Client contact management for travel industry

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i'm stephanie grice and our guest today is heidi dako who's entrepreneur humanitarian and an adventurer and she owns and operates uh marketing for travel agents so welcome to the lounge heidi and thanks for joining us here today thanks for having me stephanie i am super excited to talk to all the travel professionals tuning in right now yeah so am i this is going to be such a great episode and just very actionable so everybody listening grab a pen and paper now because i feel like you're gonna need it for sure um but before we dive into everything though uh first can you just share a little bit more about yourself and how you got started in the travel industry yeah so just over five years ago i started marketing for travelagents.com and our signature main program that we sell is called the travel expert marketing academy which is designed to help travel professionals get their marketing on point so that they are continually attracting in new ideal clients to their travel business not the tire kickers and the bargain hunters and the time wasters but ideal clients that they really want to be working with and um when i started marketing for travel agents what i saw in the market was this huge gap um where there are really expensive albeit you know some of them are great um programs that where you can learn how to grow your travel business but they're out of reach for a lot of travel agents just getting started and then there just really wasn't anything that was affordable that was highly effective um so many of the things out there which are isn't even that many of them but i mean they just kind of give you a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it's not the whole picture and the whole plan and step-by-step um that puts it together the other thing with travel professionals is they have um to be extremely efficient with their time in order to make decent money and so they need things as done for you and grab and go as possible so for a travel professional to sit and spend hours and hours and hours learning some marketing strategy and then hours and hours and hours trying to figure out how to implement that whole marketing strategy and then hoping to get results and then course correcting and all of that like they just don't have the time and bandwidth and it can put them out of business quite frankly you know especially because a lot of them getting started are working day jobs and they're side hustling as a travel professional trying to get off the the ground and so they need a highly affordable effective and efficient way to get new clients and so we saw that gap in the marketplace and created the travel expert marketing academy to do just that for travel agents and so we show them the entire picture of the marketing plan they need to have in their travel business and we give them as many done for you grab and go resources proven templates you know all of that so they can just grab it implement it get results um so it's been really really fun working with the travel agent community for the last um over five years now that's awesome and that's all so true especially now i mean well before even covey but um you know once we start getting out of the pandemic and travel starts really picking up that will be needed more than ever so that's really cool and so oh sorry go ahead i say the good news is you know one silver lining with this pandemic is that the world woke up to the value of travel agents essentially overnight we are seeing people rush back to travel agents in a way that we have not seen in over two decades we have so many members in our academy our travel expert marketing academy that are reporting to us that their phones are ringing off the hook they have clients you know they're doing many of them have done more bookings in the last four and five months than they have in the last like three and four years combined um because people are like you know what the travel landscape has changed it is complicated i want to work with a travel professional so it's one thing that's happened and then the next thing that's happened is um people are valuing experiences more than stuff ever before so the amount of money that they're putting into travel and the value that they're putting into travel especially bucket list trouble bucket list travel has gone if you look at the graphs it has gone off the charts in terms of the increase in bucket list travel and people spending um way more money and so because of that they're like i need to work with a professional on this i'm not just booking something simple here and i'm spending a good amount of my income on this so the travel agents that are getting in front of people with the right marketing message and the right strategies their phones are ringing off the hooks right now and that's what we're going to talk about today i'm going to walk through six strategies that travel agents can implement right away that's going to get your phones ringing with those ideal clients because there are a plethora of ideal clients out there that want to hire you they want to work with you people are more willing than ever to pay planning fees we've got agents in our academy that are charging 600 1200 and above in planning fees obviously it's not required your business you get to play the rules but um i do recommend it for a lot of agents and it's easier than ever to get it um and getting those ideal clients actually is easier than ever if your phone's not ringing off the hook with ideal clients it's because you have a marketing problem and so we're gonna help you address that today oh that is awesome that is so cool to hear too just and we're seeing that at traffic too i mean it is really starting to just so many proposals coming left