We hear this line all the time from venues: “Your platform would change my life but I am just too busy at the moment to implement anything like this”. It’s true that the seasonality of events is giving way to a year-long cycle where event and wedding venues are busier and busier.
This makes having an all-in-one platform for events & weddings even more important to the overall success of your venue.
The reality is, if you are too busy to invest in software that will significantly lighten your workload, then you especially need to make the investment. The problem is that misconceptions exist about just how disruptive such an implementation is to venues.
It’s time to frame the conversation another way. To do this we need to tackle the 3 key misconceptions associated with investing in venue event software head-on:
1. Implementation is too time-consuming
This isn’t a sales technique, an empty promise meant to trick you into adding another item to the to-do list. It honestly frustrates me when I hear venues tell me that they are struggling to manage their email inbox, that contracts take weeks to send out, and that venue tours and show-arounds are frequently time-wasting no-shows. I excitedly start talking about BriteVenue and how much time and stress it will save them.
This is usually when I hear a deep sigh, then something along the lines of “this would be amazing but we don’t have time to implement this”.
I empathize, I truly do. But the truth is implementation is not time-consuming. If your venue’s data sources are stored in an excel sheet, then we are literally talking about 2 to 3 hours of work, including a thorough 1-on-1 BriteVenue training session. We have an implementation team of very friendly, knowledgeable folks that do this day-in, day-out and have a very fine-tuned process.
We start out with an implementation road-map for your venue, having discussed your current process and structure. Do you want to take payments through BriteVenue? Great. But we want to know you can manage inquiries and bookings first. Then we set-up your account as discussed and input your data, from ongoing inquiries to your database of contacts. Finally, we hold a training session. After that we work closely with you to add in training and guidance on other features your venue will benefit from.
If someone told you that in exchange for 2 to 3-hours of their time, you could save them 20 plus-hours over the next few weeks, chances are they wouldn’t believe you. I’d love to show you how we can do that for you.
2. I’d love this, but my team (in some cases the owner) is not as tech-savvy
People don’t give themselves or their team-members enough credit here and I would argue they don’t give us enough credit either. Opinions of software are based upon older generation products like Salesforce and for a lot of individuals in the hospitality sector, Point-of-Sale systems.
We made design a central theme and a core competency of our platform. Look at Apple’s success, it rests in the fact they made “design” an integral part of their brand. Their “iSomething” products generally offer a highly intuitive user experience, but more importantly, they delight their customers. That’s what we’ve set out to achieve with BriteVenue.
We engineered BriteVenue to be straightforward. If you can navigate a smartphone, you can navigate BriteVenue.
3. My events program has been growing, without a platform
Kudos to you! This is a testament to your hard-work and the sweat and tears you’ve put in (hopefully there was no blood involved). But even if you feel your wedding and events program has maxed out and you couldn’t possibly do any more of either (or you simply don’t want to), you have to consider the other benefits of a centralized system.
For example, a lot of busy event venues we work with experienced issues with staff retention before BriteVenue. The stress of overflowing inboxes, the occasional ‘particular’ (insert your preferred word here ;-)) bride and groom, and the constant flow of paperwork, is a significant contributor to burnout.
Having a centralized, all-in-one, cloud-based platform is a huge relief to all of the above. Richard Branson is fond of saying “If you look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple.” We couldn’t agree more with him. A lot of that starts with giving them the tools they need.
Recent Comments