Wedding Business Solutions

Kevin Townsend - Weddings in New Zealand!

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Kevin Townsend - Weddings in New Zealand

What if your wedding business had to navigate strict lockdowns, shifting markets, and unique cultural expectations—would your sales process survive? How do you attract the right clients and keep your venue calendar full when economic tides turn? In this episode, I share what weddings are really like in New Zealand, including how refining inquiry forms, understanding cultural differences, and using data-driven decisions are helping venues thrive amidst challenge and change. Could your business habits use a Kiwi-style upgrade?

Listen to this new episode for real-world strategies from New Zealand on qualifying leads, responding to economic shifts, and building a sales system that works—even in uncertain times.

About Kevin: 
The marketing manager and director of New Zealand wedding company Simply Events. The company owns and manages two wedding venues in Auckland – Abel Estate and Tui Hills. Kevin comes from a background in journalism, media syndication and metadata. In 2028 he and his project-manager wife Ruth Carpenter went into the wedding industry, initially running a pop-up wedding business called Simply Wed before buying Tui Hills in 2019 and Abel Estate in 2021.

Contact Kevin
https://www.popupweddings.co.nz/ 

https://www.instagram.com/popupweddingsnz/ 

https://www.instagram.com/tuihills/ 

https://www.facebook.com/tuihillsauckland 

https://www.instagram.com/abelestatevenue/ 

https://www.facebook.com/abelestatevenue

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 Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com 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  

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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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 Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Weddings around the world, are they the same? Are they different? Let's find out about New Zealand. Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so happy to have my friend Kevin Townsend on from New Zealand to talk about weddings in New Zealand. Kevin, how you doing?

I'm doing fine in the circumstances.

In the circumstances. Okay, tell me, what are the circumstances?

Well, as you probably. Well, you may or may not know, New Zealand had a very strict lockdown that went on a really long time. They chopped off our part of New Zealand at the top of the north island and put us into lockdown longer than anyone else. And then that's been followed by essentially a few years of recession. So what a great time to get into the wedding business.

Right. And then you have a new. Is it a Prime minister, a president? What is your.

Yeah, yeah, Prime Minister. Yeah, got a new government and they're sort of trying to kick start the economy. I think technically at the moment we're out of recession, but only just. So, yeah, we are definitely seeing market being quite difficult. You know, people just don't have the money in their pockets that they used to have. And I don't know, they had this saying survived 25 and now I'm thinking it should really be survived 25 because it's actually slightly worse so far than 24.

Wow. Well, but you had some still pent up demand coming out of COVID in the 24, 23, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that has sort of dissipated and now it's things like mortgage interest rates that are sort of holding us back. Consumer confidence is down slightly.

Right.It's not going to go on forever. But yeah, so that's why I say in the circumstances, I think we doing okay.

Yeah. You know, the whole idea of we're in recession, not recession, those are the economists looking at figures. You know, people feel it in your wallet or you don't feel it in your wallet, you know that that's really what it is. So let's talk about, you know, two parts of this. So that's a little bit more about what's going on with that and then about just weddings in general, you know, forgetting about COVID the actual wedding itself. So are you, are you getting inquiries these days?

Yeah, inquiries are going reasonably well. I'm kind of happy with it. We made a decision some time ago to add a bit of friction to our inquiry forms and collect more data from people who are inquiring. And we got rid of a lot of tire kickers and getting better quality inquiries. So I think that it's really hard to know sometimes. Is it good to have a heap of inquiries? I mean, every, every. And this is one of the differences with America is every January is our peak time for delivering weddings, but it's also the peak sales time between because of the different seasons. Right.

Reverse to the States.

Right.

So that can be quite difficult. So sometimes I think my wife, who handles a lot of the inquiries would hope that it was not quite so many in January and then it sort of tails off a bit. So we're happy enough at the moment, I think, and we'll see where that goes.

Yeah, that's an interesting twist on that because being in the northern hemisphere, you know, our season, the busiest time in the states for weddings and people are listening around the world. But here in the States, May through October now it is seasonal in certain places in Arizona and Florida. Down south, the summertime is slower, they're busier, more, you know, towards the wintertime, like you. But for the most part, May through October is the busiest time here. So we have that advantage. If you're listening here when you complain about you're getting inundated in January, you're not doing weddings while you're trying to follow up with all those inquiries as well. And that's why it's important to have those systems in place regardless of the time of year, because you can't not follow up, but you also can't not deliver. Right.