and right all over so that is awesome i will let you take it away because i know i'm excited to hear all right too so there are two primary types of uh client getting strategies so one strategy is what i call a lead source so that's it's just like what it sounds it is a source of leads for your travel business leads meaning prospective clients coming in so a source meaning it's a something you set up that you continually work on you know you're either rinsing repeating it or it's like a regular source that's set up that you just keep massaging it and it keeps sending you clients so a lead source and every single travel professional needs to have at least three lead sources set up in their business like three to five depending um then the second type of client getting strategy is what we call a cash injection strategy this is just like a down and dirty like go get some clients so it's it's uh like hey i'm having a slow month i'm gonna just do a couple quick you know one or two just cash injection strategies that these strategies are just bolts of new clients they're not something that's going to regularly feed your business and it's not something you can do it's not sustainable in that you can't do it like week in week out where like a lead source is something that can just be part of your regular marketing system your marketing calendar you just feed those lead sources and they feed you leads regularly and then a cash injection strategy is just that quick hit of new clients so we're gonna go over four different uh possible lead sources for travel professionals and then two different quick cash injection strategies now inside our academy we actually go through 14 of them in depth and we give you how-to tutorials and we give you done-for-you templates and scripts and everything to make implementation quick and easy obviously we don't have time for all that in this quick podcast today so i'm going to give you an overview of the strategies now it is important to remember you don't want to run around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to do 15 things and do none of them well you want to go deep instead of wide so that's why we recommend you choose you know like three lead sources that you go deep on and you really focus in on and then you occasionally do those quick hit um cash injection strategies when you just need an influx of clients you're having a slow month you're having a slow quarter um so i'm gonna go over four possible ones like i said we have 14 in there because not everyone that i'm going over might be an ideal fit for you right like you're a unique person you have a unique business and unique skill set and so um i chose four different ones that i believe most travel professionals at least one if not two of these would be a good fit for your travel business um and then like i said in the academy you go through many more so that you can really choose three that really resonate with you feel good for you um you know they fit your business all of that so let's dive in yeah that's awesome i'm excited we're getting a little sneak peek into everything yeah [Laughter] all right so um number one i want to talk about uh jv's so jv sounds stands for joint venture so this is where you're creating a joint venture partnership with another you know business or entity and it can be look a lot of different ways there's a lot of different ways to do a jv and you're partnering with uh with a usually a business but with a somebody who has they sell a product or service that is complementary to what you sell or maybe it's not complementary and it's not related in any way but they have the same ideal client as you do so they serve a certain type of client and you serve that same type of client so you might be selling two entirely different things like they might sell spa services and you sell travel services you know it might be totally different things but you have the same type of client and so then you do a partnership together that is beneficial for both of you so you're essentially like cross-pollinating your clientele now there's a few unique ways to do this um so i'm going to give you uh two i've got two examples for you so the first example is you could partner with a country club in fact um the country club that um were members of did this with the travel agent i'm like kudos to that travel agent it was really smart so that travel agent um just went to the country club and pitched them to be their kind of resident travel agent where she would um put together a different like uh survey the member base like what kind of you know trips people wanted to do um they were do she was doing i think like two different group trips annually and so they would market that to the base of that you know country club like hey we're gonna do uh you know whatever it was you know on trip and so if you're interested you know set up a consultation with me to get you know the details um so that was one way she worked with them but another way that she worked with them is the country club had all of these different partnerships set up where their members would get you know discounts at you know with a local specific like they had a resident personal trainer and then their resident travel agent their resident this and their resident back and so what would happen is their resident professionals so travel agent being one of them would contribute content to their quarterly magazine that they put out so they would like write a little article in there give some travel tips but then they would get like a little bio section like i'm the resident travel agent for xyz country club contact me here you know special deals and you know upgrades etc available to members of the club um so she was constantly getting promoted in their magazine um she would occasionally actually do a lunchtime lecture