with family and friends etc? I’ve coached people in the past that have been brought up to believe that money IS the root of all evil, how can you develop a successful business with THAT belief firmly planted in your subconscious? The truth is you can’t, you will always keep sabotaging your own success until you recognise the belief and clean it up!

So…. today, have a self assessment day! What will it take for you to achieve all your dreams and what do you see standing in the way of it? Of course you CAN have it all, its just a matter of recognising your limiting beliefs and finding the right path for you!

 

Claire xox

 

Do you need help to put together a Marketing Strategy for your business that will make it SOAR? Are you ready to Step Up??? Click Here NOW

Can You Sell More Than Just Your Time?

Posted on 03/10/2011 by admin
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When my Wedding Planning business started taking off one of the things that bothered me was the fact that I only had so many physical hours in the day which effectively meant that there was a limit on what I could earn. Of course I could raise my prices but the limit would still be there. Luckily with Wedding Planning I was able to train people so that they could work for me and I could in effect do more than just one wedding on any single day and when business was booming I was doing 4 weddings a day. Unfortunately, many of the professions within the wedding industry mean that it is impossible to clone yourself such as lots of stationery, photographers, designers etc which mean there is a ceiling on your earning potential right? Well no!

Many experts say that the mark of a good business is if you could go away for a year and come back and its still running, could you do this with your business? If you can’t then you don’t have a business, you have a job! And unfortunately for many if us the job we have doesn’t come with the perks of working for someone else because you don’t get bonuses, holiday pay, sick pay, company parties etc, etc.

So how can you get out of this time for money trap and start to build a REAL business? Well the answer is to sell your knowledge. We all have a whole ton of wealth and experience in our heads and this is what people pay you for, but what if you could put some of this knowledge and experience down on paper and sell it? If you’re a wedding planner can you do online workshop advice or sell checklists or planning guides? If you are a photographer could you sell a guide to doing your own wedding photography??  But claire, I hear you say, if I do that I’m going to lose customers!!! NOOOOOOO !!! You will NOT lose customers, if anything you will gain them. The people that will buy your guides are NOT the same people that are your clients, they wont pay your prices, BUT you never know, some may be so impressed by your expertise that they end up booking you!

So, if you want your BUSINESS to grow and to start earning a PASSIVE income, think about what you can sell. If you want help with developing the PASSIVE INCOME side of your business then click here now, the Wedding Wealth Program covers this and many other aspects of growing your business and soon you’ll be earning money in your sleep!!!!!


Claire x0x


Do you need help to put together a Marketing Strategy for your business that will make it SOAR? Are you ready to Step Up??? Click Here NOW

Are you ‘different’ enough to survive the Wedding Industry???

Posted on 02/23/2011 by admin
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Whenever I walk around local wedding fairs to have a look at what people are selling and how people are selling it you tend to see the same thing over and over again and I go to fairs from the perspective of a bride (no, I’m not getting married) but without sounding too sad and pathetic I try and put myself in the mind of the bride and walk around to see what appeals and what doesn’t. Of course not all brides have the same taste as me so the products themselves will appear to some brides and not others but some Wedding Suppliers are indeed ‘different’. This has got nothing to do with what they are selling, this has to do with the people selling them.

If you want to be different and really stand out in the wedding industry then you have to be ‘extraordinary’ and do things that none of your competitors do. If you ask any supplier what makes them different from everyone else then they will say things such as good quality products, great service etc etc – EVERYONE  says this so in fact they are not being different at all, they are being just like everyone else.

In order to rise above everyone else you need to raise the bar! When I was wedding planning I found online these gorgeous silver frogs with little gold crowns – they were really cute and tasteful and they cost me about £30 each so not cheap. Every time I signed a new client (which was generally worth about £3k to me) I would send the couple one of the frogs to thank them for choosing to do business with me and they loved them!

How many of you send your previous clients anniversary cards every year? Do you send thank you gifts for referrals received? One of my lovely clients send gorgeous hand made cards that she writes and send by snail mail to new clients (snail mail in this age of everything electronic can be incredibly effective!)  Do you go out of your way to make your clients feel really good about their decision to work with you? If you do they will be falling over themselves to get everyone else to choose you as well.

The key to going the extra mile it consistency – come up with extraordinary acts that you can do EVERY SINGLE TIME!!!! And do them!

I’d love to hear your comments about what you are going to start doing thats extraordinary in your business!


Claire x0x


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You need to know what your brides REALLY want to buy…

Posted on 01/08/2011 by admin
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When I’m talking to new clients I always like to start by asking the question above, what are your brides buying? Of course I get the usual answers of Wedding Planning, Invitations, a Wedding Video, Photography but are any of those answers correct? Well actually they are not, and that’s where lots of Wedding Suppliers marketing starts going wrong….


