Business Survival Means Aligning Your Services to Your Clients’ Needs

Monday’s Los Angeles Times featured a review, titled “Why you should look at your firm from the outside in”, of the book “Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs” by Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott. The main lesson of the review and the book is that to survive in today’s economic climate, businesses must learn to see things as your customers do and avoid the tendency to react to financial crisis by cutting back without a clear and accurate view of what your strengths and weaknesses will be in the upcoming market.

The author of the review, Alan Mitchell, a contributing editor to Marketing Week and the Financial Times of London as well as co-writer of “Beyond Branding”, a multi-author text that challenges businesses to have a human perspective that benefits people rather than manipulates them, highlights a six step recipe for overcoming this tendency detailed in “Tuned In”.

For the Certified Wedding Planner, there are specific lessons to be learned from this advice. Whether you are in your first year of business or your twentieth, your business is being directly affected by the fears and concerns prospective clients feel about the state of the economy. Only by truly listening to your market will you be able to fashion your services menu to meet the needs of a client base determined to do whatever it takes to make their dream wedding a reality.

First Step – Search for the problems your bridal clients want solved. This means going to bridal shows, Bridal Balls, or even establishing relationships with bridal stores. Directly observe what interests brides-to-be and listen carefully to what they have to say.

Second Step – Identify the various buying personas in your market. These are definable groups of brides who share the same problems and desires. They could include full service brides, DIY brides needing help in consulting or “Day Of” coordination, or somewhere in between.

Third Step – Get the hard data. Are your prospects prepared to pay for your services? According to The Wedding Report, for the over 330,000 weddings that are being professionally planned this year, brides and grooms are paying an average of around $1,500 for planning services. Your research needs to include statistics for your local market as well as information culled directly from your conversations with brides-to-be.

Fourth Step – Make every step of your client’s decision and planning process an experience that resonates, from discovering and contracting your services through your meetings, your performance, and your communication.

Fifth Step – Articulate your idea in a way that is about your bridal prospect’s beliefs and not about your services’ descriptions. Speak to the solution your brides want and not the need you have to sell a particular service.

Sixth Step – Communicate not by pitching your services, but by creating information that answers the questions posed by your different bridal buying personas.

Business survival in a recessionary market takes research, planning, and action. Get out of the office and meet with your potential clients. Listen to their concerns about wedding planning costs and logistics. Discover an innovative angle that will set your business offerings above the crowd. Learn from other planners to find out what is and isn’t working.

The days of boosting business with a charitable act or by figuring out how to get the groom involved may not be completely gone. But for your wedding planning business to survive and even thrive, you need to listen to your market and give them exactly what they want.