6 Steps to Making More Money . . . Fast
by Marilee Crocker /This is the first of two parts on how to sell more effectively
When John Parke was a senior sales executive at Marriott International, he set an ambitious goal: He wanted to run the world’s best-performing, most efficient sales operation.
To reach his objective, Parke focused on streamlining what he calls “sales process.”
“Most salespeople define sales as intuition and relationships. But really what they’re doing is a process, and the relationships and the intuition are within the process,” said Parke, president and CEO of the global consulting firm Leadership Synergies.
Parke presented a seminar on Moving the Sales Process Along at the National Tour Association’s Travel Exchange 2015 in New Orleans last month.
Travel Market Report sat down with Parke near his home on Cape Cod to learn how retail travel professionals might apply his sales advice.
Here’s his step-by-step approach to growing your sales.
1. Map your sales process.
Deconstruct your work flow to isolate the steps common to every sale. What are the steps involved? This will differ depending on the nature and size of your business.
2. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Look at the process from the customer’s perspective. How easy is it for the customer to go through the sales process with you?
At Marriott, Parke and his staff figured out that a customer who was planning a big convention had to go through a minimum of 32 steps just to have the contract and booking confirmed.
“Think of how much vulnerability there is,” Parke said. “At every step, you could fail.”
3. Shorten the process.
If your sales process currently involves eight steps, look for ways to reduce that to six or four steps.
The point is to move the customer through faster. “The longer the time sellers are in the sales process, the more vulnerable they are to competitors taking that business away,” Parke explained.
One common area of vulnerability in the hospitality industry is the pass-off from sales to service. Salespeople tend to stay involved in logistics far too long, which keeps them from selling, Parke said.
“That’s an example of where the sales process is vulnerable, and if you work on it you can make huge strides,” Parke said.
4. Develop a script and follow it.
Create a script for sales calls. This will force you to think through how you want to present the three reasons a potential customer should do business with you rather than with another travel professional.
“If you don’t organize your thinking, you’re going to babble and wander,” Parke cautioned.
Following a script will help travel sellers be effective in the critical first minute of the call.
“People are so time-starved. We’re OK with someone suggesting something to us that we may be interested in, but we want them to do a professional and efficient job of it. Scripts enable you to do that,” Parke said.
5. Decide who the best customers are for your business.
A surprising number of business owners operate from a recessionary mindset where “any customer that shows up is a good customer,” Parke said.
Travel sellers who take the time to identify the characteristics of their ideal customer can better focus their energies.
This also helps sellers to set smaller, achievable objectives, which will make them more productive.
“Shrink it down and go, ‘I’m only going to call these 10 people who are good candidates. When I’m done talking to those 10 people, no matter what the outcome, then I’ll come up with 10 more.’”
6. Sell to the right people in the right order.
To “get to revenue as fast as you can,” Parke suggested making sales calls in the following sequence:
#1. Call previous customers first.
“They’re the easiest to convert. They know your business, they know you, so there’s a relationship, which means there’s a low barrier to acquisition.”
#2. Second, call customers who considered you before but went with somebody else.
“They might not be happy with that other provider, and they’ve already considered you, so there’s already a little bit of warmth in that relationship.”
#3. Third, call those customers that you’ve turned away in the past.
You may have turned a potential customer down when you discovered they were bargain hunting. But keep in mind that this individual already knows you and has already considered your services.
“If you diplomatically turned them down, they would reconsider you,” said Parke, who added that he would never advocate turning a potential customer away. (See sidebar.)
Once you’ve exhausted those three categories of customers you can move onto the fourth category––new business development.
Next time: A better way to close the sale