Are you ready to level up your selling game and boost your confidence in your business? If you’re looking to book more couples as a wedding planner, it’s imperative that you get comfortable with sales but if you are reading this, I have a feeling you’ve figured that out already. In this article, I’m going to walk you through an overview of the seven stages of the sales cycle and how to sell your wedding planning services!
But before we dive in, I want to have a heart-to-heart with you about the role you play in your business. As an entrepreneur, you wear multiple hats – from the chief IT officer to the financial officer, and even the customer-freaking-delight officer. Amidst all these responsibilities though, sales might just be the most critical. Trust me, I learned this firsthand when I started my own business as a wedding planner. Without sales, there’s no business, sister! So in this article, I want to give you an overview of each stage of the sales cycle, and I hope it will help boost your sales skills and confidence. Ready to get started?
Getting Ghosted?
Before we dive into the 7 stages of the sales process and get you to start selling more as a wedding planner, let’s take a moment to address a common occurrence that we’ve all encountered: getting ghosted. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in the art of selling, it happens to the best of us. But here’s the thing: there are steps you can take to help it happen less. Sales is like a muscle that you can continuously strengthen. With persistent effort and practice, you can become exceptional at it! So, don’t lose heart if you face a few rejections along the way. And always remember, getting ghosted is not always a reflection of your abilities or worth. It’s just a part of the journey. Keep pushing forward!
Stage One: Prospecting
When the sales cycle begins, it starts with marketing and attracting your ideal customers. While marketing and attracting people, you also pre-qualify and vet those customers to ensure they’re the right fit for your business. Not everyone who walks through your door will be a good prospect.
In the prospecting stage, you toss out lots of lines with hooks, trying to catch fish. Some of the fish you catch will be great fits for your business, while others will have to be thrown back. In this stage of the selling process, you vet and filter out leads acquired through your marketing, keeping the ones that are the best fit for your business.
Stage Two: Preparation
Next, we need to start preparing for the rest of the sales cycle. In the preparation phase, you’re likely exchanging a few emails back and forth with a lead, asking questions and trying to get more information. You’re also continuing to ensure you aren’t moving forward with any customers that don’t align with what it is you do and why you do it. Trust me – you don’t want to book more couples who don’t value what you value. This stage of the sales cycle is primarily about getting the information you need to move forward or release any potential clients that aren’t a good fit.
Stage Three: Approach
The approach stage is when we have our first meaningful interaction with a lead. It’s the consultation, whether by phone, zoom call, or in person. During this stage, you get to sit down and talk to the lead, continuing to pre-qualify. Having already prepared for the call in the last stage, during the approach phase you transition into showcasing your services while assisting potential customers in finding the solution to their specific needs. Now, can you start to see how these stages all work together if your goal is to start selling more as a wedding planner?
Stage Four: Presentation
As a wedding professional, you understand the importance of visuals in our industry. Your customers make purchasing decisions based on what they see. As I like to say, “the eye buys”. After the initial conversation (or “approach”), it’s time to present your offer. This typically takes place towards the end of the call and continues through email. Whether it’s a proposal, a quote, or a detailed presentation of your pricing and services, the way you present your offerings can make or break the sale. Remember, a poor presentation can result in lost sales. This is easily one of the most important stages in the sales process.
Stage Five: Handling Objections
Objections are barriers that customers present during the sales process. These can be expressed as questions or remain internalized. The reality is that every lead likely has an objection, preventing them from making a purchase today.
Common objections include needing more research, seeking more opinions, or uncertainty about affordability and time constraints.
Handling objections effectively is crucial to ensuring leads feel supported and confident in their decision to hire you. However, at this stage of the sales process, it’s not just about managing objections, but also about inviting objections into the sales process. This stage is vital but often uncomfortable for many. By answering tough questions and addressing customer concerns, you can guide them from uncertainty to signing your contract and paying your invoice with confidence.
Stage Six: Closing the Sale
Yes – closing the sale is not the last stage as you start selling more as a wedding planner. In this stage, we are asking our potential customers to make a decision. It’s okay to apply some pressure to get them to decide whether they’ll move forward with us. If they do, we close the sale by accepting payment and obtaining their signature on our contract.
And listen – despite what you want to hear, it often requires several follow-ups to successfully close the sale. Unfortunately, many sales fall through prematurely at this stage due to insufficient follow-up. After all, if you are like most of the women I coach, you know you don’t follow up enough!