at the country club where people would you know pay to go to a it was a lunch and learn you know they would do a few lunch and learns a month and so the resident travel agent would be one of them you know a couple times a year where she would give travel tips and then she'd usually talk about some of the group group experiences that she was designing that members could get together and go on together and then of course she would book you know individual things um so that's just one example i'm getting into probably too many details here but just to give you an example of what a jv partnership so that costs that travel agent nothing in most cases once in a while the the place will want to like a kickback on commissions but that's no big deal every time you get a commission they just want a small percentage kickback um but oftentimes they do that totally for free that jv partnership oftentimes would cost you nothing and can be a regular stream that's what we call a lead source meaning you're regularly getting high quality leads from that source right and you're just massaging that relationship and you're maximizing and leveraging that relationship month after month year after year um and i'll do a second quick example then we'll move on to strategy number two um so uh we have a uh agent insider academy actually a few of them that have done this but one i'm going to talk about in particular she went to a retirement home so 55 and plus like condominium and um pitch them that she would do like a host like a fun little travel event in their uh party room and have like lace for everybody and music and you know beverages and all that and people would come down which you know all these like retired people sitting around like go the party room get some free food and you know like see what's up and she made it really fun and then she did a pitch like hey i'm gonna be the resident travel agent for you know xyz community whatever the community is called sunshine whatever set community and um she said a couple of things so number one if you you know want to go on vacation i'll book it for you here's how i work here's all the benefits of working with me and you're going to get you know royal treatment because i'm the resident travel agent here you know etc and then the second thing is she said hey i know a lot of y'all are friends why not go on vacation together why don't i plan one or two group trips a year let's brainstorm some ideas what are you on y'all's bucket list and got them talking and excited and figured out that they actually many wanted to do a river cruise and so ended up putting together you know river cruise and then keeping that relationship where she now does regular events there does regular you know group things and then has people call so those are just two examples of jv's there's we can give you like a million examples that we don't have time for that today but setting up joint ventures uh partnerships um is really really uh lucrative for your travel business and just like working those relationships all right moving on to number two which um similar to a joint venture you can set up what's called a corporate contract and these can actually be even more lucrative than joint ventures so here's a very quick example of a corporate contract when i was a kid my dad worked for the power company um the big power company in midwest and um they would put out a vacation every year that uh their resident travel agent you know put together and you know one year it would be disney next year would be bahamas you know this and that and they would say hey for families you know the power company which there's thousands i think they had maybe 3 000 employees at the time right it's a lot of families um we have this package available you can go anytime during these dates it's going to be a sunday to a friday and it's this amount and like all the things like all work down if you want to do upgrades it's this it was all planned out so they weren't necessarily traveling together all they could be but they were traveling like within a window and you know it worked out all the resort details and everything and so that agent just put together a different deal every year so we went on that trip every year and we'd go and there'd be all sorts of families the week that we went i'm sure all sorts of families the week after and the week before and you know because they would give like a i don't remember exactly but maybe a two-month window or something that you know you could go on this specific type of trip um so that's an example of a corporate contract um most likely in that case the corporation is getting a kickback but it's well worth it because you're getting i mean you know you can just from one corporate contract get enough business for your entire year um if you have the right kind of contract in a big enough contract and then imagine if you had 10 of those right and you had you know three different agents working for you managing that so corporate contracts can be really lucrative um and again inside our academy we teach you all these strategies and gives you the ins and outs and scripts and who to contact and how to get these and like all the things um today we're just doing high level overview because that's all we have time for that is so cool though i'm already my mind is like oh my god i can't believe i've never thought of that it's amazing great ideas so uh strategy number three we're only on three we're gonna wait keep going yay all right strategy number three is get press so press means um radio tv newspaper local magazine now you might be thinking oh my gosh it'd be so hard to get press no it's actually way easier than you probably realize especially local press and your small local you know a lot of people have them the mis uh conception that they have to be on the today