Wedding Business Solutions

Are you adding sludge to your sales process?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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How much effort does it really take for your customers to do business with you? Are you asking for too much information up front, hiding fees, or making simple tasks needlessly complicated? In this episode, I dig into the ways we unintentionally add friction—“sludge”—that drives prospective customers away, and share strategies for making it easier for people to choose you.

Listen to this new 10-minute episode for practical tips on reducing friction and making your business the easiest—and most appealing—choice for couples planning their wedding.

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 adding sludge to your sales process? Listen to this episode. See what I'm talking about. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I just finished listening to the updated version of Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. I had read the original version, and they did an updated version. They call it the Final Edition because they don't want to have to do this again. They did the Final Edition a few years ago.

I wanted to listen to it to see what had been updated, because I think the first version was like 2007 or so, and this one was 2021 or 2022, somewhere around there. They talked about sludge, which sounded a lot to me like friction or effort that I've spoken about before from other books that I’ve listened to and talked about here. They said sludge is making it difficult for people to attain an outcome that will make them better off. And again, a lot of it comes down to the effort that we make people go through or the friction that we add to the process.

In their epilogue, they talked about whether we can make the effort just one click. Can one click do what we want to do, or do we have to do multiple ones? I had something that came up recently where they wanted me to take a form, print it out, fill it out, and send it in the mail.

Really? It’s 2025. Why are we still doing this? That was sludge. I applied for a credit card and hadn’t heard back from Chase. I was looking and couldn’t find a phone number anywhere. I wanted to call and see what was going on, so I finally called the number on the back of one of my cards since I also bank there.

Just as I was calling them, I got an email—no, actually, I logged into my Chase account and saw the new account in there. They had approved me, but I got no notification. So here I am now trying to call them to see what’s going on, and I had already been approved. Again, sludge.

We have our credit frozen so that it’s protected, so you can’t open an account unless I unfreeze it. There are three credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You log on to their sites, it’s totally free. If you have not done this, I really suggest you do. If you need to unfreeze your credit like I just did, it’s easy enough—except that one of the three bureaus made it harder.

On two of them, you log in and right on the homepage there’s a freeze option. You click it, manage the freeze, set the dates, and you’re done. On the third one, I was searching and searching, trying to find it. The others were one click and done. That’s sludge. Why did two make it easy and the other didn’t? They’re creating friction.

Now I know why—they want you to buy their paid products. But the other two don’t, so who do I feel better about? The one that makes it easy. It’s the same thing in business. If they can’t fill out your contact form without giving you a phone number, that’s sludge, because not everybody wants to give it.

Every field you add to a contact form—required or not—makes fewer people fill it out. Having the phone field required especially reduces submissions, because some people just don’t want you to call or text them. Mark Chapman from the I Society, who’s been on my podcast, said if you include the phone field, add “If you prefer texting.” That actually increases the number of people who provide their number because you’re giving them control. Or let them check a box—preferred method: phone, email, text, WhatsApp, whatever.

Hidden or unclear disclosures about charges and fees—that’s sludge. In the wedding and event industry, we have the curse of knowledge. We talk about “plus plus”—plus tax, plus service charge. The service charge can feel like sludge because it’s not something people encounter all the time, so it feels like a gotcha.

We expect sales tax. We get that. But service charges? Not so much. Where I live in New Jersey, clothing up to a certain amount has no sales tax, but above that it does. That surprises people. And you can’t pump your own gas in New Jersey—that surprises people too. When you don’t know what to expect, that’s where sludge appears.

Resort fees—oh gosh. I’m sure some of you are nodding. If it’s not disclosed up front or hidden in the fine print, that’s sludge. If it’s mandatory, it shouldn’t be hidden. And what really bothers me—and probably you—is when it’s not even a resort but they’re charging a “resort fee.” Like in some Las Vegas hotels. You’re charging me for Wi-Fi and the pool? My status already gives me Wi-Fi free, and I’m not using the pool. Why am I paying extra for that?

Hidden fees are sludge. Not making your physical address clear on your website is sludge. I get it—if you work from home, that’s fine. I do too. But venues, restaurants—your address should be easy to find. Unless you’re a speakeasy, it should be clear.

Sludge is hard for us to see because it’s hard to walk in our customers’ shoes. You might need a buddy for this. Go to each other’s websites and try to act like customers. Fill out the forms, see how it feels. You might discover that your contact form looks nice on desktop but is a pain on mobile. I reviewed a site the other day—two and a half screens of content before you even reached the form. That’s sludge.

Why not make it easy? That’s why I have a contact form on every page, with text like “Call, email, text, or fill out this short form.” Click any of those, and it takes you to the form immediately. That reduces sludge. My contact page has text above it, but almost no one reads that. Ninety-nine out of a hundred submissions from that page are spam, but only one out of a hundred from the sidebar form is spam.

I made it easy for real people. If it’s a little harder for bots, fine. They can deal with that. But when it comes to fields—what do you really need? Many of you think, “I need this information.” Yes, but not for an inquiry. If the phone rang, you’d know nothing about the person—you’d just have a conversation. Same here.

Adding more fields because you want all the information up front actually makes it harder for you. You’re taking away good questions to ask later that keep the conversation going. What are you doing that makes it hard for people to get what they want? Rules and regulations that creep into your business because one person once did something bad—those add sludge. Revisit them. Do they still apply? Do they apply to most of your customers? Or are you punishing the masses for the mistakes of a few?

Great book—Nudge: The Final Edition by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. I recommend the updated version because it’s full of great stories about choice architecture—how to present options to make decisions easier. That applies not just to packages, but to anything you offer. The way you present it can make it easier or harder to buy.

Sludge, friction, extra effort—we need to eliminate them. Be the easiest one to do business with, because people will pay more for that ease. They’ll pay for the privilege of getting a great result easily instead of struggling for it.

Sludge, from the book Nudge. 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:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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