Deconstructing the Sales Process
Let’s properly understand the difference between marketing and sales. Marketing refers to the efforts you undertake to make potential clients aware of you and your travel practice. You advertise, you write articles. You network in your community and publish a newsletter. You engage clients on social media. All of these are marketing efforts.
Marketing gives you the opportunity to engage in a sales transaction with a client – an actual purchase of a travel product through your agency. In classic marketing and sales training, marketing sets the expectations of the client and conditions the sales environment. “Sales” refers to the actual transaction – the exchange of your services for a sum of money. |
Marketing conditions the sales process.
While we can analytically separate marketing from sales, in the reality of a personality driven business like travel consulting the two are forever intertwined.
You are always marketing, even during the sales process. While you are marketing, you are creating an appropriate environment for sales to occur.
It is during those critical moments of personal contact, however, that the client decides to purchase through you or not. It is on those few moments that we want to focus for the next few weeks. Your marketing will have conditioned the sales circumstance and now we will confine our observations to those moments between the time the client approaches you with a sales opportunity to the moment they embark on their travels. Everything before and after is marketing.
If we go back and look at our marketing funnel discussion, this tipping point between the "sales process" dividing where the travel consultant is selling themselves and the beginning of the traveler purchasing from a transactional point of view is crucial. If a proper foundation of trust has developed during marketing, from that point on, both the travel consultant and the client are mutually engaged in working through the buying process, the client as the purchaser of travel and the travel agent as their buying coach/consultant.
It is important to not lapse into a retail mentality of believing you are "selling travel." The moment you do so, you will be competing solely on price. We are taught, rightly so, to shop around for the “best deal” when it comes to retailers. If two retailers have the same, identical product, you will naturally choose the one offering it at the lowest price. The retail environment is not a happy place.
Trusting yourself
The first rule of sales is, in order to do it well, you have to believe in your product. As a travel consultant, YOU are the primary product. Between the confines of your two ears you must believe that you can do a better job for your client than any other agent or than the client could do on their own. By virtue of your experience, your passion, your willingness to go the extra mile. That is the confidence you will need to sell well. With the client’s best interest at heart, your sales approach is firmly authentic and will be to your credit resulting in a long lasting relationship with your client.
Certainly you have to believe that travel is more than a discretionary spend, that it is important to the enrichment and well-being of your clients. But before everything else, you have to believe in yourself, because, as a travel consultant, you truly are the product. Believe in your willingness to go the extra mile for your clients, your willingness to research for the client in a thorough and professional manner using all of the tools at your disposal. You must be committed to spending the extra time it takes to better know your client, to research the supplier and to plan the vacation. You have to believe in your capacity for earnest study and native intelligence.
If you are willing to do what it takes to do an insanely great job for your clients, then you have the right to believe that there is no better travel consultant than you, and you will be on the way to building a first rate travel planning practice. You start the journey of believing in yourself by studying the basic principles of travel, business and marketing. Make it a part of your mission to every day enhance your knowledge base. Belief in yourself is not a matter of faith – it’s a matter of hard work and diligence.
Trust Your Clients
It is also true that sales presentations are easier to accomplish when you put the client at the absolute center of every travel planning effort. In every instance, start with the client, not the travel product. Go to extraordinary lengths to dress the client in exactly the right travel plan. Make sure the tour operator, the accommodations, the airline seat, the transfers and the extra activities fit the client. This requires a most intimate knowledge of the client not just in general, but with regard to this trip in particular. Each travel planning effort deserves its own special few minutes spent with the client discussing the “why” of the trip: “Why are you taking this trip?” What does the client want to achieve? Family time? Relaxation? Exploration? Cultural awareness? The answers to these questions allow you as a travel consultant to more closely match the product to the client.
Finally, understand that the best sales approach is like the eastern concept of Zen: it is the art of selling without selling. Think of yourself as a facilitator. Sales is not selfish manipulation. You are assisting your client in achieving what they most desire out of travel. You are not selling a cruise to your client – you are assisting your client in the conception, planning and execution of a cruise vacation using the resources you have at hand and are trained to use. You are not selling any travel products; however, you are assisting the client in their selection and purchase of travel product. When you view yourself as a facilitator of the client’s desires rather than as selling a product, you move to the client’s side of the table in the process. It is your task as a professional to assist the client in the removal of any or all of the obstacles to travel.
In order to trust your client, you have to establish a relationship. The client has to understand the ground rules - so explain what you do and how you do it to the client. Explain the mutual responsibilities you have to each other. If you simply provide the client a quote on a requested bit of travel without developing a relationship first, there is a better than average chance the "client" may or may not book with you.
Believe in yourself, put your client at the center of every planning effort and view sales as something helpful. Your care and craftsmanship will show. With these fundamentals in place, the sales process is more natural and authentic, and you will find your client with bags packed and one foot out the door!
Setting the Stage
If we go back and look at our marketing funnel discussion, this tipping point between the "sales process" dividing where the travel consultant is selling themselves and the beginning of the traveler purchasing from a transactional point of view is crucial. If a proper foundation of trust has developed during marketing, from that point on, both the travel consultant and the client are mutually engaged in working through the buying process, the client as the purchaser of travel and the travel agent as their buying coach/consultant.
