Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 134 - From Travel Leads to Clients: Conversion Analysis & Stages to Track
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to day 134 of the Travel Agency New Year Podcast. I'm your host Rachel K. And we're gonna talk about from leads to clients and all about the conversion analysis, not analysis paralysis. If you don't know who I am, go over to elevatewithrachelk.com. I don't have time to explain. Get over yourself, Rachel. Talking to myself, not you. Okay. What stages do you need to track in your conversion analysis? And what the heck is a conversion analysis? It's basically like the different stages, obviously, from the point a lead comes to you to the booking of a trip. So it's almost like the entire sales funnel, how much is converting from one point to the next. We have the initial inquiry, which could be a call, text, email, maybe a DM if that's what you do on social media. I don't know. ⁓ to setting up and confirming a consultation. That should roughly be 40 to 60 % on average for the industry. So out of every 10 people who randomly call, text, email, or sign up for like, not even necessarily a lead magnet though, or DM you. about half of them are gonna book a call. Now this isn't like... If you are marketing on social media and say book a call with me, and it's like in your link and bio thing, you're just gonna have those straight to calls. That is not this part, because they don't really start the inquiry at all, right? Like they just book a call. That is the inquiry and consultation in one. So this is more of like, if a referral is sent to you and they send an email and like, hey, so and so told me about you. Or if someone comments on one of your posts on social and then you're like, send me DM and then they send a DM for more information and then they book a call, like that's more this part of it. Consultation to booking, average industry benchmarks, there we go, that's the word I'm thinking of, 50 to 70%. So, if you average 10 random calls or texts, whatever, a month, about five of them are gonna book an actual consultation with you. Or they might straight do it on the phone with you if you have your business model set up that way where you just take calls. And then from there, of those five, two to three, on average, maybe sometimes four, will actually book a trip. So your overall lead to booking is 20 to 40%, okay? ⁓ here's another example that I did in my notes. Allow me to demonstrate. In one month, you have 100 new DMs from some posts that went crazy viral. So if you have 100 DMs from that post and you actually manage to answer all of the DMs, you should end up with a minimum 40 consultations, 20 of them booking, and that would be a 20 % overall lead to booking conversion. you're not gonna win them all all the time and that's okay. And I think I've mentioned this, ugh, I was, I had a drink of water a few minutes before recording, and I like inhaled the water, so if I cough a lot, that's why. Anyway, I've probably already mentioned this in past episodes, I know I've mentioned it elsewhere. Go Read Chilpreneur by Denise Duffield Thomas. Another one is We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers, or read both of them. They both give a lot of insight on how this is just like a numbers game. Any kind of sales is a numbers game and you should have an understanding of your industry's conversion analysis or conversion benchmarks, sorry, and compare by doing your own conversion analysis against the benchmarks. Okay, mm-mm-mm, there is some manifestation stuff and some mindset exercises for confidence as well. Like I remember Rachel Rogers in that book, We Should All Be Millionaires in particular, I remember reading, pick something that you view as a luxury but is gonna like save you time down the road to like move the needle in your business. And she talked about how when she first started, I don't even know what kind of business she runs, but they were, her and her husband were both attorneys at the time. But I remember she wrote about how they really, really needed to get their house cleaned, and was driving both of them nuts. And they were fighting over who should do, this was the main point, they were fighting over who should be cooking dinner, because she was like trying to launch this business, and they were both working as attorneys, and it was just like chaos in their household. And I think they had children at that time already. So it was like a constant fight and it just like brought the energy down the house over dinner and they decided to invest, not spend money on, but invest in like a personal chef who would do like meal prep for them and then just stick it in the fridge and they just had to throw it in the oven or whatever. And I remember reading that because I was in the same boat. at the time of reading it and it was like constantly like, who's gonna