Everyone knows Dyson cleaners right? They are definitely one of the giant success stories of recent years, these strange looking, heavily price tagged hoovers have completely blown their competition away and one of the ways they’ve done this is because they identified EXACTLY what they target market wanted and delivered it in every bit of marketing they did with their fantastic slogan “The only vacuum cleaner in the world to maintain 100% suction, 100% of the time”  The slogan is genius and addresses exactly what their customers want but what are people actually buying when they buy a hoover? They don’t actually want to buy a hoover, nobody does, what people actually want is a clean home……. Lets face it, if someone tomorrow invented a system where all you had to do was press a button and all the dust and dirt immediately vanished from your house we’d all get it the minute we woke up wouldn’t we, and I’m pretty sure that most of us wouldn’t even care what it cost, hoovers would never come out of the cupboards ever again. So when we are shopping for a new hoover, we are NOT buying a hoover, we are buying the promise of a new home, just as when we buy a car we are NOT buying a car but a safe, reliable, comfortable way to get from A to B, the reasons for buying particularly cars may vary such as economy, status symbol etc but once again, if someone made teleporting a possibility tomorrow we’d not touch the car again!

So – what are your brides REALLY buying? A wedding is supposed to be the best, happiest day of your life so a bride buys things that she think will make that happen, everything she is buying is to enhance and make real that perfect wedding day that she has in mind.


When I started my wedding planning company I was constantly hearing from brides that they didn’t need a planner because they were doing it themselves and wanted to save the money, this was because I was trying to sell Wedding Planning, of course I was, I was a wedding planner after all right?? Wrong – I quickly reviewed my sales method and took on board the fact that I WASN’T selling wedding planning – what I was actually selling was an outcome! I was selling complete peace of mind for the wedding day, I was selling a wedding day that was going to go perfectly and all the bride and groom had to do was turn up, relax and enjoy the day, worry about nothing and know it was all taken care of, I was selling the happiness of all the guests, the knowledge for the bride and groom that all their guests would be catered for and looked after impeccably, my bride and groom wanted unique and special touches on the wedding day that none of their guests had ever seen before…… now THAT’S what my clients wanted, all of those things, NOT a wedding planner……..


So – have a think about what you are selling, whether you currently think its invitations, favours, flowers, photography, videography or planning, sit down and get clear about what you are REALLY selling and you will see your sales soar……


Claire xox


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Wedding Fayres – Waste of Time or Goldmine???

Posted on 12/01/2010 by admin
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When I talk to wedding suppliers they always tell me that one of the biggest expenses they have is the amount they spend on Wedding Fayres, this is Great I say but they look at me blankly and tell me that some of the wedding fayres they attend they hardly get any bookings out of and some actually get nothing out of spending a valuable Sunday at a Wedding Fayre!!!!

Back when I was wedding planning I used to hate the thought of doing a Wedding Fayre because I’d usually been working all day Saturday at a wedding and it meant giving up a valuable Sunday so I wanted to make damn sure I was going to get a lot of work out of it!!!  So how I hear you ask do you get a lot of work out of it?

Well the easiest way to explain what to do is to tell you what to definitely NOT do! I’ve spent loads of time at Wedding Fayres, from the very expensive national ones to the very small village ones and the same things apply, so here are my top tips for what NOT to do at a Wedding Fayre:-

  1. Turn up late or go home early.
    How many times have you been at a wedding fayre and the person next to you packs up an hour early? Yes, we all want to get home and we all hate standing around when noone is about but you’ve committed yourself to be there for the duration of the wedding fayre so make the most of it. Packing up early looks unprofessional and is disrespectful to the brides that do turn up at the end of the day, after all, how would you like to go to a shop at 4.30 that you knew closed at 5pm and they already closed? You wouldn’t be impressed at all and more to the point I’m pretty sure you’d make sure you didn’t shop there again!
  2. Eat lunch at your stand.
    Have you ever wanted to ask someone a question when the person had a mouthful of sandwich? II bet you changed your mind and didn’t bother – well so will the brides! I actually went to a Wedding Fayre once and the person on the stand next to me was eating a Pot Noodle for over 30 minutes! lol  I admit I quite like Pot Noodles but can you imagine the mess it made and how it looked? Yuk! lol Once again it shows disrespect to your potential clients and will not make them want to work with you. I’m not saying for one minute that you can’t eat at a wedding fayre, of course you can but move away from your stand if you have to.
  3. Spend the days at on a seat behind your table.
    In body language terms this says I’m not interested in you, I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to be here! Ok – maybe you don’t but do you really want your potential customers thinking that?  I know a couple of people that attend wedding fayres regularly and I know they don’t get much business out of it and the whole time they are there they spend texting on their phones or chatting to each other and sat right behind their table out of the way – I kid you not! Are you really surprised they don’t get the business from Wedding Fayres that they should?
  4. You’re there to Sell, Sell, Sell
    The higher the product or service you are selling the less likely you are to make a sale or booking on the day of a wedding fayre, and if thats the reason you are going you’ve got it all wrong. Have you seen the people at Wedding Fayres that are incredibly pushy to the bides and are all buy, buy, buy – is it any wonder everyone just walks straight past them? You need to get clear in your head what you are at the Fayre for – it should be to get leads, nothing more than that and when you get that right you switch off your  ’Buy me now Bride Repeller’ and the whole process becomes much, much easier.


Ok, so those are my top tips for what not to do at a Wedding Fayre so what should you do?  If you want REAL success at Wedding Fairs then I have written a fabulous book on the subject, available in paperback or immediate download find out more here


Claire xoxo