Category Archives: Sales Skills

8 Travel Design Trends for Making the Sale

From our friends at Reservations.com

If you’re a sales or marketing professional in the travel industry – whether B2B or B2C – you know how critical branding and design is for a travel company’s website.

In 2018, 71% of U.S. travelers researched their travel plans online and 83% used digital platforms to book tickets and accommodations. Furthermore, just over half of consumers (51%) admitted that the visual content and imagery of the travel sites they visit can influence their trip decisions.

Furthermore, with over $1 trillion being spent by U.S. travelers, there’s a lot of opportunity in the space for smart operators.

Continue reading →

Should I start a side hustle? (infographic)

From our friends at Self Lender…

As of 2016, the average student loan debt neared $40,000. With the increased difficulty of landing a well-paid, full-time job straight out of college, graduates are struggling to earn a living.

In order to better manage the cost of living with shackling debt, grads have started working side hustles to make ends meet.

A side hustle is an additional, flexible job that allows you to earn supplemental income while taking classes or working a full-time job.

Self Lender provides 7 reasons why people need side hustles in this economic climate. To help you get some ideas, they put together 51 side hustle options for recent grads. Check out the infographic below to discover if you should start a side hustle.

Quote-to-Cash (QTC) Basic Process

Think about your approach to your customers: Nothing you do operates in a vacuum. For example, the order fulfilling process isn’t just the salesperson’s responsibility. It starts with marketing, when a customer receives communication that leads them to set expectations about what their experience with your company will be like. It extends to the salesperson, of course, when they outline the policies and procedures. And it goes beyond to the person who actually fulfills the order to the customer service team that responds, post-order, and helps out with any questions or concerns.

That’s a holistic approach to an order, and the same holistic approach should be part of the quote process, too. When it is, that’s called the quote-to-cash process. It views the customer and their interactions and the pricing they receive as interdependent and tied together. Ready to learn more about this? This graphic helps to explain it.

Click To Enlarge

Via Salesforce

Should a gift to my client have our company logo?

This article below was written by our friends at ParkPow. ParkPow provides parking enforcement software to help property owners, hotels, universities, and municipalities enforce their parking policies.

Gift giving serves a vital purpose in the business world. So whether it’s Christmas, a big launch celebration, a promotion, or even a client’s birthday, there’s a reason to give. There’s a lot to consider in this gift-giving exercise. Who should we give to? What do we give? How should we give it?

For this post, I want to explore a more subtle, but important topic: should our client gift contain our company’s logo?

Why We Give
Let’s take a step back and remind ourselves of the ultimate goal: to drive revenue. Revenue comes from customers and customers buy (to a good extent) from trusted relationships.

So gift-giving to the client is the opportune chance to build the relationship, to show that we care. After all, without the relationship, there’s really not much left over.

Let’s be clear: if we think that we’re giving purely out of the goodness of our heart—then we should really be investing our time and money to a charity. Giving a thoughtful gift to a client is not charity work.

Give with Logo or Not?
Talk to anyone in marketing and they would instinctively say that any corporate gift should contain the company’s logo. This is really inferior thinking. Moreover, it’s really selfish.

Why? Because if our goal is to build on the personal relationship–not our corporate relationship–then we should not tie the gift with our company logo. We want to give with the perception that we want nothing else in return.

Giving a gift with our logo makes the gift only a half-present. We want the client to take the gift so that we can outlandishly remind them that we exist.

We don’t have to stoop so low. We in sales should take the high-road.

Imagine for a minute we gave the client a nice, titanium fidget spinner to help them destress. I’d prefer the client’s friend or colleague to ask, “Hey, that’s a cool stress reliever. Where did you get it?” than for that client to outright see my company logo. Why? Because then it allows the client—the person whom I want to build a relationship—to acknowledge me and my company for the gift. Acknowledgment is the first sign of appreciation.

Give for the Sake of the Relationship
It’s easy to just sit back and forget about giving. But I’d encourage you to give a simple gift with the goal of fostering the relationship. Just make sure not to stamp the company logo on it!