Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 186 - Where Leads go to die: Building a pipeline that actually works
Transcript
- Rachel: Where leads go to die. Day one eighty six. It's confession time. When I first started out as a travel agent, I worked for an agency that provided goose egg resources. Fortunately for me, I had had my own business in the past. If you care, it was a cleaning business. Alright? I did v pretty darn well. Anywho. The first few months I was a travel agent though, I had been out of the entrepreneur land for maybe like a year. So I was a little rusty. ⁓ my pipeline, okay, first of all, the agency that I worked for worked for didn't even offer like a travel CRM. They're like, use HubSpot, figure it out. MailChimp. And I was like, what? How was how? Well, I don't know, you gotta figure it out. It was terrible, terrible company to work with. Anyway. So my pipeline was like mental notes, prayers, back of here, the utility bill envelope. Just writing stuff down like this is what they want. I remember I'd remember leave for like maybe three or four days if I had time to work on it. ⁓ if it doesn't, if I didn't, it would just kind of quietly evaporate. But if any of this sounds familiar, today is poor vu. Poor vu. Most advisors don't have a marketing problem. Many don't. So a lot do. Many don't. They have a follow-through problem. Leads come in from your newsletter, DMs, referral, what ev's. And then they like might sit in your inbox. Next to the five million other things, and by the time you circle back, they decided to just book with someone else or lost momentum entirely. A pipeline isn't the fancy CRM subscription. Okay? I'm losing my voice. It's a simple, visible system that answers one question at all times. Where is every single lead right now and what's the next action? This is the workflows help with the pipeline, right? And a lot of people talk about workflows after their client is booked. There should be a workflow from the moment they book the consultation. Well, I think there actually is a course out there, maybe. No. I maybe, I don't know. I don't know. So there is a course called Propose to Close, but I don't know if it goes all the way from initial consultation all the way to booking. Because propose sounds like I haven't taken this course, obviously. Propose sounds like the proposal. And that doesn't sound like okay, anyway. Look into it. Solid, maybe. I don't know. But there's five stages. ⁓ If you're using sticky notes, back of your utility bill envelope, CRM, spreadsheet, whatever you're using, five basic stages, new inquiry, came in, hasn't been contacted yet. Call scheduled, you've responded, or they booked a consultation. I like to skip the new inquiry altogether and just go, hey, just book a call with me immediately. I like to skip that, but I still get new inquiries outside of that. Proposal sent. You've given them your itinerary or quote. Or sent your fee before the proposal if you charge a fee. But we're just gonna eliminate the fee. Fee is in between these two if you charge a fee. You've given them at least one proposal. Waiting on the decision. Booked. It's deposited. It's a real trip now. It's actually happening. And then nurture because they booked and not now. Like nurture not now part. They haven't booked anything yet. They kind of fell off a little bit. They haven't completely ghosted. But this stage is the one that people forget most often, and it can be a gold mine. Every lead should have a stage, an owner, probably all you, every single stage, and a date for the next touch point. You can use Trello or like Monday, I think. ⁓ like in Trello I have my entire sales side workflow for group travel management, dates, like how many days out, and you I just copy it for every single group. And then I have the admin side. What does the admin need to do? So I've kind of got it set up like this too. ⁓ so here's a rule if you care. Because if you don't have everything dated for the next touch point and a lead's been sitting with no date, that's the leak in your pipeline. That's the part of your pipeline that you're missing. So the rule that's going to change your closing rate, respond to every new inquiry within 48 hours. Ideally, same day, but we all know that's not necessarily possible. Travelers researching trips are often talking to more than one TA, we all know that. Sometimes without saying so, but just have that in your head. Like I'm not the only one they're talking to right now. Speed signals competence before you've said a single thing about Punta Cana, Portugal, Panama, ⁓ the panhandle. That doesn't mean that you need the full proposal in two days. It means, hey, I got your message. I'd love to dig more into this and get to know you a little better. See if we're a good fit. Here's a link to schedule call. This is what I always put in mind if they're like not following my normal process of just booking a call. Here's a link to schedule call. If there's a time or day that you don't see on this calendar, personally reply to this email. Let me know personally. I will see if I can squeeze you in. Because I know sometimes I know I have like nothing to do on Thursday night. And I'm I'll be out of office at like 6 or 7 PM And so then I can make that decision and open up my availability for them even though it's not on my calendar. I actually just had that with a honeymoon request. They didn't book they didn't follow the directions, but they were they came in and they're like, hey, I'm looking for honeymoon, I heard about you, da da da da through my lead form. I was like, great, can you book a call? That'd be the next step. And they were like, Well, I tried and I was like, ⁓ that's weird. They said my link was saying nothing was available or wasn't working is all they said, because my calendar was like super full. And I was like, well, do you want to do a call on this Saturday? Like I I don't know why my link's full, but I'm available this Saturday and I'm available at one PM on Saturday. So I I volunteered to do that. I know you're supposed to have like good boundaries, but also I have the choice To be flexible in those boundaries, especially if they're like, hey, your referral and like I we were referred to you guys and we're trying to book and this other travel agency is not being cool and we want to work with you. Okay. So you can say that. I'd love to do a call. Here's my scheduler link. And then you have the choice to add if there's a time that you need. Please and it's not listed as available, please let me know. And I actually got that from ⁓ it was like a mortgage type, but like real estate investing thing that I was inquiring about. And they do quite a bit of business and they personally say that too. And I was like, dang, that's pretty cool. So I But that response keeps you in the game. Okay. Let's pause for a second and let's see how many DMs. This this is why I stopped accepting DMs because the message requests back when I had Facebook be like, well, there's 17 leads I didn't get because I wouldn't check message requests and it wouldn't Facebook wouldn't notify me like of every single message request. And I'm like, well, now I just look like a jerk face that doesn't even read your messages. Ugh. Anyway. Go count how many leads are sitting in possibly your inbox, your DMs, maybe your notes app without a clear next step. That number is your homework. Okay. Every one of those needs a stage and a next action before you create a single new piece of content. Because new leads mean nothing if the ones you already have are stuck in your pipeline. Okay. And you're probably like, I'm brand new, I have zero leads, so please take this into account. like Keep this in mind as you grow because like I said, like I missed so many leads from like rando Facebook and TikTok DMs. because I didn't get the actual notifications and I wasn't actively checking. ⁓ but then also I have had back in twenty twenty four I missed out. I can't rem it was some kind of repeat or referral thing. Like three or four trips in the summer of twenty four. And if you know, you know, for me, that was not a time for me to be doing anything. And It was just like three or four, but I remember I completely dropped the ball on the pipeline because I didn't have the capacity to it was I was barely getting through the day, if I'm honest with you. And I didn't have the capacity to take them on. I didn't have the capacity. I even had like VA's and stuff, and I was still like, drop the ball. Like that's how bad it was. So that could happen. Anyway. Tomorrow we go a little bit deeper in what actually turns a proposal sent into a booked one. And booking strategy moves that you can make to shrink your close time. Sometimes I see agents take weeks, months to close trips, and it's like, this is always to your time. Just close it. All right. Have a wonderful day. Today was day, what is it, 186? See you tomorrow.