Transcript of Short 54 – Let’s Do a Sales Funnel Audit.

The Wedding Pro CEO SHORTS are quick, bite-sized episodes are meant to inspire you as you build the business you’re dreaming of! 

[00:00:00] Brandee Gaar: Hey, their CEOs. Welcome back to today’s Thursday short of the Wedding Pro CEO podcast. I’m your host Brandee Gaar, and my mission is to help you, the wedding industry entrepreneur, to build a profitable business that you actually love. 

On today’s show, I want to talk to you about auditing your sales funnel.

 A sales funnel is exactly what it sounds like. You think about a funnel, right? And you’ve got new followers that you’re bringing in through all your different networks. Maybe it’s from referrals from other vendors, or it’s social media, or it’s marketing and advertising, whatever it is, you’ve got people that are coming into your funnel.

Slowly, you’re starting to bring them down to these warm leads that are so excited to work with you that you can just close. Right? But sometimes you look at your sales and you’re like, My sales aren’t high enough. I’m not hitting my sales goal, and not all the time. Is that a problem with not enough leads. I really wanna talk to you

[00:01:00] about what could be going wrong in your sales funnel and how to audit that so that you know for yourself. 

Here we are in the first week of February. So what I want you to do is I want you to do this exercise for all of January so that you can see whether you have a leak in your sales funnel.

Okay? So super simple. This is gonna be very, very easy. This is something that we do every single month at Blush so that I can see where our funnel is breaking down, if it’s breaking down, and how we can fix that so that our sales will go up. Okay? 

So this is a really, really quick and simple exercise. 

The first thing I want you to do is I want you to go back through January and I want you to see how many leads came in, okay?

Whether they were good leads, bad leads, you weren’t available for the date. Just every single person that inquired with you, I want you to look and. How many people inquired with you? Okay? 

So let’s just say for the sake of this podcast that we had 10 people inquire. That means we got

[00:02:00] 10 leads that came in. No matter how they came in. You got 10 leads. Okay, so the next thing I want you to write down, I want you to look at is how many of those leads booked a consult with you? So they came in, they inquired, and then how many of those turned into consults? Why is this important? Because we wanna see, are they falling off between inquiring with you and booking a consult?

So we wanna know these numbers. Okay? 

So how many of the 10 leads that came in. Booked a consult with you. 

And then the last number I want you to go look at is of those consults, how many of those booked, how many of those actually booked with you? So what happens a lot of times is when I’m looking at sales numbers with a wedding pro, a lot of times what they tell me is, only their number of consults to how many they actually booked.

And while that’s an important number, I want to know how many leads actually came in the door. 

[00:03:00] Brandee Gaar: Because here’s the thing, there’s a couple of places where your sales funnel can break down. If, let’s say in January you had 10 leads come in, and four of those booked a console, and one of them booked. Okay, so you’re telling me, Hey Brandee, one wedding a month booking isn’t enough for me.

I had budgeted to book three weddings a month and I need to go get more leads. I need to go get more leads. Well, one of the things I would ask you is, Well, if I’m looking at your sales funnel and I see you got 10 leads and only one of them booked and only four of them went to consult, I don’t necessarily think your issue is getting enough leads in.

I think you’re getting enough leads to get three bookings. I think the issue is that you’ve got a breakdown in your funnel. If 10 leads inquired and only four booked a consult, what’s happening between when they inquire and when they booked a consult that’s keeping them from booking a consult? There’s a lot of things

[00:04:00] that could happen here. It could be that you didn’t follow up. 

“And it was crazy how different her sales were, as soon as we changed her follow up emails. Now, in her follow up emails, it’s very clear what people need to do to book a consult. It tells them exactly what to do.”

Brandee Gaar

Honestly, this is the number one reason that your leads don’t book a consult is because you only send the very first email and there’s no follow up. Another one. I was working with a student last year and this was the exact scenario. She was saying that there weren’t enough bookings coming in and she was like, I don’t understand, like we need to go be more on social media.

I need to go pay for advertising. When we started looking at her sales funnel, what was actually happening is she was getting plenty of leads. She was getting plenty of leads. Most of them were not booking a consult. And so we started looking at her follow up process cuz she said, I follow up three times with them for a consult or I, I follow up with them three times and I don’t understand why they’re not booking a consult.