In your case, you can't not deliver the weddings as well. So tell me about the increasing the form because typically increasing the number of fields on a form reduces the number of inquiries which again, you're trying to do that, but you're trying to get rid of the tire kickers. So what did you do on the form? What did you add, take away? What did you do?

Just a few questions, quite basic questions really. Just how many guests are you expecting? What, what approximate date do you want? What kind of wedding are you looking for? And we gave them some, that was just a tick box thing which has been very useful to understand what they want. It's one of those things. I have to say that part of the reason also is that we have made a decision that we're, for want of a better term, going to be a data driven business. And we get some incredibly valuable information from those inquiry forms which enable us to track through what happened, see what worked, see what didn't. I'll give you a little example. I've just been Working on producing a whole lot of grass we use, for those who don't know, at Looker Studio, which is a Google product, which is free, which is great. And I don't know how they're managing to make it free, but it's just this huge thing.

So you get lots and lots of graphs and so I spend quite a bit of time graphing what people are doing. So one of the things, one of the questions on the form is what date? As I've said, what date are you after? What are you looking for? So what we've been able to do is to measure what's the demand for every month during the year and then go and look of that, of those inquiries, how many did we actually sell? So what months are we performing really well on and what months are we dropping the ball? So we've just done a big thing where we've adjusted prices and some offerings. We did the same sort of thing with. How many people do you want at your wedding? Same thing. We discovered we weren't selling enough big weddings, so we've taken a whole lot of actions to change that around. And when we sort of examined it, we could see why we weren't selling so many. We didn't make enough song and dance about it on our website. We didn't have a specific page about larger weddings.

So we've changed that. We've done some pricing changes. So as well as getting rid of the tiger, because the people who do come to your website, you get a lot more information out of them and you can change what you're doing and see whether it's working.

So you talk about the tire characters. Is there pricing on your website? Actually, we should step back because we didn't really say what you do. So tell everybody what you're doing. Now that we're a few minutes into this, tell people what you do, because I know that.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got two wedding venues here in Auckland. So one is a very, what I guess quite a usual wedding venue. It's in a wine region, so vineyard style, it's. It's an historic winery. It doesn't produce any grapes. Produces a few grapes, but they don't. We don't do anything with them.

So we've got vines and everything which people like and that's all cool. And then our second venue, Tui Hills, which is that picture that you can see behind me, that's really the New Zealand venue, the New Zealand Bush, Ferns, Palms. It's got the whole New Zealand vibe going on. So that's what we do. But we started out interestingly and doing pop up weddings. That's how we got into the business with a thing called simply wed, which was luxury pop up weddings. And it didn't really work, but we learned a lot of lessons and now we are offering popular pop up weddings and doing way better because we changed how we offered them. So that's, it's been a little bit of a journey.

So describe what you mean by a pop up wedding.

Well, I guess it's sort of a bit like the word elopement has changed meaning. It used to mean you ran away from your parents, went to another. There you go. Went to Vegas maybe in your case or I don't know, somewhere else in New Zealand and you got married. Now it kind of just means a small wedding. Like a really small, like.

Yeah, I have some clients with that. So now you and I met how many years ago now? It's.

Well, well, I think we might have met the lead. Probably don't remember it at all. At your stand at the 2019 winning NBA. Okay, so that's, that's when you first came on my radar and you know, we, we, we made a big decision to go to the wedding. Mba, we'd only just got into the sort of owning a wedding venue and I've got to say, it transformed everything that we did from then on.

That's great. That's great. And, and then we worked together during COVID We did some remote stuff. We worked together again. And that's why, you know, they thought you and I have been in contact, you know, every once in a while we're messaging. Anyway, so I love this idea. Okay, so is there pricing on your website for the venues?

Yep, definitely.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that doesn't, it doesn't go into everything, but it's enough. So people should know.

Right. And again, when you talk about getting rid of the tire kickers, one of the problems that a lot of people have is they don't want to put pricing on their site. But then people reach out who can't afford them. And if we think about this, we live in a world where we can get a price for just about anything online these days. So the lack of transparency, I've stopped saying it's a generational thing because it's really anybody, you know, you and I, who are not digital natives. Right. You got the white on top, I got the white on the beard. We're not digital natives.

Right. We're used to. Now we want to get a price for something we go online, I mean way, way, way back before I was in this industry, a long time ago when I sold cars, you couldn't get pricing information without showing up at a dealership. Now you go online, you can get all the pricing, get everything that you need for just about anything. So when there's no pricing, you encourage everybody to reach out. Then you get the tire kickers. But you also lose people who can afford you because of the lack of transparency. It's the two sides to that.