cook dinner, what are we gonna have for dinner, we don't have any food, but we have plenty of food but nobody wanted to cook. So I suggested, I think we signed up for HelloFresh. I think it was HelloFresh or home something. It was like HelloFresh but it wasn't. Because it had like all the sauces and all the cool stuff. and it gave you little recipe cards. I don't know, it good. So those are important things that you need to be looking over and you should read those two books because this is all just a numbers game. If you are down and it's only been like a month and you're like I'm not getting any sales, well how many leads are you getting? How many consultations are you getting? Because you know most of you, if you've been in the industry long enough, you know where your close rate is. ⁓ And many advisors that I've mentored often say it's around 60 to 70%, which is like right in line with industry benchmarks. But are you looking at how many consultations you're booking? That is super important. Like how many people are going from just being a lead to actually booking a call? Because that's step one. If you just find a way to increase the number of bookings, for consultations, you will proportionately earn more business, okay? And so this is like the whole concept of wave season. Hold on, let take a sip of my water and try not to choke on it. So everyone talks about wave season and they're like, ⁓ I have this super big rush of all this business and da da da da da. What if you ⁓ focused on keeping the lead inquiries closer to the wave season level? Then you would still have that same conversion rate. And so if your wave season's like January to March and you book 60 % of your business now, in January through March. Back to easy numbers, $100,000, I gotta write this down in my brain and on paper. So $60,000 worth of your gross revenues comes in those first three months. So you have $40,000 over nine months. And I know you're like, who makes $100,000 as a travel agent? A lot of people do, okay? Not enough. It should be a higher percentage, there are a lot of us who do. Okay, so $40,000 over nine months. Let's do Rachel Math. That's like three, $3,500 a month. That's easy Rachel Math. That's not exactly right. Close enough. It's about $3,500 a month. Those first three months are $20,000 that you're bringing in. Now, I know you're not earning it all right away. We all understand that. But those are just like, let's talk about that number. It's kind of like the, what is it, Pareto, Pareto, whatever principle. 80 % of your stuff comes from 20 % of what you do. This is 30 % or 25 % of your year. provides 60 % of your business in this scenario, okay? If we really wanted to be accurate, then it'd be like $80,000 the first three months. However, I'm trying to make math simple and I don't want to divide 80,000 by three, but 60,000 divided by three is much easier for me. All right, what if you could increase that $3,500 because your number of inquiries are going down. Let's say $100,000, you book 100 trips, ergo, the first three months you have 60 trips. If you have... a 60 % Nope, sorry. That would, hold on, now I gotta do real nap. ⁓ You're like, what? Okay, if there's 60 trips, that would mean like 180 inquiries if you're 30 % from lead to booking. Okay? I'm trying to make the numbers easy per month and divide by three, which means this is a lot of consultations you're doing. In this scenario, if you follow the standard benchmarks, you'd need This person would have 180, just call, text, email, DM, not full on consultations, okay? Just, hey, can you tell me about your services? Like that's just the inquiry, like the very, very, very beginning stages. 180 interactions like that, 60 per month, okay? And then we end up with 20 bookings per month. So, 60 inquiries to consultation means, let's stick to the middle here, let's stick to the 50%, so you'd have 30 consultations. There's 25 working days throughout each month, so you'd have one to two consultations, maybe three in one day, you know? And then overall consultation to booking is another 50%. You'd have to have a higher 40%, there we go. And then you would end up with... another 50 % of that, so you'd have 15 bookings, which tracks with the 20, right? You're like, no, it does not, Rachel. No, it doesn't, exactly. But it all bases off of your consultation to booking rate and your inquiry to consultation rate. I'm trying to do the math just on a piece of notebook paper right here. So you would roughly need 60 inquiries and have a goal of having 60 % of them. So 36 consultations would get you that 20 closings per month. Okay? This is really bad math, I'm sorry. Then, the other nine months, you've got $3,500. Now you're making, this is 100 bookings bringing in $100,000 gross. So that would mean if we make it even Stevens, we're not gonna do the 3,500 a month, but if we made it even Stevens, then we would have booked 40 trips, which would equate to $1,000 per trip, right? Yes. And you divide that 40 by nine and that's about three and a half to four trips per month each time. So then, I'm trying to show you all this, then you're like I can't see anything stupid, this is a podcast. Too bad, I don't care. So you're booking about three to four trips per month. So let's just make that number four, okay? Because you're gonna take some time off, hopefully. So four trips per month, which means if your inquiry to consultation rate is still 40 to 60%, you go from 60 inquiries, initial inquiries, to about, me go back here in time, 10. per month. 