Wedding Business Solutions

Are you approaching your leads with a defeatist attitude?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Are you approaching your leads with a defeatist attitude?

Are you approaching your leads with a defeatist attitude? What assumptions are you making about potential clients before the conversation even begins? In this episode, I discuss how your mindset can impact sales success and share strategies to stop expecting the worst, turning each lead into an opportunity until proven otherwise.

Listen to this new 7-minute episode for insights on transforming your approach to leads, improving your sales conversions, and ensuring every inquiry is treated as a valuable opportunity.

Episode Summary: 

In this episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast, I explore how approaching leads with a defeatist attitude can impact our sales success. Drawing inspiration from Mike Weinberg’s "New Sales Simplified," I discuss the detrimental effect of assuming negative outcomes with potential clients, like expecting ghosting or price shopping. It's crucial to approach each lead positively and tailor our communication to align with clients' preferences. By reducing customer friction, such as ensuring easy contact methods and adapting to generational changes, we can enhance engagement. I urge fellow wedding business professionals to shift their mindset, valuing and converting the leads we already have, rather than just seeking more, ultimately improving our sales outcomes.


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 

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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

Are you approaching your leads with a defeatist attitude? Listen to this episode. See where I'm going with this. Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I'm listening to a book, New Sales Simplified by Mike Weinberg. And I like listening to books that don't necessarily apply directly to our industry or even my business because I have to do sales as well. And this one, a lot of it's about more corporate type selling, people doing cold calling and things which some of you are doing, some of you aren't. And it was interesting him talking about the most successful salespeople and people that are less successful or not successful.

And this phrase came up, are you approaching your leads with a defeatist attitude? And what that means is, are you assuming that you're going to get ghosted? Are you assuming that they're going to be a price shopper? Are you assuming that they're going to beat you up on price? Are you assuming that it's going to take them forever to make a decision? And bringing that baggage with you is actually going to get you more of the results that you expect because people are going to pick up on that. Now, I know we'd all like to think that we're not bringing that baggage with us and that our complaining to our friends about this and getting their buy in, like, yeah, it's happening to me too. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing as well, that we're not bringing that into the next sales call. But all of these unconscious things that happen in terms of the way we write and our body language and the tone of our voice and things like that will all affect how our customers will respond to us. And like it or not, it is affecting us when we do that. So can you flip the language and say that, yeah, that last one was a price shopper, but this next one is going to want my results. It's going to have a budget for what I do and is going to, you know, want me to do their wedding, their event, or whatever it is that you're selling because they can't get my results anyplace else. And you're coming, approaching them all with that attitude.

Now, many of you are getting a lot of leads you shouldn't be getting. Like, you shouldn't be getting some of these people that can't afford what you do because you didn't put any price on your website. So they have to reach out to get a price. And therefore you give them an idea price, they get ghosted you ask them to get on the phone right away because you want to try to qualify them. You get ghosted because they're gen Y and Gen Z, Right? So all of these things that are affecting you going into the next one saying, well, it's going to be more of that, more of that, more of that. I was talking to some friends today to two different people and we all agree on the same thing, which is most of you listening. Don't need to get more leads than you're getting now. You need to convert more of the leads that you're getting.

And many of you actually need to get fewer leads than you're getting now so you'll follow up better, so you won't be so inundated that you won't be able to do the 5, 6, 7, 8 follow ups that it takes with some people to get them to convert. But again, not assuming that if they didn't respond to your first inquiry, they're not interested. Or your second, that they're not interested or your third, that they're not interested. Right when they inquire, they're interested. And if they're not getting back to you, it could be many different things, including they're busy, something else became a higher priority, or quite simply, what was that book or movie? They're just not that into you. Maybe they like the way someone else responded better or someone else responded faster or someone else made it easier to communicate with them. Maybe these are the things that are affecting it. And that's what I see more than not, is it's not that they weren't interested because they made the inquiry, they put you on the short list.

It's that you're attracting either the wrong people because you're not putting any pricing out there. Therefore people, they love your photos, they love your reviews and they have to reach out to find out that you're out of their budget, never should have reached out in the first place if they knew that. Or you're trying to force people to do things the way you want as opposed to the way they want because you're no longer in sync with them. You know, at some point you might have been the same generation and age as your clients and as your couples, and maybe now you're not. You know, I like to say that in the 30 years I've been in the wedding and event industry, couples have gotten five years older. I got 30 years old, they got five years old. Wait a minute, that's not fair. It's not fair.

True. It's True, it's true. Couples used to be an average of 24 or 25 and now they're about 30. And that's happened over 30 years. So you have to adapt to your customers so that you're going to reduce the friction, make it easier for them. But if we're bringing in this defeatist attitude, which is we're assuming that we're just going to get more of the same and more ghosting and more whatever, we're going to keep getting that because that's what we're focusing on and that's what we're putting out into the world. If you flip that and say I'm going to assume that every lead is a good lead until proven otherwise, that every lead, because they already reached out, because they already like what they've seen, read, heard, watched, personally experienced or whatever that made them reach out, that that is going to make them want to continue the conversation with me as long as I start to do things a little differently that are making it easier for them to have the communication the way they want in the voice that they want with the technology that they want because they are the customer and they get to decide. Just the other day I was on a zoom call with some people and somebody needed to get a hold of someone that wasn't on the call and went to their website and there was no phone number.

Went to their Instagram and it sent you to their website which had no phone number. Meanwhile, they needed to reach this person now or at least try to, but they couldn't because they couldn't find a phone number anywhere. Well, that friction means they are missing out on calls like this. Inquiries and things that aren't happening because somebody still wants to pick up the phone. Maybe the mother of a bride or a groom or someone getting married. Maybe they want to pick up the phone. I've told the story about my son getting married last year and my daughter in law reached out to a rental company and wanted to have a call and they told her no, just look at the catalog on our website. Tell us what you want.

Creating friction. So if you're assuming that, oh, I don't want to waste my time on the phone with another person because my time got wasted by somebody else. Well, now you've made it so that the next person who's a legitimate prospect is not going to reach out, which happened in the case of my son's wedding. They went to a different rental company because this company wouldn't meet them where they were the way they wanted to. So Are you approaching your leads with a defeatist attitude? Think about the next time you're you get a lead in Are you excited that you got the lead? Are you like, oh, that's going to be another price shopper, that's going to be another ghost or whatever? Flip that script. Make it that you're excited about it because that's somebody that is paying the bills, that is providing your retirement, that is paying for your college education or your kids college education or whatever. Flip the script and say, yes, I need that lead. I'm going to work that lead because that is a good lead until proven otherwise.

Hope that gives you something to think about. Thanks.


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:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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