Wedding Business Solutions

How can you embrace change?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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How can you embrace change?

Change is inevitable, but how do you handle it? Do you fear the unknown or see it as an opportunity? In this episode, I dive into the psychology of change resistance and offer strategies to not only accept change but to thrive in it. What steps can you take today to make change your ally in business?

Listen to this new 12-minute episode for insights on how to handle change effectively and transform it into a motor for growth and opportunity in your wedding business.

Episode Summary: 

In this episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast, I delve into the topic of embracing change, especially within the realm of sales training. I share insights from a recent training session and discuss why people naturally resist change, even when it's beneficial. You'll hear about the importance of quickly responding to inquiries to boost engagement and how incremental improvements can make a significant difference, even for well-performing businesses. I also touch on the risks and rewards of change, both in marketing strategies and personal career choices. This episode is packed with valuable advice for anyone looking to become more adaptable and effective in their professional lives.


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.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

How can you embrace change better? Listen to this episode, see where I'm going. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I just came back from doing a sales training with a group and something that's very common is for people to resist the changes that I'm proposing. And I don't expect everybody to do everything that I say. But the reason that people bring me in for sales training is because they want to do something different. Right? You know, the old thing, it's either insanity or futility. The definition being if you do the same thing the same way and expect a different result.

So some of this resistance comes from the fact that the person bringing me in is not often the person that needs to change because it's people on their team. So it might be the owner of the company or manager or director or level or something like. Like that. And then also it's sometimes it's just the people themselves. They say, listen, we need to do something different. Including me. Come in for the day, analyze what we're doing. Let's take a look at this.

And I just had this happen to me yesterday. And it's always fun and funny at the same time because the resistance to change is normal. Right? We're comfortable in what we're doing. We do what, you know, we get into our routines and we have our systems. And in this particular case, where the resistance was coming from is I was talking about how to respond to inquiries differently. And one of the things I always do when we're doing an on site training is if we get any new inquiries, let's answer them now. And I do this at Mastermind days as well. Not just with a single company.

I've done this with multiple companies. Let's answer them now. And doing it differently than the way that it had been done before. And in this case, I had secret shop them, but they also sent me all of their cadence of how they're following up and they were doing a better job than most already. And that's also pretty common where people will bring me in, who are you look from the outside and say, but you're doing really good. Right. And we can do better. And that's the point.

I love the idea of when you think about the most professional athletes out there, the top of their game, they have a coach, right? Why would they need a coach if they're at the top of the game? Well, they're at the top of their game because of the coach. That's what it is. So in this case, it was one of those. They were doing it better. But I said, I think we can do better because they brought me in. Why we're not getting to where we need to be. And this year, 2024, being a challenging year for a lot of people. If you go back a few episodes on this podcast, you'll see me talking about the trifecta of the COVID hangover, the presidential election year, and the engagement gap all kind of coming together all at once.

So the funny thing with this one was that the four inquiries we got that day, we got responses from all of them. And that's not typically what happens for this company or for many people. Probably most of you listening here, you respond right away, and then you don't hear back. You don't hear back today. Sometimes you don't hear back at all. Sometimes it takes a few days. Sometimes you have to follow up a few more times. But in this particular case, all four of the people that reached out all responded to us, and we went back and forth and we had some tour times potentially scheduled and things like that, but that's not normal.

And the concern was that if people are responding that quickly, that's going to take me away from some of the other duties that I have here at the company, which is what we'd call a good problem, right? That's what we would call it, a good problem. And what that means is other things probably have to change as well. So maybe the way that this. The procedure is done needs to change so that if someone is too busy responding to inquiries, that's a good thing because people are actually responding and not ghosting. Do we need more people to be able to handle the other workload? Do we need to divide the workload differently? You know, just different things like that? So how are you with change? How do you handle change? Or do you embrace change? Do you. Do you. Do you like the unknown? Do you like trying something new and, you know, taking some risks with that because it's always risky for change because you don't know what the results are going to be, or do you avoid it at all costs? When someone comes to me and says, I'm thinking of changing the way I do my advertising and marketing, or I'm thinking of trying something else, I almost always say to them, okay, that's cool, right? Why? What is it about that audience? Because if you've heard me talk about this before, if you've read this in my books, we want to think of the three things being the geographics of that audience, where are they? The demographics being the measurable things? Age, income, sexual orientation, education, things like that, the things that you can quantify, but then the psychographics, you know, what is it about that audience that you think would attract them to the kind of results that you provide and the type of business and people that you are? So before you go and do that, don't stop doing what you're doing that's bringing you leads. Now, if you're doing something that's bringing you no leads, you have to ask yourself a couple of questions.

If it's bringing you no leads at all, is it the right audience? Are you fishing with the right bait? In other words, do you have the right photos, the right text, the right SEO and all those things to get those people right? Or are you getting leads and they're not converting? And most people at that point blame the lead source instead of looking in the mirror and blaming themselves. I was saying this yesterday to the boss of this company. The first place I look when things aren't going well is in the mirror. It's. If it happens on my watch, it's my responsibility. That's. It doesn't mean that I did it. It just.

