Written By: Scott Koepf, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)– Cruise Planners
Travel advisors need many abilities to succeed in today’s competitive market. Education, passion and experience are all helpful in building your business but only if you have the right abilities to put them to use. You could know every rule of a sport, passionately love it and have experience watching it but none of those results in your ability to actually play the sport. Selling travel is the same. You can know the details of each supplier, be passionate about the joys of travel and have personally travelled the world, however none of those will automatically bring success as a travel advisor.
The most successful advisors know that there are certain abilities that will connect them to clients in a mutually beneficial relationship. While there are several abilities travel advisors should develop and constantly improve upon, here are three of the most important abilities:
Avail-ability
Quite simply, this one is the king of all abilities that all potential clients will judge you on and have the most expectations for you to fulfill. You can have amazing knowledge, skills, and passion but they will all be useless if you did not respond when the client wanted you to. This starts with the first inquiry you get (a new lead). A recent report indicated that sales are made 70% of the time by the first salesperson to respond to a request. This does not mean you have to answer every call or email or text within seconds but the faster the better. You can set expectations on your voice message or auto responder, but you need to be specific. If you say you will get back to them ‘right away’ or ‘soon’ that means five minutes to potential clients, so tell them when you will respond (in 5 hours, next business day, etc.). Consumers are patient if they have specific expectations and this will also help you be accountable.
Availability is also the number one way you will be judged as to your customer service. You can send gifts, create beautiful emails and provide fantastic itineraries but if you do not respond in a timely fashion, none of those matter. This does not mean you have to immediately react 24/7 (although some advisors do) as once again you can set the expectations of typical response times/days unless an emergency. Your availability or if you prefer, your accessibility is by far the most impactful ability you can embrace.
A great quote to live by (no clue who said it) is “Your greatest ability is your availability!”
Believability
To build profitable lifetime relationships with clients, they have to believe you and believe in you. The process of building and maintaining trust is the foundation of a good sales process. While this takes many abilities in working with clients, trust will not be granted until it is earned. There is no short cut to having a client really trust you so take your time. Do not be in a hurry to collect a deposit but set your goal to spend time qualifying a client and sharing what you can do for them. Sending out quick quotes to the masses will not bring consistent positive success as there will be no trust created. A good book title by Bert Decker makes the point clearly, “You Have to be Believed to be Heard”. When a client trusts you, they will believe you when you communicate with them. Without trust, you are just more noise in a crowded marketplace.
Compatibility
This goes hand in hand with believability as clients not only need to trust you but they need to like you. And the reverse is true if you want to enjoy your role as a travel advisor. Finding the right clients who you like to work with is the most important element to consider when determining your niche. Many articles and workshops emphasize the need for advisors to specialize however most focus on building specific product or destination knowledge and then marketing your differentiation. While there is nothing wrong with that approach, the first question to ask yourself is if the niche you develop will bring you the right kind of clients. Therefore, consider specializing in client interests first versus products or destinations as that will build compatibility with your database in a much deeper way.
As a final note, Artificial Intelligence is changing the travel advisor role dramatically. While some see the eventual demise of travel advisors, others see the benefits of utilizing AI to make them more relevant than ever. Great advisors will embrace AI but what will keep the advisors relevant, and an important distribution channel, are these three abilities. AI is available 24/7 instantaneously so your Availability is being compared to that. AI can make mistakes but each day it gets more acurate so the only thing that will overcome that is your Believability. And finally, AI cannot build a human relationship no matter how hard it tries, so building upon Compatability to find and keep clients will be the long term path to success.