So I think having the pricing on your site certainly helps. Getting rid of the tire kickers, the additional fields, again, it's up in the air. It's working for you with that. Is it just that? Is it other things that went along with it? You know, who knows? I like leaving some of the questions off for something easy to ask them. But I love the idea of, you know, what type of wedding do you want? So what are the choices? When you, when you're saying, because you said they're a tick box, what is it?

Well, what we've done is we've created sort of three levels of weddings. So you have, at the top is what we call a classic wedding. So the full, well we do them for eight hours here. So that's ceremony and reception is normal. Then we have, at the bottom we have the pop up weddings which are two and a half hours. We can, you can have as many people as you like come to them. We've had, you know, we've done pop up winnings of 120people but you just have canapes and drinks at the end.

Right.

And then you go home or go home. Yeah, right. So that, so that's the cheapest option. And then in the middle was one that we didn't know whether it was going to work but it's actually proven to be a lot more popular than we thought. Which is what we call a compact wedding. So that's five hours long. Now I'm not sure if that's normal in the States or not.

It's kind of normal, yes.

Yeah, it's really unusual here. It's unusually short. So there you go. There's another difference, right. And we found that that particularly appeals to people who just don't want the party at the end.

So describe, describe this eight hour. Because people listening here from the States and I would say even in Canada and some other places, you know, it's typically the, of five hours you might have the ceremony, the cocktails on there. So five to six hours is typical. They might go into an after party or something. But that's, that's more of a typical thing of five to six hours. So tell us, give me the timeline for this. Eight hours.

Okay. Well, starts off normally at 4:00 clock with the ceremony and then probably go in for. Then you have this sort of the quote unquote cocktail hour, which is never only an hour and it's never only cocktails. But anyway, so that's canapes and champagne or whatever the people want. And that's sort of, you know, it's the hugging and the kissing and all that. And that goes on for an hour or so. And then you get, often at that point the couple go away for photos or they get photos on the, on the, at the venue itself.

Right.

And then, and for dinner at about 6, and then speeches and what have you get you through at about 8:30, maybe 9:00 clock and then it's party time. So that'll go through till midnight.

So the dinner. So ceremonies, how long?

Well, typically only about 20 minutes to half an hour.

Right.

If it's an Indian ceremony, it'll go for an hour or whatever.

Sure.

But yeah, so it's, it's short.

Right. So that's, that's very celebrating. And then the, the, that drinks reception, the cocktails, an hour up to, well.

Anywhere from an hour to two hours depending on what they want to do. Right.

So that's, that, that's the extending over here now. Something that's different around the states. Not just different, you know, across oceans and all. I live in New Jersey now. I grew up in the New York, in New York City and we have what has been dubbed kind of the yo yo wedding because when you go in and you, you sit down and you have your salad and then you get up and dance and then you sit down, have your entree and then you get up and dance. And then you sit down and they cut the cake and you have your dessert and then you get up and dance and it's this. And a friend of mine in Chicago has got a wedding band and he offers this dancing between courses as a novelty. And I said, what do you mean a novelty? That's every wedding in the New York area.

It's just, it's just like that. It's just the way it is. And other places you sit down, you get your meal. That, that's, that, that's what it is. So, so if we're talking about half an hour for the ceremony, maybe 90 minutes, you're two hours into that. Eight hours now you have six hours for dinner into this. That. So you said like 8 o' clock, 8:30.

That's when the. It's just dancing from then until.

Yeah.

At night.

39 o' clock here till midnight. Typically. Although quite often we find that the weddings tend to start winding down at about 10:30, 11, you know.

Right, right. People are done.

Yeah. A lot of people come to weddings, they're all fired up. They're going to, you know, go till one in the morning or whatever they think. And it just takes its toll.

It's a long time. So is. Is an open bar typical or cash bar? How do they do it?

Well, we. What's typical here is you have like one of two ways. You either have bar tab.

Right.

So that the couple, you know, pay for the.

Put down something. Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then after that when that runs out, which usually gets stopped up. But you know, once that runs out, then you people have to pay. Or the other thing is a beer and wine and soft drinks drinks package. You don't pay any more. But it's fixed price for. For each person.

Right.

Which is very popular, as you'd imagine.

