The Sales Cycle: Recommend a Product
The sales process is dynamic, fluid and subject to unforeseen challenges at any point. While your techniques for dealing with these challenges may vary, the process for leading a customer to a buying decision remains essentially the same. By breaking the sales process into a series of interrelated steps, or sales cycle, we are better able to study the elusive skill known as selling.
Because it is so important to understand and embrace the travel advisor’s role of salesperson, we have spent the past few weeks revisiting this concept. This is the fifth in an eight-part series examining each step of the sales cycle.
Recommending a Product
Recommending products involves a great deal more than handing out a few brochures or suggesting websites. In fact, professional travel sales consultants often leave printouts and brochures out of the sales process until a decision has been made. During an effective product presentation, the travel consultant uses the power of language and knowledge to help the customer decide among a few good options.
How successful you are in this stage frequently is a result of how well you use language to present the benefits of the products you recommend. Customers don’t buy the inherent characteristics of a travel product or its features; instead, they buy those intangible positive feelings and qualities the product provides or its benefits.
While it is important for them to know the features of what they’re buying, you also should take the time to stress the benefits by appealing to their senses and feelings. Use vivid language to paint pictures, tell stories and make the intangible nature of travel seem tangible and real. If, for example, you’re talking to an adventure traveler who seems interested in exploring Mayan ruins in Central America, you might recommend a tour that includes a hotel within walking distance from Tikal, one of the largest excavated Mayan villages.
If the features of the tour seem to be of interest to your customer, then go ahead and sell the benefits to engage your client emotionally in the purchase decision. Perhaps you can tell a story about how one of your customers trekked from her hotel at dawn through the jungle to the top of the highest temple at Tikal and watched the sunrise as monkeys and exotic birds sounded their morning wake-up calls. Such emotional appeals, combined with a thorough and honest explanation of the products’ features, are powerful tools for selling.
You also can use your knowledge of products and customers’ needs to increase the scope of the sale when you make your product recommendations. Remember that value is the relationship between price paid and performance received. As performance received goes up in relation to price paid, value goes up, creating a value-added experience. Similarly, as performance received goes down in relation to price paid, value goes down. By offering products or services that will add value to your client’s travel experience, you are in effect treating sales as an extension of customer service, which should be your goal in customer-focused selling.
Once you’ve recommended two or three suitable options (don’t overload your client with too many product choices) and communicated features as well as benefits, you’ll need to check with your client to see which, if any, of your recommendations appeal to your customer. To do this, ask for their verbal feedback (“What do you think?”) and watch their nonverbal signals (smiling or frowning, nodding or quizzical expressions, etc.). Based on their reactions, you’ll know whether you need to take a step back or move forward in the sales process.
This week’s Hot Tip Tuesday was taken from the Customer-Focused Selling module in The Travel Institute’s Certified Travel Associate program. For a more in-depth look at all the skills in this step, we encourage you to enroll in the CTA program.
