What is the essence of high sales for any travel consultant?
What makes you become a travel agent superstar with high sales volume?
Have you ever pondered these questions effectively?
Well after coaching 146 small businesses and spending 13 years in the travel industry here are my top 4 tips for maximizing your travel sales and overachieving as a travel consultant.
1. What is your personal vision for your role?
That is – what are you aiming for?
I urge you to set a yearly target for your sales and break it down to quarterly and monthly targets for your sales.
Without a target to aim for it has been my experience that there is no possible way to overachieve.
Interestingly my experience has been that sales of any travel agency individual without a target to aim for are usually about 20-40% lower over a year than a competing travel agency with a target.
After all, how can you possible stay motivated enough to push through the inevitable challenges and roadblocks that come your way. This point is critical to high sales. Mark my words you must have a target to pursue, to smash or to push towards.
Example: 1 year target is $1 million gross sales for the company.
2. Follow up every enquiry with 5 multiple professional communications.
If I could convince you of the mightiest of strategies, the one that takes the pick as the first tactic I would introduce to any travel business, it would be following up every quote within 3 business days and to keep in touch with your prospects until they buy.
Burn this secret into your mind. To build any business to consumer relationship you need to accept that several contacts should be considered the norm and not the exception when dealing with your prospects. Three, five or seven contacts or communications with your enquirer virtually means a booking will result with you rather than a hit or miss one contact approach.
The biggest mistake most new travel businesses make is to NOT consistently follow up every enquiry. The best way to enable this to happen is to have a sales system whereby every consultant professionally and without fear is trained to simply have 3 or 5 or 7 communications after someone enquires. I recommend you start with producing a simple 5 step sales system.
3. Generating most of your clients from referrals
The reality for us all in the travel industry is that most clients are very happy with your service. Generally speaking we are dealing with a delightful subject – travel and people warm to the advice we give.
So because we are in an industry like this, we all need to capitalize on these good feelings and reward ourselves with many more clients.
Put directly, if you have not got a referral program in place for your travel business, you are missing out on a lot of extra business.
So to maximize sales and to become a travel agent superstar you must give your current customers an opportunity to sell for you by recommending others to you. There is so many ways this can be done effectively. But in essence it is about offering to help all of your delighted clients friends, family and colleagues when the time comes to travel.
4. Do you really want to become a travel agent overachiever?
You may think this is a strange question to ask. But listen up. In business and in life I have found a direct correlation with over achievement and the reasons why you are doing it. Have you got your reasons why sorted as to why you want to become a travel agent superstar?
If not, let us make a start right now.
I suggest you list down ten to twenty reasons why you want to overachieve.
Examples could be:
I want to earn a high income to support my family.
I want to earn the prestige and recognition of my travel agency colleagues.
I want to win the award for best travel consultant in my organization.
I want to sell $1 million of travel this year and earn a 14 day Mediterranean cruise that our company gives away for over achievement.
I want to become a travel agent superstar because I have the urgency to help give value to as many customers, who I deem to be personal friends rather than clients.
Whenever you have your reasons clear for anything this clarity often becomes like an unstoppable force heading down a fast track.
Imagine as a travel agency business you go through these 4 areas above with every consultant individually and collectively in team meeting. Can you imagine the end result?
I can safely say from experience the end result means every individual has the tools and motivation to become a travel agent over achiever.