Right? Yeah. But what's interesting is when I. I talk to my catering clients, bottles of beer, it cost you more for that bottle of beer than pouring that alcoholic drink. And yet we charge less for the beer and wine than we do for the alcohol when it actually cost more to do that. The profit margin on that is less.

Yeah. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah.Yeah.

So just getting back to the compact wedding then. So for the five hours, you're going to get to about 9 o' clock and you've basically just finished dinner, you say your goodbyes and then and everyone leaves.

Okay.

Which we've discovered that particularly Korean and Chinese customers really like that because it's more unusual for them to have the party.

Okay.

It's more of a Western thing. And you probably wouldn't realize this. I'm sure that in Auckland we have about 10% of the population is Asian. What we would call Asian as not Indian, but Right. From Southeast Asia and China. Yeah. So it's, it's an important market and they're having more weddings than other New Zealanders.

Interesting. You know, how far is it from New Zealand to that part of the world? Oh.

I don't know. Singapore's what, about 12 hours or on a plane or whatever. But Ellen, everything's a long way.

Right? Right. I haven't been to New Zealand yet. I've been to Australia, haven't Been to New Zealand. I was thinking about popping over when I realized that it was what, a five or six hour flight to pop?

Oh, no, it's only three from Sydney. Only three from Sydney. So it's not too bad.

Okay, not too bad. No excuse. Next time I get down there. Yeah, we, there was a conference I did not go to in Bali last year because it was 30 hours of traveling from here and my wife has about a seven hour flight limit and you can't take seven hour flights and get to Bali. So not gonna, not gonna happen. So, so, so the. What's. Percentage wise, maybe what's the price difference between that middle, that five, six hours versus that eight hours? How much less are they paying?

Honestly, it's not huge. We, we halve the venue fee, which is, you know, typically on say a Saturday, it's like 3000 New Zealand, which is about 2000American at the moment. And we have that, so not actually that different.

Right. Well, it sounds like it shouldn't be because it's just a time difference. They're still having a full dinner, Right. They're still drinking, they're just not staying later. Yeah.

And of course with weddings, people drink half of their allocation in the first hour.

Right.

So it makes hardly any difference to the amount that they drink. Doesn't make any difference to the eating. It's really only the fact that they don't have a DJ or a band at the end and they don't dance where we hardly have any drinks consumed anyway. So, yeah, it works. I, I think it mostly it's because it fits in culturally with some people and because there are some people who just don't want to dance.

Right.

They just don't want to get.

So are they not having music or just not having it later?

Well, they might have some music during dinner or what have you. We've had people who've had things like a cellist or whatever you know, during the, during the meal. But essentially dinner's finished and that's fine.

There is it, you're done. But again, culturally it fits. Which makes, you know, which makes sense. You're offering them something. I'm glad to hear that you're not charging a lot less for that. Because, you know, people talk about sales, sales, sales. Really what it comes down to is profitability and going back to the data. And that's a thing that a lot of people don't have their head around is a lot of this data that you're talking about.

And when you look at supply and demand and say okay, whatever our busiest month is, which might be January or might be, you know, February, whatever it is for you, this, each of your venues does one wedding at a time.

Yeah. So that it's always exclusive use for each one. But we are doing them on the same day for sure.

You do, right, because you can do a two and a half hour. You're not doing a six hour and an eight hour, you're just doing a two and a half and a.

No, if we got one at Tui Hills for eight hours, we'll do one able for two hours as well.

Right, that's what I'm saying. But you're not going to do a six and a.

There are some people who try that sort of thing, but it never, never works.

Yeah, we, my wife and I were talking the other day because we got married on a Sunday. We started at noon and we had to be out. I think it was, it was five o' clock or so because there was another wedding coming in on a Sunday. There was another one that was going to be another six hours. You know, on top of that going till midnight. And they were going to turn that room very fast and get another group in. But yeah, you know, I have some clients that will do Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday evening, Sunday morning, Sunday evening. Throwing five in on a weekend, you got to be careful you don't burn your staff out.

But, but you know, you're certainly making good use of, of the profitability on the busiest months.

Well, what do I say? You got to sweep the asset.

Right. Well, you know, again, looking back at the data, if everybody would look, I talk about your most important inventory is your calendar because it's not going to change. Right. So your busiest month, whatever it is, you're going to get four Saturdays, five if you're lucky. You know, once in a while we get lucky with five, but yeah, pretty much it's four. And if you see that you're getting those inquiries. So are you, are you turning away the smaller guest count weddings or are you just increasing the minimum spend or minimum guest count for those busiest days?

