1. Reply within the hour — including at 11pm
Couples enquire in the evening and at weekends, and they message several venues at once. The first proper reply frames the whole conversation. "Thanks, we'll be in touch" is not a reply; it's a receipt. If nobody is at a desk out of hours, that's the first thing to fix, whether with a rota, a system, or both.
2. Lead with dates and a price band
Answer the two questions every couple actually has: can we have a date near the one we want, and roughly what will it cost. Offer three real dates from the live calendar — including a Friday or off-season Saturday you'd like to fill — and a range, not a "please enquire". A "no, that Saturday's taken" ends the conversation; "the 12th is gone, but the 5th and 19th are open, and Fridays are £X less" keeps it going.
3. Sell the visit, not the PDF
The showround is where wedding venues get booked. Every reply should move toward it: two or three visit slots offered, in the first message. The brochure is what they read on the way home.
4. Chase until it resolves
Most lost weddings were never declined — they went quiet. A planner with forty tabs open forgets. Follow up on a schedule (a few days, a week, a fortnight), politely, until there's a yes, a no, or a genuinely dead lead. Nobody should have to remember to chase; it should be a rule that runs.
5. Log every touch in one place
If the enquiry lives in one person's inbox, the venue doesn't know its own pipeline, and it walks out the door with four weeks' notice. Every enquiry, quote and chase in one system, so anyone can pick it up and the numbers are real.
6. Hold the big calls for the owner
Quotes above a set value, discounts, sensitive replies — those wait for the owner or GM. Everything else can run without them touching it. Set the thresholds once; the job runs inside them.
Who does this job?
Traditionally the events coordinator — a £30k–£45k hire doing steps 1–5 in office hours, which is exactly when wedding enquiries aren't arriving. MarsAI runs the six steps as a system, day and night, in your voice, with the approvals still yours, from £995 a month. Either way, the steps above are the job.
Want to know how your venue scores on the six? The free audit measures it — response speed, follow-up gaps, where enquiries die — and writes up the fixes.
Free audit: we time your replies, find the unchased quotes and the dead channels, and give you 3–5 fixes in writing.
Get the hire costed →