How many times have you heard this comment in gatherings of friends and professionals? And it is undoubtedly a categorical truth about the world of sales in tourism, hospitality, golf courses, and in general, in all service and production sectors: Selling or Dispatching Golf Hotel Tourism.
The years of prosperity are over, of Spain driven by European investments, of an accelerated pace of development and easy sales. How many times have you remembered those years of events, groups, and daily requests to fill your establishments? Do you remember? Few destinations compete with ours, our country in full development, all incentives wanted to be organized in the European Caribbean.
Well, this is over, we stopped attending to our clients’ requests, “dispatching them”, to have to go out on the street to “sell”.
The tourist market for the marketing of hotels, golf courses, and vacation resorts has changed abysmally. Destinations have multiplied, we have emerging countries offering quality and service at attractive prices for middle/upper-class clients, and countries in Asia and the Middle East are increasingly investing in the world of hospitality and leisure.
With this situation at the international level, the competitiveness we have at the national level, and the oversupply of products, we have no choice but to “reinvent” the way we sell. It is not enough to just go out on the street with cold-calling actions, take out our brochures and distribute them everywhere, agree on collaboration and volume discount contracts with operators, bartering based on production… The market is changing, and with it the way our clients observe our products. The client does not want to be bothered with aggressive marketing campaigns, which are valid, nor do they want to be harassed with phone calls, which are valid, or with untimely visits, which are also valid.
Increasingly, our clients have access to information globally transmitted about our product or service. We have specialized websites in sales of vacations, trips, hotels, golf courses, etc., or forums where the experience of each client is shared, reviewed with the utmost rigor and detail, and our own corporate portals where we show what we offer, how we do it, how we sell, and at what price.
Faced with this situation, we ask ourselves where are we going? If our clients have so much information about our products or services, how do we sell?
Although all the old-school actions we have been applying to our properties remain fruitful and valid, we are entering the world of communications and information.
The future of the commercial agent will be in the generation of content and experiences in our workplaces, where we can show our clients, as well as viralize everything we can offer them: experiences in resort hotels, golf courses, events in our hotels, organized conventions… So they can learn about us, compare, and come to buy from us. I assure you that this way, the client comes with the lesson well learned. Or hasn’t this happened to you during a site inspection? Haven’t you had the feeling that there are clients who sometimes know your product as well as you do?
That will be the line, although as we mentioned previously, all commercial and marketing actions remain effective and necessary, the figure of the salesperson will tend to mutate into that of a “content and communication generator”, guiding from our portals and annexes, the desired clientele traffic towards a possible “site inspection”. Without a doubt, a new form of marketing.
