8 Reasons You Are Not Closing More Travel Sales

Are you buying leads but not closing any sales? It can be frustrating when potential clients respond negatively or even worse just ignore you. Before you keep wasting money on leads you should make sure you have your own business in order. If you don’t inspire trust and create value for your clients they will be booking with someone else. Here is what you need to have in order before you can really expect to close a substantial number of sales.

• 1. Professional Website.

  Having a great website inspires trust in potential customers. Your website should have a great design, properly formatted images, professional written content, work across a variety of devices from laptops to mobile and should be fast and free of errors. It definitely, takes some time to get everything in order and requires an investment from your side. If you have a poor website customers will feel like you don’t care about your business and they are unlikely to trust you with their money. After all it would be pretty easy to change the name of your travel company and just disappear or start over.

• 2. Third Party Reviews.

  Reviews are super important. You won’t be closing a lot of sales until you have at least 5 or 6 reviews from past clients. I am not talking about testimonials on your website or Facebook reviews. Customers are smart and these are too easy to fake. The best place to get reviews is on Tripadvisor. Don’t even think about asking friends for fake reviews since real customers will be able to spot these easily. You need real reviews from real customers. Its fine however to reach out to past clients even if they traveled with you some time ago and let them know you have a Tripadvisor account and would appreciate if they write a review for you.

  Reviews are a tough one if you are just starting your business since even if you are doing everything else right it is going to be hard to make those first few bookings and get your first reviews. My experience suggests that companies without any reviews should have conversion rates on leads of around 1 or 2%. This can easily double or triple once you get some reviews as long as you have everything else in order.

• 3. Proper Salesmanship.

  Salesmanship is the art of closing the deal. It’s about understanding what your potential customer wants and making the sale. In my experience you have 2 basic customer types; those who are price sensitive and those who are service oriented. Use available clues to figure out which each type of lead is and craft your sales approach accordingly. If a customer wants to be reassured on the service aspects but you are trying to close the sale by offering discounts its not going to happen.

• 4. Timely Response.

  Responding timely to potential customers is essential. If you are emailing back and forth with a customer and then all of a sudden you don’t respond for two hours you have broken the attention span of the customer and now you have to fight to get it back. If you respond immediately its also a good way to build trust. If it takes you two days to respond you have no credibility. Even if it’s the weekend or Friday night you need to respond. Imagine yourself in your customers shoes and think how you would feel if it takes someone 2 days to respond. Your also going to be wondering how long it will take if you need any service from that person once you buy.

• 5. Appropriate Follow-ups.

  Accept the fact that not everyone want to talk to you all the time. All of us our busy and potential customers are no different. If after a few days you have not heard from a customer its fine to follow-up and try to get the conversation back on track. If a client does not respond to the first email I suggest following up at least six times over the course of 2 months both by phone and email.

• 6. Value for Client.

  If you are doing everything else right but still struggling to make sales ask yourself if you are giving the customer a compelling value. How does your product line up against the competition? Maybe it’s a pricing issue or maybe its an issue with the actual product itself and how its crafted. Change your product and/or pricing and keep trying.

• 7. Presentation.

  This applies to both phone and email. Emails should be properly formatted and easy to read. Make sure you use a spell checker. Personalize each email and let the client you know what they want and have done everything you can to make booking the trip easy. Don’t overload the client with too much information but at the same time provide what is needed and what is relevant. Remember most of us have a short attention span.

• 8. Payments.

  Finally make it easy to pay online and or accept various forms of payment. Make sure your website is secure. If clients are worried about making a full payment consider accepting just a deposit and letting them pay the rest on arrival.