show in order to like get clients from you know press you totally don't you actually can get do a lot better and get a lot more clients from some small little spot on your local you know morning program you know radio or tv or even in your local little like magazine like a lot of um like uh homeowners associations will have like these little neighborhood magazines that go out and you're like yeah it only goes like 2 000 people you'd be shocked at how many great clients you can get from something like that right and so um there is uh you know whole process for getting press but like in the academy we give you what's called a press kit where we tell you how to find the outlets how to find the contact person we give you exact scripts on how to find their contact information like how to find their email and phone number and where to harvest that information from exactly what kind of email you can send them like the template um how to do a pitch we even give you grab and go pitches that you can just grab customize and send out you know so you even have to write your own pitches so it is a process but it um once you have contacts with the price again you can be the resident travel agent like we've got members who like they're the resident travel agent for the little morning show in their local area and um that program they get to be on regularly or sometimes they'll just call them and say hey we're doing a story in xyz and we want you to give your take on it or we want you to share you know some statistics or this and that so that we can just plug into the story like travel professional blah blah blah says docs they want to just add it into the story which is that extra so you become like their resident you know travel agent and then there's so many different ways to leverage the press so it's not just about like people hearing you and maybe you know going to your website and possibly you know booking a consultation with you it's about all of the different ways that you can leverage each piece of press that you get um and there's a lot there's like 10 or 12 that we give you that are very simple they take very little time and that's where the real gold is um on getting press so that's our third lead source is getting press all right our fourth lead source and then we're going to move on to cash injection strategies so our fourth lead source is through organic social media now i know some of you are like so hang on with me bear with me so organic means it's not paid so of course you can buy ads on you know facebook you know etc um organic means it's just you know free social media and yes i get that social media can just suck all your time and all the life right out of you however if you're following a proven succinct strategy and you are consistent with that strategy you can attract great clients through social media now the key is you set up a strategy um you follow the strategy and you set up boundaries and you you know lock in how much time you're spending and you have like a whole thing which we actually in the academy have an amazing social media expert that lays out a fantastic strategy that you'll actually follow and that you'll actually get results from because it's not at all overwhelming it's very simplistic the other thing with organic social media here's one quick tip before we move on um but it's a really really really important tip you want to go deep and not wide it's not about being on every social media platform it's about picking one that you are going to focus on pick one focus on the one now you could have just kind of a presence on a few others but you don't really invest much time and energy at all and you've got one that you go deep on and that's the one that's regularly sending new good client leads to your business i love that i like how you mentioned too that it it's because it's social media can be its own job literally full-time job so yeah i love that idea just focus on one and figure out which one is your favorite and that works the most and run after it yeah great tip and yes on one platform and on one specific strategy that gets results and letting go of everything else so it's like 80 20 rule you're there is a even on that one platform that you choose there's a million things you could do but we show you like okay you're just gonna do one simple straightforward strategy that's gonna get results and you're gonna let go of all the other things that yeah could help a bit but it's not going to move the needle enough that it's worth your time and energy so it's really the key like as a travel agent as a travel professional you've got to be efficient with your time if you're going to make good money at this you just have to be there's no other way around it in the travel business all right moving on to cash injection strategy cash injections i'm just so excited to hear what cash injection means yes that entails i'm excited to chat about it so again these are not regular lead sources these are quick hits quick hits of clients so number one is you want to craft a letter when i say letter it doesn't necessarily mean physical snail mail um letter can be digital right you're gonna craft a message that um that is short and sweet and it highlights um you know who you are and what you're doing right now um so so in this letter this initial letter and then you're gonna highlight your uh consultation so we we usually recommend our agents or i shouldn't say usually we pretty much always recommend that you um do what we call a complimentary consultation like a free vacation planning session or something to um when you're getting a lead to come in the door versus them just like asking you for quotes and we have a whole thing around that that i'm not going to go into right now but um but basically that's a great way to fill your calendar with you know high quality