It's my responsibility for those results because it's happening on my watch. I did that when I was VP of Sales at the Knot. Anything that happened on my watch was my responsibility. And that's why I believe if you are managing people, don't just give them a responsibility. Give them the authority to make those decisions so that they can get to the results that they want. Okay, but I digress. Coming back in here to change. So change is about trying something else.

And if it comes to advertising and marketing, if things are bringing you leads, even if it's not the kind of business you want or as much as you want to drop, that is to cut off that pipeline for an unknown. So before you do that, try something new. And I was talking to a friend of mine in Texas, and he was thinking of throwing more money into Facebook ads and things, or Instagram or TikTok. And if you've heard Mark Chapman on this podcast, you've heard him say that you have to invest 10 to $15 a day, 10 to $15 a day, to say that you've given it a really good shot. And you know, if you. If you're not giving it that much money, you can't say you've given it a really good shot. Know if it works. And in this particular case, this friend was thinking about dropping Something else to go and do social, but didn't think it was going to cost that much to do the social.

I said, well, it doesn't have to, but if you want it to work, it does. And that's the same with any advertising, marketing, networking. If you're taking a booth at a wedding expo and you take the smallest booth in the back in the corner where the lighting isn't that good because it was cheap, you really didn't give it a chance to say, hey, wedding expos work for me or not. But if you take a decent sized booth at a decent place, okay, now you can say, right, I've given it the best placement. Of course there's other things you have to do there, right? It's not set it and forget it. If you, you buy an ad on the nod or Wedding wire or Weddings online or Easy Weddings or any hitched or any of these sites, it's not set it, forget it. You have to make sure you have the most recent photos. You have photos showing emotion and results.

You have a great text there. You have recent reviews, you've responded to those recent reviews, right? These are all active participation things that you need to do on these sites to say that it worked. But in this case with the change, I said to my friend, prove that the new thing works first before you stop what you're doing. And then the other thing is, can you make what you're doing work better? And that's what I did with this client just the other day. I didn't do anything to change the leads that were coming in. I had no, no authority to do that. They were doing what they were doing. And when I showed up that day and those leads came in, they came in because of what they did.The fact that all four of them responded to us while I was there and some of them multiple times, that's because of the change that I suggested and that they did. And I have to say, one of the people that was typing responses and I suggested, okay, do this, you know, short one question at the end. If you guys have heard or read anything I do and you know, any, any message. I was going to say email, but any Message, email, text, WhatsApp, social messaging, messaging, on the. Not Wedding Wire or any of those sites. If you want a reply, you need to end with one question, one question at the end in its own paragraph. So when they scan they'll see that, well, this is a much shorter message with no attachments and no links than they were used to doing. And one person is Like, I think I want to throw up because it's so uncomfortable to do something that's so different than what they were doing.

And then when they're getting a reply, I said, you just replied to that bride three times, right? Like, she got back to you from. From her inquiry. You responded, she got back to you, you got back there. She got back to you, you got back there, she got back to you. I said, does that normally happen? And she said, no. I said, then why would you want to throw up? Because it's working, it's working now. It's showing that what you were doing before maybe didn't work as well as this because it was different. Now time will only tell.

I'll be following up with them to see if these people have. Are coming in for tours because it's a venue coming in for and actually booking because there's other steps in there, right? Getting them in for the tour as a step, doing the actual tour as a step, asking for the sale as a step, following up if they don't book today as a step, right, all those other things. But they're pretty good and buttoned down on that. What we needed is more people to go from inquiry to the conversation and then the conversation to the tour. So let's go back and think about change here. I used to resist change, just like everybody does, right? We get comfortable with what we do. But if you look back and see what you've already accomplished, if you look back and see things that you're doing now, they're a result of change. You being in the position that you're in, whether you own a company, work for a company, whatever, that's a result of change because you didn't always do that.

Maybe some of you did, but you didn't always do that. I'm where I am because of many, many changes, the first of which was, you know, quitting a job that I was making really good money, had a company car, had fully paid benefits, my wife was pregnant, our other son was turning 3. And you would think we were living the high life, except I hated what I was doing. And I took a leap of faith into a new industry that I knew nothing about. I had never done outside sales, I had never done cold calling, and I had never worked on straight commission with no salary, draw, guarantee or minimum. And it makes no sense on paper to do that when my wife is pregnant at home and not working and her other son turning 3 and I don't even have a car. I have to turn in the company car. It made no sense.

But I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for that. And then if we didn't buy the franchises of the wedding magazines, it wouldn't have led to the next thing, which was selling them back to work for the franchisor, which led to the not buying the company, which led to me being VP of Sales and then 13 years ago, going out on my own and instead of going to work for somebody else, going out on my own. And all these things are just changes. So you look back and you take some of these things for granted. But think of how you got where you are, how many changes were involved in getting there, and isn't that where the good stuff happens? And yes, sometimes it doesn't work out right. But that's okay too, because that's a learning experience. So have you learned to embrace change? Can you learn to embrace change? I hope you can and hope this gives you a little, maybe a little push. Thanks for listening.


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.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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