Modern Sales: Best Practices For Venues

This is a sponsored post that contains affiliate links. 

The world is changing at a rapid rate. In fact, Moore’s Law suggests that technology is improving at an exponential pace every year.

Consumers are also adapting. At the time of writing this ebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has recently become the world’s wealthiest person.

E-commerce is stripping away business at a rapid pace from brick and mortar shops and even Amazon has branched out into providing server solutions for software.

Major hotel chains have been disrupted by Airbnb and even the wedding venue space is being changed by businesses like Duo Venues.

As a result of all of this disruption and change, it’s expected that the way consumers shop and make purchasing decisions has also fundamentally changed.

The entire world is changing like never before. Is your venue keeping up?

One example of how things are changing is the way millennials shop.

They don’t want to speak to a sales person on the phone or email your team. Instead, they prefer to look up pricing and reviews online, ask their friends on Facebook for feedback or text your venue to chat.

In one of our recent studies, we asked one of our leading venues to try texting back inquiries instead of emailing them for a one month test. Initially, the venue’s potential customers would inquire via email and the venue would respond by email.

In our experiment, we had the venue respond by email only the first time, and then we asked them to follow up by text the very next day (these were consumer clients, not business clients).

The results were astounding.

Replies shot up from 15% on average to 50% just by using texting.

Additionally, we asked the venue to send potential customers additional email and text follow ups over a period of six weeks.

Before our research project, this particular venue had not followed up at all and so we were essentially adding six additional sales touches into their process through our automation.

By the end of the experiment, their reply rate over the campaign had shot up to 64% and sales were up by 28%.

Using text messaging and automation, combined into a follow up sequence, we were able to dramatically increase bookings quickly.

Technology has allowed us to have more rapid communication than ever before and as a result, our attention spans are shorter. Our experiment re-affirmed this and so have dozens of our experiments since.

Each month, our clients send thousands of emails to thousands of inquiries and our system monitors the top performing campaigns.

We are able to see the fundamental reasons why certain messaging and follow-up sequences get more replies than others. What we have seen surprised even us.

The right messaging, sent via email and text communication channels, done consistently over time creates results that far outweigh traditional sales approaches.

Successful venue sales reps sell using modern technology and that consists of text messaging, emails and automated follow ups.

Taking things one step further, today’s leading organizations are using big data more than ever to drive sales and generate results.

Imagine if, for example, you had access to the leading sales emails that were proven to get the best results after hundreds of thousands of experiments with real customers. You’d definitely use those emails, rather than write your own, right?

Of course, you would!

With modern technology, venues like yours are able to gain insight and information that was previously unavailable and they are exploiting it to succeed faster and increase their bookings.

Modern venue and hotel sales teams must also utilize this data to their advantage if they want to remain competitive.

The results are clear: those who adapt survive and thrive, those whose systems, mindset and sales philosophy stay rooted in the past get diminishing results for their efforts over time.

Interested In Learning More?

Contact us at: www.eventtemple.com

About Event Temple:

Event Temple is the hospitality and venue industry’s first cloud-based platform. Our central hub is perfect for managing sales, marketing, events and scheduling.

Our system also integrates seamlessly with thousands of other programs through our open API and Zapier connection so you can build your own hospitality-based operations system using the world’s leading software and still manage everything from one place!

This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click through and buy something, we will probably get paid.

Share your best tips for marketing to millennials below!