The Importance of Responding

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You’re getting married!! Ok, pause right here for a second because I’m really excited for you! You’ve contacted SO many vendors. Seriously, probably too many to count at this point and you’ve definitely started to lose track of everyone! Not only have you contacted a whole host of possible vendors, but you’ve also met with a bunch of them and now they are all starting to rattle around in your head. You are forgetting the names and businesses of people you actually thought you wanted to work with! It is incredibly frustrating! How are you supposed to respond back to each potential vendor? It begins to seem impossible!

I was a bride once. In reality, I kind of still am. While I got married back in July of this past year (2018), it was only a small ceremony with our closest family members present. We didn’t have to hire a whole bunch of vendors. The vendors we did choose ended up being the first (and sometimes ONLY) one we talked to in that vendor category. I hate to say it but, we had it easy. Now, my husband and I are getting ourselves prepared for a much larger ceremony taking place in May with ALL of our friends and family present. This has been a much bigger logistical challenge. In short...I get it. There are a lot of vendors to talk to and it’s easy to get confused on which ones you’ve messaged back and which ones you haven’t. It’s easy to start calling that business by the wrong name or forgetting that the owner is Sally and not Jessica. I know. It’s hard. How do you know who to hire?

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Photo by bruce mars from Pexels

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Obviously, you aren’t going to hire every person you talk to. You might talk with three DJs before choosing the one that you actually want to hire for your celebration. You probably chose her because she was professional but also funny and quirky, maybe just like you. But what about the other three DJs you talked to? They’ll just forget about you and move on right? WRONG! They are actually wondering what in the heck happened to that super nice couple that they talked to over coffee. The one in the relationship who only drank their coffee if there were three ice cubes placed in it first. And the other one who used almost all of the sugar packets to sweeten theirs up. Yes. DJs, and all other vendors wonder what happened to you after you meet with them and they don’t hear back.

Chances are you told the vendor that you would get back to them after you had the chance to meet others. Now you have chosen a vendor from the five you spoke to, you’ve moved on to different areas of planning. What are the vendors you didn’t choose doing? Outside of just waiting for you to get back with them, your vendors are noticing a steady influx of potential new clients. Some of them may even be asking about a date that is VERY close to yours, making the vendor think that perhaps the next potential client that gets in contact with them really WILL be asking about your date. And if they can’t get in touch with you to let you know about another client asking about the same date as your wedding, then suddenly vendors are left with a dilemma. We ask ourselves, “should I keep that date open for that awesome couple I met with a week and a half ago? Will they get back to me after the three follow-up emails I sent? Should I just move forward with this other couple?” It’s a hard place to be in for vendors, and yet we are put in that situation all the time.

So here’s what’s up. As you’ve been planning your wedding, you’ve valued those vendors that got back to you quickly. It has been so helpful to have them get in touch with you in a timely manner. You found yourself frustrated with a few vendors who took several days to get back to you and even though you may have really liked them at the start, now that you realize that they aren’t as quick to respond, you begin to wonder about how well they will respond to you as you get closer to your date. The frustration you feel at a lack of communication from potential vendors is the exact same frustration that vendors feel when you don’t get back to them. Often times a vendor, myself included, will send a follow-up e-mail (or two or three) over the course of a week or so. We know you are busy. We know you’ve got other wedding planning things and work things and life things going on, and we want to make sure you know that we didn’t meet with you and then forget about you. So we send follow-up emails to check in. When we don’t hear back we always assume that you’ve gone a different direction.

What if you do decide to go in a different direction? That’s ok! We aren’t expecting to book every single client that comes through the door. As vendors, we know that you have specific needs around a budget. We also know that you want our personalities to be a good fit (we want this too). We know that you, in the process of talking with other potential vendors, may have come across someone that you’d prefer to hire over us. Knowing this, it does not offend us when you let us know that you’ve gone in a different direction! Again, we are not expecting to book every.single.couple we come across. It is not going to crush us to hear that you have decided to work with a different vendor. In reality, it really helps us when you share that news with us.

You see, it’s important that you respond to our follow-up e-mails. As vendors, we receive many messages each day from potential brides and grooms who all want to meet up with us at this place and that place. They are excited about their weddings and as vendors, we are too! When a vendor is waiting on a potential client to get back to them, it puts the vendor in a difficult position of having to turn down other potential clients that are interested in booking. It means we have to keep your proposal open even after you’ve already decided that you’re moving forward with someone else. So while you have crossed our services off your list, we still have you on ours, just waiting to hear back from you. This can be so easily avoided by simply getting back in touch with not only vendors you HAVE decided to hire, but also vendors that you have decided NOT to hire. Again, I promise you, you will not hurt anyone’s feelings! In fact, you’ll save us some time. We won’t have to check in with you again (which means you don’t have to keep seeing our e-mail address come across your screen), we won’t have to tell other potential couples that we are waiting to hear back from you, and you can move forward with the vendor you did decide to hire. It’s a winning situation for everyone!

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