Why do people give up so easily?
I’m preparing a new presentation for this year’s Wedding MBA on my experiences and findings from the secret shopping I do. Sometimes clients hire us to secret shop them and sometimes we do it when someone inquires but doesn’t hire us, just to see how badly they might need help (cue the smiley emoji). What amazes us is how many times companies don’t reply at all to our inquiry, even when it’s directly through their website. Sometimes it’s a technological issue (easy to fix when you know about it) but other times the lead comes through, and we still get no reply. Then we’re waiting to see how many times a company will reach back out to us, when they don’t get a reply. The sad answer is that we usually only get one attempt from most of the companies we shop. A few others will try 2 or 3 times, and a small minority will try way more than that. Who do you think will get the business.
Listen to this 12-minute episode for perspective and I hope incentive for you to follow up more times than you’re doing now.
If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com
Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com
– Why do people give up so easily? Listen to this episode. See what I’m talking about.
Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Thanks for listening to another episode of the “Wedding Business Solutions” podcast. I’m working on a presentation for this year’s Wedding MBA on secret shopping, and the results and my experiences with secret shopping businesses just like yours. And whether you’re a venue, or caterer, or a photographer, a DJ, a rental company, officiant, whatever, you’ve probably been secret shopped. Maybe by me, but maybe by your competitors, right? Or maybe by somebody doing research in the industry. And here’s the interesting thing. Every time we do the secret shopping, if we shop at a number of businesses, we find companies that don’t respond at all.
Some of them are technological reasons. It’s not an excuse, but there is a technological reason, which actually it’s probably the easiest thing ’cause it could be fixed if it’s technology. I recently had a client of mine ask me to secret shop them, and they wanted us to secret shop actually on the phone as well as through their website, which we did. And we recorded the phone call when we shopped them and their person did not do that well. There were definitely easy things for them to fix on that, but it’s a person so it’s a little harder to get that person to adopt that as their new normal or their next normal. What was interesting though is we filled out their contact form. We got an auto reply, which I’m not crazy about auto replies, those of you that know me. I don’t think it was a great auto reply either. But then we got no reply. We got no follow up. No actual reply from a person.
So I waited a week, went back to the owner, and said, “Hey, we didn’t get any response.” Gave him the email address we used. They checked, it had come in, but for whatever reason it didn’t get to the right people, so they didn’t follow up. Waited another week, he said he was fixing that. Waited another week, tried it again. Auto reply again, no reply again. At this moment we’re shopping about 40 different companies and of the 40 there are one, two… About four or five that did not respond at all. I don’t count auto responses. That’s your computer saying we’ve received your message. That’s not a response, right?
Four or five that didn’t respond at all. Think about how much money that’s costing to not reply at all. Of the rest of the companies, everybody replied. Some of them quickly, some of them within minutes, some of them within hours, some of them within a day. Some of them eh, might have taken a couple of days, right? Not good because we know from The Knot and Wedding Wire that couples choose the first one about half the time, the first person who responds. So you do want to try to get to them quickly. I want you to not only be the first if you can, but obviously be the best response. Not just the first response. And then we’re tracking other things about, you know, how long is it on a smartphone screen? How many links or attachments or things are there? Again, if you’ve been reading my books or listening to this, you know I’m not crazy about either of those. We don’t want to distract them. But what I want this episode to be about is the follow up. And it’s about the follow up because it’s the easiest way to make more money without spending another dime on advertising and marketing. Without spending more than you are now.
I’m not saying you don’t need to spend money on that, I’m saying you don’t need to spend more if you would just work the leads that you get better. So of all of these companies, of these 40 companies or so, there are about six or seven that have tried a second time. A few of those, a third time. There’s one of them that’s up to about seven already in a matter of, I think it’s three weeks, and we’ve gotten seven responses from them. That company is going to get more business just because the others have stopped trying. Think about that. Think about all the companies that could have gotten the lead that you got. Just pick any lead that you get. And how many other companies got that same lead? Not that many. It’s a handful typically, right? It could be three, it could be five, it could be seven. It’s not 20. They’ve eliminated most of the others in your marketing category.
Again, if you’ve read my books, heard me speak, you’ve heard this phrase all the time. They’ve eliminated most of your competitors. They like what they’ve seen and heard and read and watched and experienced with you, and that’s why they made an inquiry. Which means you’re on a very short list. Why would you give up so easily? And then why would you complain about not having enough business or not profiting enough, when you have leads that you did not get a “no”? The biggest opportunity, that everybody listening here has including me, is the people that haven’t told you “no”. ‘Cause if you didn’t hear “no”, it doesn’t mean they booked somebody else. If you heard “yes”, you’re moving forward. If you’ve heard nothing, it doesn’t mean they booked someone else. Yeah, sure, some of them have. Some people will never tell you “no”. They don’t want the confrontation, they’ll never tell you no. And that’s why I’ve talked about and written about some easier ways to get people to tell you “no”.
Give them an easy way to tell you “no”, because we want a yes or a no. You don’t want to have a pile of people that have reached out that you don’t have a no and you just don’t know. These are these maybes, these could bes. But if you’re not still following up, you’re not going to get that business. Yes, some of them will come out of the woodwork and come back and say, “we’re interested”. But what if somebody else reaches out to them instead of you in that interim? They’re likely to get the business more than you because they’re the ones showing that they’re interested more. It’s actually one of the chapters in my new book, “Stop Selling and Help Them Buy”. Is that you want to be interested more than interesting. Right? Interested in their business. If somebody reaches out to me, as far as I’m concerned, that is my sale to lose. If someone reaches out to you, that’s your sale to lose. And because I know that through our secret shopping, because I know that most of your competitors are giving up so soon, it’s easier for you to get it just by following up.