10 to 12, that's a huge drop. So, I'm not saying keep maintaining that 60 consultations or whatever, inquiries, not consultations, but inquiries per month. But if you wanna increase your revenue, what tactics can you do in your business? This could be following up with past clients, this could be asking for referrals, this could be following up with people who... Maybe started the inquiry, but you didn't quite close it, so you just follow up again and be like, hey, I'm just checking in. Little things like that to get more consultations. Because if you think about it over the nine months, let's say just one month you booked another 20 trips extra. That's 16 extra. That's an additional $16,000 just in that one month. that would really change things. And if you just did 10 extra trips, that's an extra $10,000 in revenue in one month. And if you work backwards, you'd have to have for 10 trips, if you have a really bad closing rate, 50 inquiries. So what are some things you can do today to get just a few more inquiries when things are going down? Maybe you need to do some more networking, maybe you need to do some more engagement online, maybe you need to reach out to past clients. There's a number of different things that we've talked about in many other episodes. But this is what the conversion analysis does for you. And it also helps you understand, like I said, you're not gonna win them all all the time. So if you know, like during wave season, that is 80 % of your revenue for the year or whatever. In this example, it was 60%. and you happen to hit, and I'm just pretending it's $1,000 per trip, you happen to hit 90 in those first three months. If you wanna take it easier, you can because you know you're still gonna average another $40,000 in gross revenue, right? for the remainder of the year. Okay, so that's a long way of talking about the inquiry, increasing the number of inquiries. How can you increase the number of inquiries? If you want to just do it, you just need to show up online more. You need to show up online in more places in not an annoying way. And you know what I mean by not an annoying way. I'm a Sandal specialist and I'm totally free. My services are all free. Ma'am this is a post about getting married in Croatia. Well you should book a sandals. I'll price match anything. I mean, sorry if you're that person listening and you're like unsubscribe. It's not the best way to do that. ⁓ But just showing up answering questions and saying happy to help, that's a really good way. Like if you're in Facebook groups or in subreddits, I feel like the whole happy to help is kind of played out now, but years ago nobody was doing that. Everybody was like, I can book you this and I'm the best travel agent at this. And just me, me, me, me, me, me, me. ⁓ I like to do a soft and I don't really do it anymore because I'm completely changing my niche. So I don't need to do this kind of thing so much. When I would do it, I would provide a very thorough answer and then I'd ask them a question. if it was like a comment that I was doing and then they would be like, oh, that's great. Or like somebody else would see it and be like, this is really good advice. This is really good knowledge. Then they would ask me, you a travel agent or are you a wedding planner? And I'd be like, I'm both. Can I send you a DM? You certainly can. I wasn't pushing them and I would say things like, I wouldn't really say happy to help. I'd just be like, here's your answer. I'm not trying to sell to you. Here's your answer. This is what I would recommend. And then they would reply and be like, wow, this is very... well thought out, like comments like that, people really appreciate it because you're just giving them your knowledge and expertise and they're just like, well howdy, that was super helpful, thank you. And then you just say, you're welcome or my pleasure, whatever. And then if they say anything else, be like, yeah, you can always send me a DM if you need any help. Anyway, that was a really long episode. I'm sorry for my terrible notebook math. I should have had the example actually done beforehand. But, it's not how I do things around here. If you liked this episode, you probably didn't. Still subscribe anyway. And have a great day. See you tomorrow.