It is important to not lapse into a retail mentality of believing you are "selling travel." The moment you do so, you will be competing solely on price. We are taught, rightly so, to shop around for the “best deal” when it comes to retailers. If two retailers have the same, identical product, you will naturally choose the one offering it at the lowest price. The retail environment is not a happy place.
Trusting yourself
The first rule of sales is, in order to do it well, you have to believe in your product. As a travel consultant, YOU are the primary product. Between the confines of your two ears you must believe that you can do a better job for your client than any other agent or than the client could do on their own. By virtue of your experience, your passion, your willingness to go the extra mile. That is the confidence you will need to sell well. With the client’s best interest at heart, your sales approach is firmly authentic and will be to your credit resulting in a long lasting relationship with your client.
Certainly you have to believe that travel is more than a discretionary spend, that it is important to the enrichment and well-being of your clients. But before everything else, you have to believe in yourself, because, as a travel consultant, you truly are the product. Believe in your willingness to go the extra mile for your clients, your willingness to research for the client in a thorough and professional manner using all of the tools at your disposal. You must be committed to spending the extra time it takes to better know your client, to research the supplier and to plan the vacation. You have to believe in your capacity for earnest study and native intelligence.
If you are willing to do what it takes to do an insanely great job for your clients, then you have the right to believe that there is no better travel consultant than you, and you will be on the way to building a first rate travel planning practice. You start the journey of believing in yourself by studying the basic principles of travel, business and marketing. Make it a part of your mission to every day enhance your knowledge base. Belief in yourself is not a matter of faith – it’s a matter of hard work and diligence.
Trust Your Clients
It is also true that sales presentations are easier to accomplish when you put the client at the absolute center of every travel planning effort. In every instance, start with the client, not the travel product. Go to extraordinary lengths to dress the client in exactly the right travel plan. Make sure the tour operator, the accommodations, the airline seat, the transfers and the extra activities fit the client. This requires a most intimate knowledge of the client not just in general, but with regard to this trip in particular. Each travel planning effort deserves its own special few minutes spent with the client discussing the “why” of the trip: “Why are you taking this trip?” What does the client want to achieve? Family time? Relaxation? Exploration? Cultural awareness? The answers to these questions allow you as a travel consultant to more closely match the product to the client.
Finally, understand that the best sales approach is like the eastern concept of Zen: it is the art of selling without selling. Think of yourself as a facilitator. Sales is not selfish manipulation. You are assisting your client in achieving what they most desire out of travel. You are not selling a cruise to your client – you are assisting your client in the conception, planning and execution of a cruise vacation using the resources you have at hand and are trained to use. You are not selling any travel products; however, you are assisting the client in their selection and purchase of travel product. When you view yourself as a facilitator of the client’s desires rather than as selling a product, you move to the client’s side of the table in the process. It is your task as a professional to assist the client in the removal of any or all of the obstacles to travel.
In order to trust your client, you have to establish a relationship. The client has to understand the ground rules - so explain what you do and how you do it to the client. Explain the mutual responsibilities you have to each other. If you simply provide the client a quote on a requested bit of travel without developing a relationship first, there is a better than average chance the "client" may or may not book with you.
Believe in yourself, put your client at the center of every planning effort and view sales as something helpful. Your care and craftsmanship will show. With these fundamentals in place, the sales process is more natural and authentic, and you will find your client with bags packed and one foot out the door!
Setting the Stage
You can spend lots of money getting consumers to your front door, to give you a call or to visit your website. But if they then don’t allow you to plan their trip, nothing happens and all of that fantastic marketing is for naught. Marketing drives sales, there is little doubt about that. But it is your own understanding and execution of sales technique that, at the end of the day, makes something happen.
Your marketing creates a consumer’s propensity to buy from you. Your sales ability closes the transaction. Your client’s initial interactions with you set the stage for their involvement with you as a travel professional. Your clients will want a lot of questions answered about hotel properties, options, pricing and payment. They will be evaluating your expertise and demeanor. They will observe your tone of voice, your manner of dress and your level of confidence. Your potential client will want to feel as though you empathize with them and that their plans are important to you. |
The good news is that you can, in fact, be in control of every aspect of the sales process. You, as the expert, can control the sales environment. You have to be 100% authentic – clients will detect “salesmanship” in a heartbeat and will shy off. But you also have to have a solid understanding of the sales process, the psychology of your clients and the importance of first impressions. Set the stage for success. This is what all your marketing has wrought, now it’s time to deliver on the expectations you have set. Now is the time to be the boss – take control of the process, inspire trust and confidence, demonstrate your empathetic concerns for the needs of your client. Be prepared, even rehearse. Set the psychology and the tone of the encounter so that the client knows you are not going to sell them anything. Instead, you are going to help them make an intelligent buying decision.
That is, indeed, the wonderful thing about consultive sales. You are not selling travel, you are selling yourself. But in order to do so, you have to be the ultimate stage master, in control of the environment and the tenor of the transaction. Assume that role well and you will have many happy clients.