[00:00:00.200] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Donald Miller says, If you confuse, you lose. In today's episode of the Power and Purpose podcast, I want to chat with you about two places where you might be confusing your prospects and losing the sale.

[00:00:16.180] - Candice Coppola (Host)

You're here to grow a business, but not just any business. You want to grow a profitable business with purpose, a business where you wake up every single day driven to serve your customers and make a difference in your own life. I'm Candice coppola, published author, business coach, and your guide to building. A profitable business with purpose. Join me here every single week as we explore how to build and grow your business with purpose. Get ready to dig in and have meaningful conversations about the strategies and techniques that will help you build your dream business. This is the power in purpose.

[00:01:02.020] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Hey there, friend. Welcome back to the power in purpose podcast. It's me, your host, Candice. In today's episode, I wanted to walk you through how you might be confusing some of your prospects, your leads during the sales process, and thereby losing them to your competition. Marketing and sales is always a hot topic here on the power in purpose podcast. I try to do my best to support you in this, help give you tools and tricks and tips that can help you to land more sales in your business, to help you book more of your dreamy clients. I do that especially with my course, The Client Cocktail. T oday, I thought we should take it back a little bit to Donald Miller's Building a Brand Story, one of my favorite business books. If you haven't read it yet, you should. Aleah Harris talked about this book in her interview with me where we talked about storytelling and your marketing and how to use it more effectively. Aleah is a brand story expert. This is one of those business books that I think will stand the test of time. Donald Miller wrote this book and let's see if we can grab the date.

[00:02:21.850] - Candice Coppola (Host)

I have it here in my hand. Donald Miller wrote this book back in 2017. I think this was one of the first business books I read as I really began to transition more into business coaching. It changed how I thought about marketing and my role as a wedding planner and as a business coach at the time. Donald Miller's promise in this book is to help you clarify your message so your customers will listen. There are two places that I see wedding pros really confusing people with their message, and two places where you could be clearer with your marketing and your messaging so that people understand who you are, who you serve, what you do, and how you solve their problems better than your competition. That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, a short and quick episode that's going to help you think differently about two areas in your business. I hope compel you to go check in on these areas of your business to make sure you're not confusing the hell out of people. Because Donald Miller says, If you confuse, you lose. And I don't want you to lose out on sales this engagement season.

[00:03:38.680] - Candice Coppola (Host)

So the first place that I see wedding pros confusing people is with your sales decks and your brochures. Whether you send a honey book brochure, shout out to our sponsor, honey book, or you're sending them to a landing page, maybe you send them a PDF, or there's some other way that you communicate your pricing and your product. This is an area where so much confusion happens on the prospects part, the leads part, and you lose the sale pretty quickly, actually. If you confuse somebody with your pricing, your sales dex, your brochures, they're going to tag out pretty quickly. They're gone. They're going to go follow the path of least resistance. It's often your competitors. Interestingly enough, in chapter 1 of Building a Brand Story, Donald Miller talks about this. I'm going to read you a passage from the book. This is on page 5, so right in the front. He says, Even if we have the best product in the marketplace, we'll lose to an inferior product if our competitor's offer is communicated more clearly. Even if you are the bomb, you are number 1, you are the most talented, you have the best service, the best client experience, you are the shit and you know it.

[00:05:01.120] - Candice Coppola (Host)

We all know it. You're amazing at what you do. No apologies for that. You will lose to an inferior product, somebody without as much experience as you, somebody who doesn't offer the same level of client experience, somebody who is not as talented as you. You will lose to that person if they communicate more clearly than you. Isn't that fascinating? And it's true. I've seen it happen. Not only has happened to me, but I've also been a customer where I've chosen someone who just communicated better and lived to tell the tale. Your sales decks and your brochures are one place where you really may be confusing your prospects. Here is how I see that confusion happening. There are a few key areas in your sales decks and brochures. There are a few key mistakes I should say that you're making where I see this happen. The first is whatever you're sending people with your pricing and your services, it's too freaking long. You're sending people a 14 page brochure, and I need you to realize, girl, nobody has time to read all that. Nobody has time to come through that to make sense of it, to try to make heads or tails of it.