So we do have different. We use minimum spend, not minimum guest numbers. Which minimum guest numbers is quite common here. Yeah, we don't like that as a way of differentiating because we have a lot of extra services that people can pay for and a lot of extra hire items. So we can always get someone with a smaller wedding up to a nice big budget.

Right? Yeah.

And they benefit, makes it easier for them. They're getting the, all the things that they want in one package, which.

And it's still exclusive use of the venue, which is what they want and you're getting. Right. It's just what, you know, minimum spend is an industry phrase. It's not a common phrase for somebody who's shopping for something they've never shopped for before. They don't understand that. So I, I've seen it done different ways. One of my clients puts the prices on the website per person, but then says the minimum number of people. Of course, the same thing could happen if they came and said, okay, well I don't have 160 people, I have 120.

Great, well, let's see how we can get you to there. Let's add the photo booth. Let's add these things on. And you say, okay, I'll do that wedding if, if they really want that. But you know, as we all know, once that inventory is taken, it's taken. The next person comes along with 300 guests and you can't take it. Although it did happen to somebody that I know in Mexico. They didn't tell them this, but I'm sure they just got a bigger wedding because they moved them to a different property.

You know, they were at this new property and they said, no, we can't do that anymore, but we can put you here. And I was like, oh, yeah, they got a bigger wedding. That's what it was. It's not right. You know, you took that wedding, you shouldn't do that. But sounded like that to me, that they were just getting bumped. Yeah, for somebody better on that. So what are some of the things you've learned now when things are a little bit leaner? Are you doing anything different in terms of following up or stuff like that? Because, you know, things are a little.

Still wonky with the economy at all.

I think that we've been following up for a long time. I think the last time we had a little teaching session with you, which was really good, we sort of got to the point where we decided that what was most important was the system for selling, not who was doing the selling. I mean, you need someone who's personable and all that, but following the system, doing the right things, knowing what to say, but having it as a system that, you know, that really made a huge difference. So part of that system that we have is we do have a number of follow ups. And I was listening to a podcast from you a while back about how people sort of bail out from following up really early in the piece.

So good, good for you. Bad for them.

Yeah, that's right. So we try not to do that. In fact, we've actually got a little plan at the moment to go back to people who inquired even two years ago for weddings, which we would have given up on eventually. You get ghosted, you know.

Sure.

And you try so many times. You try all the different ways, phone, text, email, the whole whole thing. And just going back to see, well, you know, they wanted a wedding at the end of 2026. Did they get it? Did they go ahead? We find, like just at the moment, we've seen quite a lot of inquiries from people who we'd given up on like a year ago and we thought, oh, they're long gone. And then they've been coming back to us because they postponed the whole thing for a while.

Right.

So you've got a resource there. As long as you're recording your inquiries and, you know, making sure everything's going to be written down somewhere that you can get to them. So you could even go as far as maybe a year after, maybe longer, you just don't know. So look, there might be 100, 150 of those people on their books. You know, it's not that big a deal. And if we sell one or two weddings out of that, it'll be well worth it, right?

Well, you know, my favorite phrase, if you don't ask, the answer is always no. I worked with somebody the other day. He does weddings in Italy, so destination weddings for Brits and us and people coming over. And he's advertising here in the States and he's responding right away, but he's about 1 out of 10 are getting back to him. Right. So he's getting ghosted a lot. And I looked at how he was responding and, you know, too long and the brochure didn't open well on a phone and all the typical things that we see. And so we came up with, I forget what it was.

Seven or eight different messages. So this is the system, right? You respond this way. If they don't respond, you do this. If they don't respond, you do this and do this and do this. And about three days later he messaged me and said six of the last nine that inquired, he's gotten conversations with now one out of ten before, now six out of nine. Why? Meeting them where they are. Nice short message, just having a conversation, not trying to dump everything on them all at once. I posted this video on Social the other day, actually reposted it from somebody that put it up there about Gen Z And I'm trying really hard these days not to just say Gen Z is this, or Gen Y is this, or Gen X is this, because we're really right.

Now, if you just look at the age brackets, the youngest Gen Ys are 29. The oldest Gen Z's are 28. They're the same people, right? Don't forget the letter. They're. They're the same people. But what was interesting is it was a video saying that Gen Z has telephobia. Like they're actually, they don't know how to use the phone. They're afraid of the phone because they didn't grow up having to use it like you and I did.