prospective clients you do these really short efficient um consultations to make sure and vet them make sure that they're gonna be a good fit to work with um so what you do is you say hey i've got a certain amount of spot this is what i'm up to this is how it benefits you i've got a certain amount of spots open on my calendar the next couple weeks where i'm offering these complimentary vacation planning sessions you know book here and you give them a link to an online scheduler and we actually have a template for this that we'll give you and i'll we give it to our academy members but at the end of this i'm going to tell you how you can actually go get it for free like right away without even joining our academy yeah um so although i highly recommend that you join our academy but this is an extra little freebie that i'm going to throw in today um and then you want to send that out to um friends family like past co-workers um that kind of thing and i understand because a lot of you are grimacing and saying yeah but most of my family would be terrible clients most of my friends would not be great clients all that here's the deal it's not just about them becoming a client for you or not it's about they each have a circle of influence so you're going to customize each of these so this is something that you're sending out one one on one right so you're literally setting aside you know a saturday or a friday or whatever and you're like all right i'm going to send out 100 letters because i need to go out and just get a quick injection of clients in my business and you're going to go through your email database you're going to go through you know different you know databases that you have all the business cards on your desk you know etc etc and um send a customized individual letter to each person so you can send out via email you can send it out via you know facebook direct message instagram dm like whatever contact you have in for you know for them and and some of it might be like hey um this is what i'm up to um and this is the kind of clients i work with um who do you know that would be a great fit can you send it can you forward this on to them these are the spots that i have open the next few weeks for a complimentary vacation planning session you know etc and you would be surprised like everybody is surprised by the number of friends and family that are like didn't know that you were a travel agent or forgot that you were a travel agent and so you get responses like oh my gosh yeah i totally forgot you were in the travel business my you know old co-worker susie's actually planning a disney trip or this or that like you think that your all of your friends and family know what you do and i promise you they don't like if you just sent out a survey and was like what do i do for a living to all your friends and family you would be shocked and dismayed at the number of wrong answers you will get and the reality is it's not because they don't love and care about you it's because they are so busy and overwhelmed with their own life that they just aren't focused right they just aren't focused and so you need to tell them what you're up to remind them what you're up to remind them what you do how to work with you remind them what your website is like all of that because they have people in their lives that could be great clients for you so it's obviously not a strategy you can do like ever you know every week but you can do it a few times a year when you're having a slow you know slow month a slow time and you just need to get that hit of extra clients and then because you're doing custom letters again you're customizing what that says so this is not like some blanket pitch that you're sending out i would never recommend that these are all each customized to the person that you're sending it to and i know 100 sounds like a lot but you'd be so surprised that you can whip out 100 of those in a saturday like yeah and then yeah totally you just block your time and you just like out and then you do follow-ups a few days later because you will have you know 98 of people won't get a response from so then you do a bunch of follow-ups a few days later you get actually a pretty a hot much higher response to the follow-ups than the initial one and then um still low it's still small percentage but even there's people that didn't respond that forwarded it on they just never got around to responding to tell you that or it just clicked in their brain about you and they were gonna respond and they forgot and it got buried in their inbox but at least they're thinking about it they're thinking about you they're thinking about the fact that you're a travel agent and then later you hear from them or later you like randomly get a referral from them um so it's it does have a uh a lot of benefits like over time as well you know the benefits come in yeah that makes sense because it is an opportunity just to get in front of them you know like you said remind them that is so funny though too about you know not knowing what you do and now is such a perfect time because it's gonna be again the value of an agent just skyrocketed in the past 18 months so yeah absolutely stephanie you nailed it on the head now it's like more important than ever that you do this strategy because people are looking for agents and 75 percent of the people you know don't remember didn't remember or know or whatever thinking that you're a travel agent exactly you got to get out there you've got to get in front of them which brings us to the second strategy which is similar it's basically we're just taking that strategy and adding another layer to it which for the second layer you're going out to your circle of influence so for the first layer you're really going out to people you personally have a relationship with so this is like a