[00:06:13.930] - Candice Coppola (Host)

It's too long. If there would be a Goldilocks link to a sales deck or a brochure, I would say outside of just listing out the services you offer or a page per package, maybe an additional one to two pages around that. You don't want to send something that's so long, it feels overwhelming, and people just automatically say, No, this isn't for me. It's too much. That just seems crazy. The first mistake you could be making is your sales deck is too long. The next is it's trying to do too much. I find that this happens when something is too long. It's trying to be too much. It's a sales deck. It's your autobiography. It's a glimpse into your process. There's a video attached. You're talking about your first grade trauma. Girl, what? This is doing way too much. It's doing the most and not in a good way. Sometimes what I find when I'm reviewing and critiquing sales decks for the women in my mastermind or Planner's Playbook, or just in my career as being a business coach, I have looked at hundreds of brochures and sales decks. It's doing too much. It's just doing too much at once and you're going to lose people when it's just too much information, especially unnecessary information.

[00:07:33.750] - Candice Coppola (Host)

The third, and this is really a big mistake, this one dings you pretty hard, is it's designed poorly. I know you're not a graphic designer and you're a wedding planner, you're a photographer, you're an invitation designer, a floorist, I get it. But you need to learn how to design graphics better if you're going to be creating these things yourself. And due to the nature of how marketing has changed, you need to get good at this stuff. And it's actually a lot easier than you think. You don't need a graphic design degree in order to just pick up some basics. Youtube is a great place to learn TikTok, Instagram. There are educators out there who will teach you how to design better, but you just need to get a handle of the basics. Often when I'm reviewing a sales brochure, a sales deck, the person has no concept of how to create something that is both visually appealing and easy to understand. It's a science. There's an art to graphic design, how to use typography to get people to read, to make sure skimmers slow their scroll. There is a method to breaking up text so that it's easy to digest, calling forward certain pieces of information that will get people excited or motivated, pairing that with images, white space around text.

[00:08:59.190] - Candice Coppola (Host)

There's a lot that goes into design, and it sounds complicated, but I promise it is easy to learn once you start to experiment with it and start to pay attention to how you're designing things in your business, whether it's an Instagram post or a sales deck or brochure. You need to make sure these things are designed well because the eye is what's buying. My eye is buying and it's not just buying the images of your work. It's also buying how your words are presented to me. And if you're writing in all caps and your spacing between your letters is an inch in between each letter, I am not reading that shit, girl. I'm sorry. You're using big script fonts and you're writing a paragraph. I'm not reading that. I'm not reading that. I think we have to have Nicole Yang, my graphic designer, come on the show. I think she needs to break this down for us some of the common design mistakes we're making. But you have to be careful of how you design. Simple is always better. And if you can remember that we're going to talk about that over and over here, actually.

[00:10:03.730] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Simple is always better. I know we love bells and whistles and we love motifs and we love this and we love that. We love color and we love playing around. We love fonts and we love scripts and we love Serif and we love San Serif. We love all the stuff. But simple is always best. So one reason why you might be losing people in the sale is your shit is crazy looking. It's designed poorly. This is an easy fix, though. You can buy a really nicely designed template and stay within the parameters. You can learn a little bit about graphic design, or you can just hire a graphic designer to do this for you, and it's worth the investment. Next, it's difficult to digest or compare. As Donald Miller told us in Building a Brand Story, if your competition is inferior but their communication is better, they will win. You need to make sure that whatever you're sending with your pricing and your services is easy to digest but also to compare against your competition. Realize that your sales deck is being compared next to another planner, next to another videographer or another florist. If yours is all over the place or more difficult to understand than the other person's, your lead, your prospect is going to gravitate towards the path of least resistance, the thing that they can understand more clearly, more simply, and more quickly.

[00:11:24.290] - Candice Coppola (Host)

You need to make sure that it's easy to understand and easy to compare. By compare, I nliterally put it up against, print it out and put it up against what the competition is sending to their clients. Is yours too long? Is the graphic design too crazy? Is it hard to understand? Is there too many words? Are there not any bullet points? I see that all the time. People don't use bullet points to express short, punchy lists of services and things like that. So you want to make sure that it's easy to understand and compare. Next, it's written in advanced language. As an expert, you obviously have way more experience than most people in what you do, but you have to be careful that you're not speaking with that experience in the language that you're using in anything marketing or sales related. Your ideal customer, girl, they don't know the first thing about what it is that you do. So make sure you're not talking to them like a fellow planner or a fellow forest, photographer or caterer. You have to recognize that your prospect has probably zero experience planning a wedding. And so to use industry jargon and language and terms is going to quickly make them feel inferior, could make them feel dumb.