And I was telling this to a friend of mine who's got teenage daughters. And he said, yeah, he told his daughter, you know, call. You want to find out? Just call. And she goes, well, what do I do? He's like, what do you, what do you mean? What do you do? Pick up the phone and you call them. She didn't know what to do. She didn't know how to have the. Had a conversation. And they're actually, Gen Z is taking courses, taking classes on how to use the telephone.

And yet what do we see? Almost half of the people that we do secret shopping, they're asking for a phone call right away and they're wondering why they're getting ghosted. And, and here's one of the reasons with people that just don't, don't know how to use the phone and they don't want to use the phone. It's not their communication method. So we still, yeah, it's, it's really, really hard to get my head around that somebody doesn't know how to use a phone because it seems so natural.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's New Zealand's a sort of a smaller country. Maybe that's a just different culture or whatever. We find the phone works pretty well even now.

Good, good.

And we do, generally speaking, ring first, the first thing. But we, we don't send an automatic response. Someone called Alan Bird told me that was not a good idea. So we, we don't do that. We'll bring them. If we don't get them, then we'll email and text.

Right, right. So you're. Now how often do you, would you say that they're actually answering the phone? Because of course, it's their availability. It's not just whether they want to talk on the phone. They may, they don't know you're calling. Right. It's not an appointment. So how often does somebody actually pick up?

I will say around about 5050.

That's good, that's good. And listen, I have no problem with calling. I certainly did cold calling for 10 years, driving around, knocking on doors. I have no problem calling somebody. You have to be prepared with a short message. And your message is going to be, you know that. Sorry I missed you. I was very excited to speak to you about having your wedding here.

I'm going to send you an email right now. If you don't see it, check your spam folder. You know, because they're crazy these days. And then texting, we know that over 90% of text messages are seen within three minutes. That's not the case for, you know, an email. They're not seeing that right away, but they are seeing that text. So texting has been working really well for a lot of people here. And if people are thinking, hey, I don't want to use my personal cell number, you don't have to.

There are texting services. If you text my phone number, my main phone number, it's a landline, you know, the cord that doesn't charge the phone, it's the, you know, but you can text that. And I get it on my phone, my iPad, my desktop, my laptop, I get that everywhere. And I did, I did that because I used to have, here's my cell number, here's my office number. And one day somebody handed me a business card and I was going to call them and I'm looking at the two numbers and it was cell number and office number. And I was trying to decide, is it okay to call their mobile because it's on the card. But I don't really know them that well. And instead of calling them, I'm sitting there looking at their card thinking, which number should I call? And I said, I don't want to do that to my customers.

I want them to just see a phone number, call, text, whatever you want. So that's years ago. I turned that into a textable number just to make it easy, reduce the friction. So in your follow up system, right, so you're going to call right away, you're going to email, you're going to text. How I love the fact that you're going back to people way more than just months ago. Because I tell people, just go back to people from months ago and just send them one sentence. Are you still looking for a beautiful venue to host your wedding? Are you still looking for a creative officiant to make Your ceremony. Beautiful.

You're still looking for a videographer to capture the sights and sounds. Whatever. One sentence I have. And just to clarify what Kevin was saying, an auto response, not an automated email. Right. Because you can send an automated email. I do that. It's 30 minutes after you fill out my contact form.

It's not immediate. And I did that, Kevin, because I'd be on stage and somebody would inquire and get an immediate email from me, except I'm standing in front of them on stage. Clearly, I didn't send that to you. But 30 minutes later, oh, Helen's in the hallway. He's.

He's.

He's messaging me that it makes more sense. But I have eight. I have a series of eight of those. And I. In this past week, two people from the sixth and seventh messages responded to me. Right. And I'm okay with a no, I'm okay with hey, we've already booked. Or we don't need that anymore because that's an answer.

Right. But how many ghosts do you have? From. Like you said, from, you know, a year ago, two years ago, that.

Yeah.

Are you also following up with the people that came in? Right. They. They had had a tour, but then you didn't hear anything.

Yeah, yeah, we do. Although we. We find that is much more difficult because they. You've kind of answered all their questions already. I mean, we try and keep some things that we can follow them up with. So we'll see maybe. So if they're interested in something and we. It wasn't available to see at the time or send them a picture or if they wanted to see.

What does this look like with, with a wedding in it? We show them that. That sort of thing.

But how, how, but how long. Because you said you're going back to people that a year ago, inquired.

Yeah.

