Headquarter Happenings: Nexion Hones in on Helping Agents Sell

In some ways, Nexion hasn’t changed at all under the new Travel Leaders structure; in other ways, it’s better than ever, says Jackie Friedman, CTC, CTIE, and president of Nexion.

“So much great stuff has happened, and we continue to embrace the Travel Leaders programs more than ever before. We’ve taken their infrastructure and added our own unique content, such as our first multi-supplier consumer campaign that included a 32-page magazine around holiday travel and another on family travel coming in December,” Friedman told Travel Market Report at the CoNexion conference in the Big Easy last week. “So there has been a lot more emphasis on the consumer.”

But that’s not to say that Nexion has forgotten its most important customer, the travel agent. Nexion’s research found that when asked what they need most, the majority of travel agents, not surprisingly, say “more clients.” So Nexion is rolling out new technology aimed at helping agents grow and expand their businesses.

New technology, training and education
New this year was Agent Profiler, which lets members build a profile of themselves and their businesses to sit on the Travel Leaders consumer website, where they can attract prospects looking for a travel agent.

There is also a whole new Nexion technology platform, called myNexion, rolling out to replace and improve upon the WebView portal. It features customer relationship management (CRM) software designed to help agents build a database, separate it by interest, and send targeted marketing pieces to the various niches. It will be released in phases over the next six months and integrated with the Travel Leaders Group’s lead-generation and direct-mail marketing tools.

Like the industry itself, “Nexion is definitely growing in the right way,” Friedman said. As new agents enter the marketplace, Nexion is targeting them with Travel Leaders of Tomorrow, an independent-learner program designed to get newcomers up to speed faster and selling more sooner. And as travel agents increasingly are taking on subagents with specialties like multigenerational travel, romance travel, wellness travel, and group travel, Nexion is offering educational events in each of those areas. “We understand the importance of specialization and we help them build those specialties,” Friedman said.

Indeed, Nexion is known for its education and training programs for new agents, and continues to focus on growing them. In June, the company debuted a three-day Master Marketing Symposium that had 33 agents digging into the components of a marketing plan, working with experts on building their social media presence, and listening to website experts and supplier coaches.

This year also saw Nexion’s first-ever luxury travel symposium, which proved so successful that another has already been scheduled for next year. In addition, there were two group sales programs aimed at teaching agents how to source, market, build and book groups, such as small groups of wine enthusiasts on a river cruise or small corporate meeting and incentive groups.

There also has been an internal change that saw Nexion’s education team grow by 50 percent as it morphed into a “business development and education team.” Coaching is a major focus at the company, and the new resources will center around coaching agents and putting together training programs to keep up with the speed of change in the travel industry.

“One benefit of being part of the Travel Leaders Group is that we can tap into shared resources to roll out new programs,” Friedman said. “The biggest change is adding new resources and tapping into the resources we have to roll out our new technology.”

The rollout details
This month the first phase of the technology platform, the foundation, is rolling out; the next stage, the heart of it all, will add the CRM component. The system is now going into beta and should be available by next month. Then will come the job of working to help agents migrate to the new platform and integrating it with the marketing programs Nexion will roll out to consumers. The final phase, myNexion accounting, will come out at the beginning of 2018; it will automate customer invoicing and accounting, including vendor receipts and payments, billing, corporate account management, all integrated with the GDSs.

A lot of time and effort has gone into putting all the pieces together in one integrated package. Most agents are not using a CRM program, “and some have a sort of home-grown thing in Excel,” Friedman said. “In many cases they’ve been waiting for this from us.”

Teaching agents how to use new technology to increase sales
Rather than just pushing it out and hoping agents use it, Nexion is going to proactively “teach them not just how to put the data in, but also how to use it. We will continue to work with them to ensure that they are taking advantage of the technology. You can give agents the tools, but you also have to focus on how to use them or you are wasting your money.”

When it comes to building a niche, for example, the point is not just that you should have one, but rather, how do you build one and how do you segment your customer base into who would be interested in each niche? “What steps do you take to make the most of your most important asset? If you don’t have a database, how do you look at your customers and see the opportunities? You need to understand your ‘who’ and your ‘what’—the customers you have or can reach, and what you are going to sell to them,” Friedman said. “And then you have to make sure that your ‘who’ and your ‘what’ are a good fit.”

So many agents miss opportunities because they don’t listen to what their customers are telling them beyond the immediate sale, she noted. If you have a client who is trying to choose between Alaska and Hawaii and she chooses Alaska, you should come away knowing that you have a client who is interested in booking Hawaii next year or the year after—and to whom you should be reaching out with specials to Maui in the next few months.

In the end, though, no matter how much technology rolls out and how large the Travel Leaders network grows, Nexion’s goal is to “build and maintain that family feeling, that collaboration, that sense of community and of helping each other,” Friedman says. “We don’t sell travel directly. We’re a pure host agency, and our success is 100 percent dependent on our agents being successful.”