friend family really personal right you're writing a really personal you know customized email for each or message for each the second set is circle of influence so this is like you're going through you know everybody you're connected to on facebook and linkedin and instagram and you know all the business cards you have laying around from old networking events that you went to and you know you know maybe you hosted a booth at a bridal show two years ago and like all of that it's like this whole circle of influence and so you're doing a slightly different version of that letter and then you i still recommend customizing it and you are sending out individually but you're doing minor customizations because a lot of these people you don't really even know enough to customize it too much so you're doing just enough customization where it's like hey i met you at the bridal show two years ago or you know it's fun you know i saw you know on facebook that your son graduated last week like so great you know i love your posts you know just something really simple in the front that's maybe you just like you're just touching on like the connection that you have with them i'll albeit maybe a pretty minor connection um but you're you know you are talking about that connection and then you're just using like the the template after that and so a lot of those you're sending out via like direct message on social media because a lot of these people you don't like have their email addresses necessarily you're only connected on social um and then some you do have the email but you know again because you got their business card somewhere or something like that and um and then so that's that's the the second strategy is circle of influence so it's fewer customizations the good news is you can send out a lot more um so you won't get as many responses it's gonna still be a really low response you have to send out a lot more to get like the same response but you can send them out a lot faster because you're just doing like one line customization at the top like you just need to go do a quick you know search on them take a look at kind of what they've been posting on social lately that you can like talk about change one line and then like drop in the rest sort of uh deal that is awesome that is literally something that anybody listening can just start doing right after this absolutely amazing yeah yeah and if you want the script that we're recommending and we've changed it you know out through the pandemic we kept changing the script to something new because obviously the world was changing so the latest script um that's out right now we actually have a free online marketing master class that you can go to and when you attend that class if you stand until the end the system the webinar system will automatically email you that script that you can grab and go right away in your travel business and you'll get a ton of value just coming to that class also um you're going to hear a bunch more strategies i'm going to walk you through that actual marketing plan that we give you in the academy so in the free class we give you the whole plan like here's the plan and then in our paid academy we actually help you with the implementation of it we give you step by step and how to and scripts and templates and everything but in the free class you get the actual plan like we give it to you to download see it's like here's the marketing plan we walk through each step of it and then you do get that script as well um and you can register for that class at jointravelacademy.com so the free online marketing master class is at jointravelacademy.com jointravelacademy.com and we host that class live sometimes and then other times we're just running replays in the different time zones um so depending upon when this releases um there might be a live class coming up which is great if you can come to live because we do q a and everything or you can maybe just watch the replay you know of a recent live class that we did and you'll get a ton of value from that class um plus you'll get the script that works um that's an updated script uh that's based on you know what's going on in the world right now and we do keep that script updated over time because obviously the world changes that script needs to you know change with the world um and then at the end of that class we tell you all about the travel expert marketing academy which is our paid premier program where we help you implement all of this and give you all the support you need and tools and we if you stay until the end of class we have a special offer for you to join us inside the academy awesome that's so great and i will drop that link in the article as well so if anyone listening um go check that out at academy.travify.com so not to confuse you with academic travel academy and travify academy yes we just we just love the academy stuff that sounds so awesome i mean just this alone what you've shared with us is just so valuable so i just want to say thank you so much i mean it's extremely actionable if everybody did even all of those or even if you just picked a few of those things you're gonna have a very successful business i believe so so that is really awesome i just want to thank you so much heidi for um sharing that all with us uh here today and and thank you so much everyone for tuning in to this episode of the lounge of travify academy and thanks again to uh our special guest heidi dako for joining us here today i love this even i feel like i i took i'm taking some things away just to apply to travify alone so this is awesome so um but also be sure to subscribe to our podcast or subscribe to our youtube channel for all of the latest episodes and we hope you enjoyed our conversation today and join us again but for now stay safe and we'll catch you on the next flight