Some people use an automated process. Again, not my favorite way to do it. Would I rather you did that than not following up? Absolutely. Would I prefer personalized follow up? Because you have to see what are people saying and is there something that they said that I need to respond to specifically, as opposed to a generic message? Yes, would absolutely be better. And if you are using an automated process, you want to make sure you stop that process as soon as they respond to you so that you are responding personally. Because if they feel it’s just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, they’ll feel like they’re just another number and they’ll go on to somebody else who’s responding personally. The only good news there is most people aren’t responding after a certain amount of time. You know, after about a week, most companies have given up. And they’re like, “Well that’s it.” And what I don’t want you to do is make assumptions that they’re price shoppers ’cause they ask about a price. Or they’re not interested because they stopped responding. It’s just not the case.
Some of you are sending emails that are going to their spam folder, and you’re not trying to text or to call or some other way, and they’re thinking you didn’t respond at all. Because not everybody checks their spam filter. I check my spam folder every day, 2, 3, 4 times a day because real stuff ends up in there and I don’t want to miss it. So I check that. I check the contact form on my website once a month. If I haven’t gotten a lead in the last week, I fill out my own contact form to make sure it’s not broken. Because that did happen to me. It happened where my form was telling people that their inquiry was submitted and it wasn’t going into my CRM, I wasn’t getting an email with the information, I didn’t even know it had happened. They’re waiting for me to respond. I had a client who called me up and said, “Hey, you know we inquired last October”, I think it was like March or February, “We inquired last October and you didn’t reply. We thought that was odd.” I said, “Yeah, that really is odd.” The guy that teaches you how to reply not replying would be really odd. And it turned out that the form on my website had broken. I don’t know for how long. I know at least for a few months, you know? And I thought, “Well just, it’s wintertime, I’m just not getting a lot of inquiries.” That’s what I thought. That wasn’t the case.
So now the first of every month my calendar reminds me to check the form if I haven’t gotten it. I hadn’t gotten a text in the last week or so, so I went to my website and I used the widget on my website to send myself a text. Now I know that it works. So you want to make sure you don’t miss a lead technologically, right? Do everything you can do to know that it’s still working. Don’t assume that it was working last year, it’s still working. Or not even last month, right?
Make sure your technology is working. If you have employees that change, make sure that all of your leads from The Knot, from Wedding Wire, from your social, from your website, are going to the new person or whoever’s supposed to be handling it. Or make sure there’s multiple people can see that the leads came in, so that you don’t miss any of those on someone’s day off, or if someone’s on vacation, or on leave or whatever. Or if somebody leaves, you want to make sure that you don’t miss out on leads. I’ve heard horror stories about this, where the technology was the problem. What bothers me more, because the technology, again, once you know it’s broken, you can fix it. What bothers me more is when people just don’t respond because they’re too busy or something. Right? And I get it. I get it, especially during season. And if you’re listening now, you know, in the summertime, or for some of you it’s slower season, some of you it’s busy season. I get it.
Do you think the customer cares? Do you think the person that took the time to fill out an inquiry on your website, on your social, on The Knot, on Wedding Wire, any place like that, do you think that person cares that you’re busy and that’s why you didn’t respond? No. And when you’re the customer, you don’t care either. Right? You don’t. You want to get a response from a person who’s taking a personal interest in you. That’s what you want. And you want that right away. You need to be following up. I have countless stories from people who tell me that by changing the way that they’re following up, by following up more times, they’re getting more business. I did a webinar recently for Wedding Pro and people had sent in things and one person said they had changed to responding the way that I teach, and they’re getting 60% of their people, their couples, are responding within 24 hours now on The Knot and Wedding Wire. How many of you would kill for that? Right? Getting 60% to respond within 24 hours to your message. Right?
Change the way you do it. That’s all they did. Right? Same person, same profile, same storefront. Changing the way they’re doing it. Richie, I don’t know if Richie’s listening to this, Richie’s the guy that got me started on the podcast. Last time I spoke about following up, he went and followed up with months’ worth of leads to his DJ company. Not just this week and last week, months’ worth. Some of them he might have had a conversation through digital or phone or whatever, and some not. And he booked five weddings.
I spoke in Ireland and a hair and makeup person wrote me a couple of weeks later, she followed up with five brides and booked three of them. Five that had been ghosting her. Five that she hadn’t followed up anymore and hadn’t heard back, followed up again one more time, booked three of them. How much money is sitting on the table that you’re not getting because you’re not doing the effort, because you’re not following up? Every once in a while I’ll go back to some of what we consider the kind of dead leads. And I followed up a lot of times, right? And I’ll go back again, ’cause I haven’t heard a “no”, and all of a sudden the person’s like, “Yeah, I am still interested, but I’m busy with this or that”. Or we’re doing business now. Or, “We don’t want to” and that’s okay. “We’re not going to do this now.” That’s okay. I want the no or the yes, I’ll take either one. So if nothing else, follow up one more time than you are now and I think you’ll get some more business from it. Thanks for listening. Let me know how it goes.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
©2023 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com