Stage Seven: Wrapping Up the Sale
Here’s where many people go wrong: we have “love bombed” this person at every stage of the sales cycle. Whether it took us three days or three months to get here, we’ve been prompt in answering every email and phone call. We’ve been enthusiastic, and we need to maintain that energy once they sign and send us their money. This is crucial in the wrap-up stage: onboarding the customer and confirming their purchase. We want them to be happy that they said yes and to feel supported and nurtured. By doing this, we can prevent buyer’s remorse and service cancellations and ensure they feel great about signing on with us! Don’t take your foot off the gas pedal once you make the sale!
If You Want to Start Selling More as a Wedding Planner, You Need To Master These 7 Stages of Selling
Here’s a quick recap of the 7 stages:
- Prospecting
- Preparation
- Approach
- Presentation
- Handling Objections
- Closing the Sale
- Wrapping up
As a wedding planner, sales might not be your favorite part of running a business. However, it’s essential if you want to book more couples and increase revenue. Mastering the 7 stages of selling outlined above helps ensure that you can close each sale with confidence and make sure that your customer feels great about signing up for your services. After all, if you don’t maintain enthusiasm and keep nurturing them after the sale is made, they might end up feeling buyer’s remorse or canceling their service altogether!
On the other hand, if done well, you may find yourself continuing to sell to them throughout the planning process, making more money per wedding booked (and offering a better service to your customer overall!). For more ways to make more money without filling your calendar to the point where you never have a Saturday off again, click here.
Not sure what to do once you make the sale?
I don’t gatekeep the next steps over here! After you make the sale, do you know exactly what to do next? If not, you need my onboarding guide for wedding planners my friend!
Inside, there are 8 critical stages to the onboarding process that you must move each client through. Don’t worry, I will walk you through each phase, and by the end you will:
- Understand how to guide your clients through the onboarding process
- Have a complete onboarding strategy that nurtures and affirms the customer’s purchase
- Copy and paste my signature onboarding framework into your business
- Launch your new onboarding process in just a few hours without second-guessing what the experience should be like
- Feel confident in how you welcome new customers to your business
Happy onboarding all those new couples my friend! DM me on Instagram and let me know how it goes!
Ready to Elevate Your Wedding Planning Business?
We would love to welcome you inside The Planners’ Playbook, the membership for wedding planners who want to elevate the wedding industry and feel confident AF in their wedding planning business (especially when selling!). From masterclasses and workshops to a deep-dive playbook being released every month, The Planner’s Playbook has everything you need to streamline your processes and save time. Plus – you’ll even get a discount on the CC shop!
Explore More Wedding Industry Resources
- Wedding Planners – Should You List Your Wedding Planner Pricing Packages On Your Website?
- The 5 Stages of Scaling Your Wedding Business You Need to Know About
- Book More Clients This Engagement Season with This Sales Process
- 5 Secrets To Consistent Sales – Sales Techniques That Work For Creatives
- Top 2 Mistakes Wedding Pros Make That Sabotage The Sale
- How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market: Creating a Website for Wedding Planners That Get Results
- Want to Book Better Clients? Stop Marketing and Improve Your Client Experience Instead
- Wedding Industry Branding: How to Create A Recognizable Brand in the Wedding Industry with Brand Strategist Nicole Yang
- Should You Increase Your Price? How to Know When It’s Time to Raise Your Rates
- How to Book Your FIRST Client as a Wedding Planner
- How To Build Your Portfolio As A Wedding Planner When You’re Just Starting Out
- Elizabeth McCravy On How To Create A Knock-Out Business Brand And Website
- Top 5 Blogging Tips For Wedding Pros in 2023
For More Wedding Planner Business Secrets Follow Me On Instagram
You might see the highlight reel and think ending up here was always my plan all along but you’d be wrong.
Like any good career, there have been lots of pivots and hiccups, and lessons that had to be learned the hard way.
Not seen here? The time…
- I forgot to add chairs to a rental order and ended up footing the $2,000 bill
- A client sat across from me crying that I ruined her wedding because her parents table had a low centerpiece
- I had to borrow $4,000 from Grandma Vera to make payroll, because I didn’t pay attention to my numbers
- About a hundred “dream clients” hired a different planner than me and I felt like an absolute failure
- I cried in my car before a wedding because I was completely and totally overwhelmed with the amount of responsibility on my shoulders (OK, maybe I did this more than once)
- My seasonal launch of The Planner’s Playbook completely bombed and I felt like my entire business was falling apart
…and roughly 700 other moments I’ve chosen to leave off the highlight reel.