[00:12:42.770] - Candice Coppola (Host)

And they're going to, you guessed it, peace out and go to where they feel more comfortable and confident, where they can easily understand what's being communicated. Another example of advanced language isn't just technical terms or even big words, but also just flowery prose. I see this all the time. Nobody expects you to be a novelist. You don't have to be Elizabeth Gilbert. You're not writing a Jane Austin novel. This isn't sense and sensibility. You don't need to write like that. You need to actually dumb it down. You need to make it so easy that a third grader could understand it. I know that's not sexy and we're taking away words that deeply resonate with you in your core. But if the person reading it can't understand it, you've confused them. And if you confuse, you lose. Also, if you wouldn't say it in conversation, if you wouldn't use the word if we were just sitting down talking, why are you using it in your marketing and in your sales? I want you to approach sales copy with some personality, but also with conversation in mind. It should be conversational. If it's conversational, it's usually easy to understand so long as it's not technical.

[00:14:05.200] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Then finally, in your sales text and brochures, your pricing makes no sense. I see this so often, especially if you have packaged pricing. What I see is two things. Thing number one is there's really not a difference between the services you're offering, but there is a difference in price. Meaning your People, Please, and Ask has just put every bullet point in every package and is offering way too much for... We'll use a planner as an example. Full service planning pretty much looks like it has the same level of service as day of coordination. So somebody reading your sales deck is like, Okay, well, I'm just going to choose the cheaper one. It feels like it has everything I need. I mean, look at all the services included in this. So you first need to make sure that your sales decks, your brochures, there's a differentiation between service levels. You can easily disconcern through even just the amount of text used to describe the service, the bullet points listed, people can easily see, Oh, this is an advanced level of service. There's way more included in this than there is in the last page, the last service.

[00:15:10.390] - Candice Coppola (Host)

The next is that they can't make sense of your price. The price jump is too small. It just doesn't make sense. And this is an interesting phenomenon where your month of coordination, for instance, is $1,500 and your full service is $2500. And they're like, Dude, how is this only $1,000 more? And it easily sets off alarm bells. And we feel like, This might be too good to be true. Or, How did they get to that price? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. And I'm comparing it against other people, and there's a much different price variation between the two. I don't think this is going to be the planner for us. You need to make sure, above all, that your pricing makes sense, how you arrived at that pricing, what that pricing looks compared to other packages of services that you might offer. And just make sure that when somebody is reading your sales text or Broadsures, they can understand how you arrived at that price. Hey there, friend.

[00:16:13.960] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Real quick, I want to share with you how you can sign up for a free trial with Honey Book. Honey Book is everything you need to get business done. And it's trusted by over 100,000 independent businesses just like yours to manage projects, book clients, send invoices, and most importantly, get paid. If you've been looking for an all in one solution to manage your customers, I want to invite you to sign up for a free trial with Honey Book. Go to candice coppola. Com honeybook to learn more. When you sign up for a free trial using the code purpose, you'll save 50 % off of your first year's subscription. Honeybook is what I used in my business as a wedding planner, and it helped me land every single sale. It's what helped me build a six figure wedding planning business. It's also what helps me today in my business. Go to candice coppola. Com honeybook to learn more and with the code purpose, save 50 % on your first year's subscription.

[00:17:28.630] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Outside of your sales decks and your brochures, the next place where I see wedding pros confusing and losing is their website. There are some overlap here. You'll notice some of the exact same mistakes over here on your website, but you'll also notice that there are some new mistakes. Now, recently, I invited women to come and join me inside my Mastermind wedding pro insiders. This is for high level wedding pros who are looking to grow their business to six figures and beyond and want to do it in community. If you're interested, you can go to weddingproinsiders. Com and sign up for the waitlist. But this is by application only, and I review and check out each person who signs up for the waitlist to see if they'd be a good fit. Part of that is going to their websites. I went to 50 websites over a two day period looking at people's work and trying to understand who they were, learn more about them. Do you know the number one mistake I saw on people's websites? Planners, photographers, stationers, floral designers, the number one mistake I saw them making that confused me so much that I had to go and try to figure this out on my own?