What about people that inquired, came in, but then, you know. They didn't tell you? Yes. They didn't tell you. No. Are you still following up with them?

I. I think we're following up with them for about a month, sometimes more. It kind of depends on whether we think that this is worthwhile. There is one little secret weapon that we have.

Okay.

Which is that we use a program called Better Proposals.

Okay.

And we team that up with HubSpot as our CRM. And we can see in the CRM when they've opened our proposals. Right. When they're looking at our proposals, when they're looking at our emails. And so if someone. And this definitely happens, they send in an inquiry, we try and ring them, don't answer. Fine. We text them, no reply.

We've emailed them. Then we send them a proposal anyway based on just a little bit of information that they've given us. And our proposals are interactive. You can change the number of guests, you can change what you're selecting. That's all of that sort of stuff. So they can work with it, but we see what they're doing from outside as well. That's just how the Internet works. And so you might get someone who doesn't respond to anything.

They never open the proposal. It's absolutely flatlined. I think those people, if they would be at the bottom of our list to follow up.

Right. Right now, if they've never opened. The other thing is, did they get it? Like, did it go to. Go to junk, which you don't have much other than calling or texting at that point, because you keep emailing, it keeps going to junk. I had a consultation earlier today, and if you're listening, you know, I'm talking about you with your Yahoo email address. He never got the zoom link because Yahoo probably sent it off. I sent it again. He didn't get it again.

And he said people give him crap for having a Yahoo address. I'm right. But he's also missing out on who knows what because he's not getting those things. So, you know, if. If they've never opened after inquiring, you got to think maybe, maybe it is just going to junk. Maybe they're not seeing it.

Yeah, yeah, that's possible. But the text won't be going to junk, so, you know, they're going to get those, so.

Right.

Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, there's only so much you can do.

Yeah. And it's like scoring them, right? You're scoring. These are. These are our better prospects, these over here. And you know what? Sometimes if a 5 is the best one and a 1 is not, sometimes the threes, just like you said, they pop up. And all of a sudden it's. Yeah, we were busy with fill in the blank school or we've saved more money or it was more than we thought it was going to be. So we saved.

My son had gotten engaged in November of 2023, and they were looking to get married quickly in March. March became June, June became July, July became August, August became September. Nobody was following up with them. Right. The people that they looked at in January for March, nobody was following up with them at that point. And, you know, would they have used one of those people? Who knows? Who knows? But the fact is nobody, they weren't asking anyone.

Here. And I don't know what the numbers are. In the States, it's quite common for someone to inquire at 10 wedding venues and get one or two replies of any sort from the wedding venues.

Yeah.

Which I'm astounded by. And when I hear these stories, that can't be right. But I just keep hearing them.

Yeah. That, that's, that's worse than here, if, you know, if that's across the board. Because our secret shopping. We've secret shopped over 650 companies. Right. Including yours, at some point. You know that. Yeah.

And you know, we get, we see about 16, 17%. We get no response. I did have my Assistant Reshap that 17% just in case it was a technical issue. It was something, whatever. And a third of those we didn't get a second time. We didn't get anything. That's twice. I'm watching hundreds of thousands of dollars flying out the door because they're not replying to an inquiry through their own website.

It just blows my mind. But then the other thing is that over 50% send the one response and then never follow up after that.

Yeah.

Which is crazy. So the average number for 650 companies is two. And that's it. You're done. Right. By the time you've done 2, 2/3 of the companies are done. 3, 3/4 of them are done for, you know, you're getting to 80% or more are done. That's why I have eight with mine.

Because by the time you there, you're in single digits. Nobody else is following up. And if you have a good system, and if you, if you didn't hear this part before, Kevin's talking about the system, you can put other salespeople into that system. Once you have the system, if, if you've ever read the book the E. Myth Revisited or the email, Right. It's about having a system, because that system, we can plug people in. I got a call yesterday from someone and he was talking about hiring a salesperson. But the people that he's been looking at have been coming from other venues and they're a much higher price looking for a different type of clientele than the typical local venue.

I said, well, don't look for a person who's got industry experience. Look for the right person. Teach them the product. Right. Have the system. Teach them the product. But you need someone who can convert and close. Right.

I don't care what they were selling before. I mean, My, My number two rep at the Knot was selling mattresses when I hired her to sell advertising. Right. But I hired a person.

Yeah.