So if you’re at the messy, nothing’s-working stage right now? Just know that if you have been to one wedding in your life, you are starting with more experience than I had.
I’m getting ready to embark on an exciting new chapter that I cannot wait to share with you… it’s big, and scary, and I’m sure in another few years I’ll have a lot more lore to share… but in the meantime…
Cheers to all the ups and downs I’ve experienced over the last 19 years!
And a special thanks to the photographers who made a lot of this lore possible: @c10ike @allanzepedaphoto @stevedepino @withincreative @robertandkathleen @thebrandedbosslady 💜🫶🏼😘
I’ve come to realize that many of us want to have a village, but we don’t recognize that we have to be a villager first.
My friend carla @c10ike is one of those rare exceptions and I want to introduce you to her!
When I started my planning business, I had no contacts and no real idea what I was doing. I was so green it makes me laugh to look back on it now!
And somehow, I got lucky enough to be taken under the wing of this incredible woman who showed up for me then when I was a little baby business owner, and has kept showing up ever since in more ways than I could possibly count.
She’s taught me so much over the years, and I don’t mean in the traditional sense of teaching someone something. She simply lived her life, and I paid attention.
She modeled what it means to be a friend.
A sister.
A daughter.
A wife.
A mother.
A business owner.
A boss.
I learned generosity by watching her be generous.
Compassion, connection, leadership… none of it came from advice. All of it came from the way she carries herself and the way she treats the people around her.
She has taught me more than she will ever know by the sheer act of living loudly and joyfully in every corner of her life.
I am so lucky to call her my friend. So lucky to be one of the many, many people she has been a villager for.
Carla thank you for letting me grow up right beside you. I love you. 🤍
DAY ONE // WPI Spring Retreat 💜
This was our first real day together! The theme of this whole retreat was refinement, so we wasted no time getting into it on Day 1!
The women shuttled up to my home, walked through the gate to mimosas and the biggest hugs, and got their welcome totes filled with goodies I curated from female owned businesses that were mostly local!
Then we settled in, did some tapping to manifest all the answers we needed for the week, courtesy of our very own @ashley.peraino (who couldn’t join us this year, but was SO THOUGHTFUL to record a video for us!)
I opened with a talk on complexity, discernment, and self-trust (today’s podcast episode, BTW) simplifying your business and actually trusting yourself to lead what’s left.
From there the room took over. We had three incredible member gives: @c10ike on trusting your creative instincts, @ininkweddings on refining your creative POV, and @welldressedevents on generating real revenue through Google Ads (it’s giving… LEADS 😉).
In between we had small group discussions, hot conversations about where instinct and POV are out of sync, a homemade Caribbean lunch, and an afternoon of poolside snacks and conversation.
This is what the WPI room looks like. A talented group of women who came with one big business question and spent day one getting closer to the answer while having fun and getting their brains stretched!
All these gorgeous moments captured by our retreat photographer + my business bestie @c10ike 💜💜💜
Do it or delete it.
I said this recently to a coaching client, and now it’s sort of become our mantra inside WPI, because almost every business owner I know has a to-do list with 47 things on it (the same 47 things that were on last week’s list, and the week before that).
They don’t get done. They just travel from week to week collecting guilt, and that guilt somehow makes it even harder to get anything done at all.
After years of coaching women through this, you start to realize that most of those tasks don’t actually have dire consequences if they never happen. They just feel important because they’ve been living on your list rent-free for six months.
I want you to look at your to-do list right now and choose.
You do it… meaning you do it right now or at the very least put it on the calendar with a real deadline.
You delegate it… but only if it’s actually worth someone else’s time, not because you’ve been avoiding it and want to make it someone else’s problem.
Or you delete it… and I mean actually delete it, not shuffle it to a “someday” list where it will haunt you until 2027.
The guilt you feel about your undone tasks won’t go away if you magically “get more productive.” Instead I want you to see it for what it is: a list-curation problem.
What’s one thing you’re deleting today?
PS: I can confidently say these @aritzia sweatpants are 10/10
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