The leads you quoted in February.
Follow up in ten minutes, not October.
Most wedding vendors lose 30 to 50 percent of their warm leads during peak season. Not because they don't want to follow up. Because they're shooting every Saturday and editing all week and the follow-up email for a couple they quoted in February sits in a draft folder until October, when it's too late. This recipe is a ten-minute Monday habit that keeps leads warm all season.
Why leads go cold during peak season.
Inquiry season is January through March. Peak event season is May through October. These overlap in the worst way: you're busiest with events exactly when you should be following up on the leads you captured three months ago.
The follow-up is not complicated. A two-sentence email referencing their venue and a question is enough to reopen most cold conversations. But it has to be personal enough that it doesn't read like a mass email, and that's the part that takes time. You can't send "Just checking in!" to a couple who told you their wedding is at a family farm in September. You have to write something that shows you remember them.
The result: the follow-up never gets written. The lead goes cold. By October the couple has been married for two months.
The recipe. A lead sheet plus a prompt.
Keep a simple lead sheet (Google Sheets, Notion, or a plain spreadsheet) with one row per unbooked lead. Once a week, on Monday morning or whenever you have ten minutes, filter for rows where status is "no reply." Copy those rows. Paste them into Claude with the prompt below. You get a draft follow-up for each lead. Copy each one, add one specific line from your memory of the couple, send.
Ten minutes for the whole batch. The drafts are short by design: two to four sentences per lead. Short emails get responses. Long follow-ups read like sales emails.
If a lead books, update the status in your sheet. If a lead says no, mark it lost. The sheet is your pipeline without the $50/mo dashboard.
What to put in the lead sheet.
You don't need a CRM for this. Seven columns in a Google Sheet are enough.
- NameThe couple's names. However they signed the inquiry.
- Event dateThe wedding date they mentioned. If unknown, leave blank.
- VenueThe venue or city. One or two words is enough.
- PackageThe package or price you quoted. Or the service tier if you haven't quoted firm numbers yet.
- Original inquiry dateWhen they first reached out. Helps you know how long it's been without having to dig.
- Last contact dateThe date of your most recent email or reply to them.
- StatusInquiry / Quoted / No reply / Booked / Lost. You update this manually. Takes five seconds per row.
Thirty seconds per lead to fill in when they first reach out. The payoff is not losing the lead in August when you don't have time to go digging through your email.
The prompt. Paste your leads at the bottom.
Copy this, fill the top section with your details once, and paste your lead rows at the bottom each time. Do 5 to 6 leads at a time, not your whole sheet at once.
I'm a [WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER / PLANNER / FLORIST / DJ / VIDEOGRAPHER] based in [SERVICE AREA]. My voice is [WARM AND PERSONAL / your description]. I sign off with my first name, [YOUR NAME].
Below are leads from my inquiry sheet who haven't responded to my original quote. For each one, write a short follow-up email.
Rules for each follow-up:
- Two to four sentences total, no more
- Reference something specific from their original inquiry (the venue, the date, the vibe they described) -- I'll fill in the bracket
- Don't mention how long it's been. Don't say "just checking in."
- One light question at the end to reopen the conversation
- Sign off with my first name
- No em-dashes, no marketing-speak, no exclamation points
Format: one block per lead, labeled with their name.
Leads:
[paste rows from your sheet, e.g.:
- Sarah + Matt, July 19 at Riverview, quoted $3,200 full-day coverage
- Priya + Jordan, September 6 at The Barn at Glencoe, quoted $2,400 half-day
]Copy it, paste it, edit the placeholders at the top. Drop your lead rows at the bottom. The prompt is yours.
Honest tradeoffs.
Claude doesn't have your calendar or booking status.
You copy the relevant rows manually. If a lead already booked last week and you forgot to update the sheet, Claude will draft a follow-up for a couple who's already your client. Keep the sheet updated. Thirty seconds per row when something changes.
Paste 5 to 6 leads at a time.
If your sheet has 30 unbooked leads, don't paste all 30 at once. The output gets unwieldy and you'll skip personalizing. Do a batch of five or six. Read them, fix one line each, send. Then the next batch next week.
Each draft needs one personalized line before you send.
Claude works from what you paste in. If all you gave it is "Sarah + Matt, July 19 at Riverview, quoted $3,200," the draft will be warm but generic. Before you send, add one line that only you would know: something from your original call with them, or a detail from their inquiry you remember. That line is the difference between a follow-up they respond to and one they delete.
The payoff is cumulative.
One ten-minute Monday habit across peak season means you touched every warm lead at least twice before October. That's the whole point. The leads were already there. You just stopped losing them to your own schedule.
Book a Scrappy Hour.
60 minutes on Google Meet. Bring your real packages and one real inquiry. We set up the workflow on your Claude account live. First one's free if you've never worked with me. $150 after that. No subscription.
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