Don’t be surprised if your clients start calling and asking to meet in Hawaii. In a first for Hawaii’s tourism industry, group sales professionals representing resorts, hotels and travel companies statewide recently banded together to launch a coordinated telephone sales campaign to bring new meetings business to the 50th state.

Organized by the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau’s (HVCB) Corporate Meetings and Incentives division with support from its Island Chapter bureaus and the Hawaii Convention Center, the “Hawaii Prospect Sales Blitz” started in Kauai and continued on each island for a week this February.

Michael Murray

“We created a list of nearly 10,000 potential clients and our goal was to contact each one and sell them on the benefits and competitive advantages of booking Hawaii for business meetings,” said Michael Murray, CMP, CMM, CASE, HVCB’s vice president of sales and marketing for corporate meetings and incentives.

Sales professionals from 50 HVCB industry partner companies on Kauai, Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii’s Big Island are took part in the collaborative sales effort. However, instead of seeking new business for their individual properties, the partners were collectively selling the Hawaiian Islands as a world-class business meetings destination.

Their strategy for selling meetings to Hawaii? "Hawaii offers six unique islands which have six unique experiences for group programs and we promoted our statewide value programs which are all listed at www.businessaloha.com," said Murray. But what clinched interest, he said, was that the week they made the calls was the same period when 49 of the 50 states got snow, Hawaii being the exception."It was a nice introduction to clients over the phone, knowing we were calling from Hawaii with average temperatures that week were in the mid 70's," he said.

HVCB targets meeting planners and decision-makers in North America in all industries but for the blitz was putting special emphasis on reaching lucrative business sectors, such as medical, pharmaceutical, banking, business-related services and supply services.