[00:18:38.140] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Do you want to know what it is? They didn't list clearly where they were located and who they serve and what they do. I'm on people's websites and girl, I'm googling zip codes, area codes. I'm like, where the hell is this? They didn't even say the city or a state. There's no city, there's no state on their website. Clearly listed above the fold, which is when you click on someone's website, it is literally everything you see before you start scrolling. There's no location listed, there's no city, there's no state, there's no country, if that's applicable. They don't say wedding planner, wedding photographer. They don't clearly state what they do. They might say something like, capturing once in a lifetime memories through the art of interpretive imagery. What is that girl? Are you a photographer? Are you an interpretive dancer? What are you doing? Tell me clearly and tell me where you are located. You need to make sure that your website very clearly states where you're located and what you do. The bonus to doing this is also SEO. If you haven't listened to Sarah Dunn's episode of the podcast, be sure to go and listen to that.

[00:19:49.100] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Sarah talks through some of the SEO mistakes you're making and how to fix them and what you should be paying attention to this year. She's also just really great to learn from in case SEO is something you want to polish this year or next or whatever. When you stay at your location and what you do, you also help yourself get found for that in search engine results. It's twofold and it's very important. Imagine you don't have your location on your website, people are clicking. You're assuming that they're coming to you already having this information, and many people don't. You don't know how they came to you, why they came to you. Make sure that your website and your copy is designed for everybody, whether they were referred to you by a friend, so they have awareness about your brand, or they literally click something and poof, here you are. They have arrived on your website, or maybe even they're researching you to see if you'd be the right fit for a mastermind you're applying to join. That's the number one mistake I see wedding pros making. Another mistake is your website is designed poorly. Listen, whether you are just starting out or you've been in business a while, your website is one of the most important places for you in your business.

[00:21:02.550] - Candice Coppola (Host)

It needs to be designed well, visually appealing. It needs to make sense. It needs to follow graphic design core tenets of graphic design. It needs to be designed well. Get yourself a Tonic Shop template. Get yourself a Show It template, if you don't have one, and redesign your website if it's looking like a hot mess. A poorly designed website is immediately going to send people elsewhere. They're going to first feel like, Oh, this isn't trustworthy. It's not designed well. It looks budget, it looks crazy, it looks outdated. Are they even still in business? I don't know if I can trust them. It's not as nicely designed as their competition. I'm out. A well designed website is absolutely critical and a must have. You can have a well designed website just starting out on a budget, and of course, as you grow your business too. Don't let being new or just starting being an excuse for not designing a nice website from the very get go on a budget. Another mistake I see that is confusing people is your website is all about you. Everything on that website is about you, girl. Every picture is of you and everything is about you and it's all about you.

[00:22:13.860] - Candice Coppola (Host)

What you will learn inside building a brand story and what you will hear in a Laya's podcast interview here on the show is that in order for you to grow your business and to land your ideal clients, you need to not be the hero of the story. You need to be the guide on the side. When you stop centering yourself in every narrative and every piece of copy, and when you stop making everything about yourself, and instead when you make it about the customer, their desires, their values, their problems, their feelings, the transformation they want. When you flip it from yourself and you send to the customer, well, that's when magic starts to happen in marketing because people don't care about you. You care about you, but they don't. They care about themselves. And so you have to feed that narcissistic tendency we all have to think about ourselves first. What's in it for me? Make sure that you let your prospect know from the get go what's in it for them. Now, another little side note here, you can use your story to tell the story of your ideal customer. So for instance, if you are a wedding planner and you started your business because your wedding planner was terrible and you thought I could do better and people deserve better, well, you can tell that story.

[00:23:32.460] - Candice Coppola (Host)

If you started your wedding planning business because you didn't have a planner and you realized how important it was and you wanted to be that person for others, you can use your story to tell the story of the client. You can use the challenges you faced in planning your wedding that would have been less challenging had you had an expert and use that as a way to share how to avoid making costly mistakes like you did. You can use your own story to tell the story of your customer, but it's not your story, it's theirs. I have a great episode here on the podcast all about storytelling. Make sure you go and check it out where I talk about stories you can tell in your marketing and your origin story being one of them, but it being really the story of your customer. Okay, you are writing all about you and not your ICA. Stop doing that. Make sure that your copy is really focused on the customer and the customer is the hero in everything you write. They're the main character. They're giving main character energy all the time. You are that supporting actress.

[00:24:28.680] - Candice Coppola (Host)

You are off on the side. You're the guide, helping them on their journey. Next, it's written in advanced language and it tries to damn hard. Your website needs to also be easy to read and easy to understand. Just like I mentioned in your sales decks, I want you to dish out flowery pros and any technical terms and stop writing like you're writing a PhD thesis on molecular biology and start writing in conversational language that people can understand how you would talk is how I want you to write. Don't write in advanced language. Don't paint a picture so abstract that I don't know who the fuck you are and what you do. And listen, I have reviewed enough websites to see this at play. And I think the reason why we might do this is maybe it's what we've learned in English in high school and college and university. It might just be naturally how we write. We have to learn some things. I also think we do it to compensate where we feel like, Oh, I need to sound like I know what I'm talking about. And yes, you do. But you can actually do that by just speaking in human terms, using human language, not this crazy language.