And the reason I did that, Kevin, is, you know, you look at resumes. I was hired to do things that my resume had nothing about. And that showed me when I was in looking for a job, people were hiring me, not the resume. And what I realized is resumes are just a list of what you've been able to do because someone gave you a chance, but not what you're capable of, because we don't know what you're capable of until we give you a chance. Right.

Yeah. I think we. We in the end, landed on a slightly different path. Slightly.

Yeah.

Is that what we've done is found people inside our own organization who we think will be good at sales.

Right.

Then they already know everything in terms of the. How we deliver, what the products are and all that. But also we know that when we give them the process, they're going to follow it.

Right.

And that's been when hiring salespeople from outside. The biggest problem we've run into is that they won't follow the process.

Right, right. And that this is why sometimes hiring from within your industry, they have the bad habits of where they came from.

Yeah.

Whereas hiring from outside that, they. They have to learn your process because they, they don't know anything about it.

Yeah.

Having people on staff, that helps you because you have your, your bench, so to speak, where we can go from. A lot of people don't have that advantage. They don't, you know, don't have that. Covid did a lot of damage to that with a lot of places where you lost a lot of that knowledge, those people leaving there. So, so what do you, what do you, what do you predict for the future now? So this year, how's this year going to end up for you?

I think it's going to be a bit of a rerun of last year.

Okay.

May. It's. They've just lowered mortgage interest rates, which is just huge here.

How much are they about?

Oh, I think they're about 5% at the moment.

Okay. That's lower than here.

Yeah. But before COVID they were about 2 to 3%.

So. Yeah, it's refinanced. I refinanced twice during COVID from 4 to 2.785 and then from there to 2.5.

So.

Yeah, I'm keeping that one, actually. I don't want it. I don't. I. I'm torn because I don't Want my, I, I don't want my mortgage. I want to pay it off. But it's a 2.5%. So why would I pay it off when I can earn more than that, just leaving the money sitting if I want it?

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's totally right. So I think that's going to make a big difference to one of the graphs I have on this big looker studio multi page. Thing is I was trying to work out what it was in the market that, that told us whether things were bad or good.

Okay.

So I could track inquiries and I could track sales because we already had that. So I started putting in a graph for mortgage interest rates, inflation. But the one that turned out to be, and it's really uncanny, it's, they just about match each other perfectly is consumer confidence. So they do a consumer confidence survey every month, right. When it went up, inquiries went up. When it went down, inquiries went down. It was, it was not exactly in lockstep, but you could see the general pattern if you, you got to do a rolling average, which is just a, you know, statistical thing, but you can, you can see that happening. So it's just gone down a little.

It was really good in January and then it's gone down a little in February and March. But once the, once the, the lower interest rates come in, then people will have some more money and we'll, hopefully it'll, it'll all take off. 20, 26 is when they predict everything's going to be kind of back to normal. So, you know, fingers crossed.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting here in the States, every four years is a presidential election, and every four years things get a little bit wonky. And if we would. I love what you said there because anything with analytics you have to look at trending over time. You can't look at a snapshot of today. Like, if you look at consumer confidence today, great, okay, but what has it been? Is it going up? Is it going down? And every four years, presidential election year makes things wonky. But the year after is a pretty typical wedding year, which means people just waiting longer to book because of what this crazy uncertainty, right? That the whole thing, one side yelling how bad things are, one side saying, no, things are good. You know, elect us.

No elect us. There you go. And the people in the middle, like, I don't know, I'm just holding on to my money for now. But in all the years I've been doing this, I don't remember the year after ever. Being a bad year with the exception of COVID Right. But I don't remember being a bad year. So it means, yeah, they're just going to book later, they're going to book closer. And this is why the follow up is just so much more important.

It's always important, but it's more important when people are taking longer to book because if you stop following up but somebody else does, they're going to get the business because they're asking. Nobody else is asking. So, yeah, that this has been great. Kevin, thank you so much for sharing what's going on. We could do this forever. Yep. I love the analytics. If you're not a left brain, you know, and you're not going to go along with that, that's fine.

I think the biggest lesson is come up with a system, stick to that system. You can plug other people into that system, that follow up system, just like you do with planning an event, just like you do with executing an event. Whatever your service is, everybody's got their systems have a sales system to go along with it. That'll help you a lot. Plus it'll, it's also something that's valuable. People talk about wanting to sell their business. Well, the system is part of what you have to sell.

Absolutely.

That, that's what it is. So thanks for joining me. I will put in the show notes if people want to find out more and see your beautiful Ven, we'll have links to that over there. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us and catch you next time.

All right, Very good.



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 Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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