What ended up being really funny is when we started looking at her follow-ups, her follow-ups were so, generic. They never once said, we’d love to do a consult with you. They didn’t give a link to book a

[00:05:00] consult. They didn’t say Reply back to book a consult, nothing. They were very much just like, Hey, just checking in on your process.

I hope everything’s going well. Let us know if you need anything. and that’s not a clear call to action. And it seems so silly, right? Because she was like, I don’t wanna be pushy. And I was like, I don’t want you to be pushy either. I don’t like used car salesmen. I would never do that. But you do need to have a clear call to action.

And it was crazy how different her sales were, as soon as we changed her follow up emails now and her follow up emails, it’s very clear what people need to do to book a consult. It tells them exactly what to do. Click here to book a consult with us. We’d love to talk to you about your wedding day. And the difference is that now instead of having 10 leads come in and only four go to consult now.

10 leads come in and seven go to consult. That’s a crazy difference, right? That’s a crazy difference. So the first number I’m wanting you to look at is how many leads came

[00:06:00] in and how many went to consult If it’s less than 50%, I want you to look at that process between your inquiry and your consult. I’d really love to see that number be closer to 60%.

Now, if some of the reasons that those leads that came in never made it to a consult are because you weren’t available for the date. You don’t necessarily have a hole in your sales funnel, but you do have a team problem there, and that’s a whole different show. That’s a problem because if you keep turning down business because you’re not available for the date, that’s a clear indication, you need to start building a team. 

Again, a whole different show. I’ll do that as a whole different topic. We talk about it in the mastermind and on the accelerator all the time, but you need to be building a team if you’re starting to turn down quite a bit of business. 

Okay? 

But so the number we’re looking for is for it to be 50% or 60% or even higher of the number of leads that come in actually go to consult. 

Okay, so now we’ve got that number and you’re really

[00:07:00] looking at, okay, I had 10 leads come in and at least, five of them went to consult right now from a consult. I personally would love to see your closing number at about 80%.

If you can get somebody to a consult, they should at that point already know your pricing, so you shouldn’t have a pricing issue. Once they get to the consult, they should already know that you’re available, so you shouldn’t have an I’m not available. Issue there, and they should be warm enough through your funnel that they already know that they like you.

You’ve made the short list of people that they’re actually gonna spend their time with to do a consult. So at this point, there should be very little friction as to why they’re not gonna book you. Okay? So I really wanna see your closing ratio be at 80%. Now, if you can get your consult rate from lead to 60% or higher, and your closing rate to 80%. Now it just becomes a numbers game, you guys. Okay, so follow me. I know I’m throwing a lot of

[00:08:00] numbers at you, but follow me through this process. Okay? If you need to book three weddings per month, let’s just say you need to book three weddings per month. That means that if you take 10 leads in Okay? 10 leads come in, six of them go to consult.

You only have to book half of those consults to hit your booking number. Okay? That’s it. But if your booking ratio is 80%, you will then be booking four of those five or five of those six consults that you did, and so now your bookings are even gonna go up higher. 

But here’s why this number is so, so important, because if you know that you have to book three weddings per month to hit your financial goals for the year. If you have to book three weddings per month and you know, you book 80% of your consults and 60% of your leads go to consult, it just becomes a numbers game now, you know, you just need to get 10 inquiries every single month to be able to hit that

[00:09:00] 3+ bookings every single month. So when you don’t hit those three, You can go back and say, okay, did I get 10 inquiries? If I didn’t get 10 inquiries? Now I know I need to start networking more. I need to start talking to people in my local market. I need to get on social media. I need to really start engaging, right, because I need to get 10 inquiries.

every single month to hit my numbers, and that makes it so much easier than just saying, I don’t understand why I’m not booking enough sales. I don’t understand why I’m not booking enough sales. It’s just a numbers game, you guys, but you have to know these numbers every single month. I would like for you to take a few minutes on your CEO Monday.

Hopefully you listen to that episode about CEO Mondays. I want you to take just a few minutes on the first Monday of every month to look back and really know how many inquiries came in, how many of those went to consult, and of those consults, how many did I book? If you know that and you’re keeping it at 60% and 80%, then it, it’s super easy

[00:10:00] to know how many leads you need to bring in every single month.

You guys, I hope that this was a simple exercise that you can do to really get your bookings up and to know where your funnel may have a leak so that you can fix that funnel super, super easily. You guys, thank you so much for being here every single week. I cannot wait to see your business sore in 2023, and I will see you next time. 

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