[00:25:41.720] - Candice Coppola (Host)

So make sure that you're not writing an advanced technical language or that you're not trying too hard. You are making it easy for me to understand. Another mistake that you are making on your website is you're not telling me what to do next as the visitor. You're not guiding me. You're not telling me, click here to book the best wedding planner in Charlotte. Click here to book the best wedding photographer in Ontario. You're not telling me what to do. I think that we need to be a little more aggressive in a good way. Like aggressive, more leader focused, being a leader and telling people what to do, rather than leaving it up to them to decide what they should do next. A good marketer will always tell you what to do next. And if somebody is really listening, they will follow your instructions. I talked about this when I talked about the onboarding episode that we just did recently, decision fatigue and how people have decision fatigue. I want you to give people next steps on your website. At every turn, tell them what to do next.

[00:26:49.100] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Finally, on.

[00:26:50.110] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Your website, the eye just isn't buying. What you are presenting your ideal client doesn't like. And this isn't the eye isn't buying and they're not your ideal client. We actually want to repel people. I want our marketing to do two things, repel and attract. And repelling is just as important as attraction. If your website is repelling people and they're not your people, good. It's saving you time. If it's repelling your people, your ideal clients, then something's wrong. Their eye isn't buying. They're not finding your website trustworthy. The images on your website, they don't like. They don't like your colors, they don't like your fonts, they don't like how it's presented. It's not giving. And so if their eye isn't buying, they're out. We're such a visual industry and people are going to connect visually with things, whether it's images, fonts, graphic design, etc. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to be the style of your customer. I think people appreciate other styles, other brand styles and colors. They might not choose them for themselves. They might not choose it for their wedding, but they like it. So if you are bold and colorful and maybe your customers aren't and that's okay, don't feel like you need to dull down your color palette.

[00:28:06.710] - Candice Coppola (Host)

It's not what I'm suggesting. But I want to make sure that your brand attracts the right people and that they're buying with their eye on your website. Because if they don't like what they see, they're gone. You have lost them. They're confused and they're gone. So these are the two places where I see wedding pros most often confusing people in their marketing and in their sales. Let's just do a really quick recap. You're confusing people in your sales decks and brochures by having them be too long, by trying to do too much, by being designed poorly. It's difficult to digest. It's difficult to compare against competition, making it easier to choose the competition. It's written in advanced language and your pricing makes no sense. On your website, similarly, it's designed poorly. It's all about you instead of your ICA. It centers you instead of making your customer the hero. It doesn't state clearly where you're located, what you do, and who you serve. It's written in advanced language and it tries way too hard. It doesn't tell the viewer what to do next and the eye isn't buying. Here's what I want you to do next, my friend.

[00:29:25.480] - Candice Coppola (Host)

I want you to do a little debrief, a little examination of your website, your sales decks. You can also maybe send these to a friend, somebody outside the industry to give you feedback and ask them to complete a survey or to tell you their thoughts and see where they get confused, what they don't like, what's not working for them, so you can get that feedback and make changes to these two spaces. With sales season here and with your business potentially poised to have one of the most amazing financial years yet, I want to make sure that you're not losing sales because your stuff could be designed better or you could have just said something a different way or presented your services in a way that's clear to understand. I want to make sure that you have the best shot at landing all the great clients this year. This is two areas where you can really dig in to make sure you're not confusing and losing people. In the show notes for this episode, I've linked to all the things that we've discussed here today. In case you want to go check out Donald Miller's book, Building a Brand Story.

[00:30:29.210] - Candice Coppola (Host)

You want to sign up for Wedding Pro Insiders Waitlist, or even go and purchase the client cocktail booking magazine worthy weddings with my formula. So be sure to check out the show notes of today's episode for all the details. Thanks for listening today. Let me know, what area do you feel like you're most guilty of confusing people? And what area do you have locked down in your business? When I said you might be doing this, you were like, Nope, that area? I know I do really well. Go tell me over on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'm here to remind you, as always, there's so much power in your purpose. Thank you so much, friend. Until next time.

[00:31:11.650] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Power In.

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