Increasing Sales for Tour Operators

Why Tour Operators Should Watch

In today's competitive travel industry, relying solely on third-party platforms can drain your profits and leave you feeling overwhelmed. But what if you could take control of your bookings and increase your revenue while reducing your dependency on costly middlemen?

This webinar replay will empower you with proven strategies to boost sales, regain control of your business, and unlock new levels of growth through effective sales tactics.

Join Brandon Lake and Josh Oakes—two successful tour operators—for this training replay, where they'll guide you through actionable insights that will transform your anxiety into confidence, frustration into relief, and uncertainty into a clear path forward.



Key Takeaways:

👉  Identifying Your Ideal Customer Profile: Utilize AI and existing customer data to pinpoint your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for higher profits.

👉 Boosting Website Performance: Increase organic search traffic and improve conversion rates through optimized website structure, page design, and key conversion elements.

👉 Diversifying Sales Channels: Understand the critical importance of diversifying sales channels and learn what a proactive sales strategy looks like.

👉 Creating a Roadmap for Growth: Discover actionable steps for scaling your tour business offline and leave with a clear roadmap for sustained growth. 

Don't miss out on actionable insights—watch the replay now!

Transcript

We have two amazing speakers today, both Brandon and Josh. And it's quite interesting because they were both are our both very successful tour operators themselves, Brandon with Western River expeditions, Moab Adventures, and our Josh with was MP MP. Yes. Both have their own ventures outside of that too. Brandon is the founder CEO of Resmark.

Resmark was a waiver sign and Josh the sunshine crime. So you guys probably know one or the other or both.

Hopefully both are amazing speakers. There's a lot to learn from them. But the other cool thing is they both have a lot of different approaches to what made them successful.

But I think it's cool because we're tour operators. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. So it's going to be really cool.

It's kind of like we're killing two birds with one stone in one hour. I know your time is valuable.

So let's learn as much as we can in this hour. right, Brandon, I'm going to take it over to you.

Brandon Lake (Western River Expeditions)

Okay. Thanks, Nikki. excited to go through a few things today. and I are going to kind of split this in half.

Adam Mitchell, Rock-About Climbing Adventures

So I'll take the first half here and we'll just start working through a few things.

Josh Oakes

I want to just give you a little bit of background before I jump into this.

Brandon Lake (Western River Expeditions)

I'm going go ahead and share my screen and I'll walk through a few things here. All right. I'm going to be focused on direct bookings.

And I think Josh is going to be talking about maybe how we can generate business through other channels. We've had a lot of success in our business with direct booking and other channels as well, but I'm going to take time to focus on this.

But let me just give you some quick background on who I am, where I came from initially. This is my dad right here in 1977.

He actually in that year, he purchased a company called Western River Expeditions with a couple of other partners. And I literally grew up in the tourism industry.

So rafting in Utah and Grand Canyon. And of course, looking very fashionable there in my 1980s outfit. I grew up and was a river guide in my 20s.

left the tourism industry for a while, came back in 2001. And my first project as I came back into the business was to build a new website.

Now this is early days of the web, right? Like really early.

So this is the website I built. And looking back, I'm a little bit embarrassed by it compared to what we built today.

But hey, it was gradients were cool back then, and they're actually coming back in. And just as most trends do.

But this site was sold, so there were no video services anything. YouTube didn't exist at that point. there wasn't really way to put your video on there.

So we were super advanced.

We had a link you could click on and say, hear guest comments and you'd actually listen to them. And that was pretty cutting edge way back then.

So during this time, we actually had a business in Southern Utah. Some of you nearby there know right where that is in Moab.

And the operation was struggling. This is where I guided, it's where I grew up. Rafting, and I did not want to.

see this operation shut down. There was talking amongst the partners of shutting the business down, and I really didn't want to see that happen.

We started brainstorming, and of course, did what an ideological person would do. We bought the Taco Bell on Main Street in Moab, Utah, and we turned it into this Moab Adventure Center.

We didn't actually didn't want to spend too much time remodeling, so we actually built the logo to fit within the little bell shape of the tower, and then remodeled kind of outside inside.

And thankfully, we built a new website from Moab Adventure Center, updated our Western River Expeditions website, and then we built systems to grow the business.

We put in place a digital waiver platform that tripled our email database in one year. We actually put in place a booking platform called Redmark that transformed the way we do business.

We went from 3,000 guests to 40,000 guests in about three years. And we had so much success with all of that, decided we really wanted to put something together to give back to others, similar to what Josh is doing as well.

We said, hey, we love to see people be successful with this. So we built Resmark Web, and now we're helping companies with websites, pay dad's management, all the things that drive traffic and conversion.

And that's what we're going to talk about right now. We're going to talk about direct bookings. And I just want to give you, before I jump into this, I want to give you an idea of why we're talking about this.

like to kind of look at numbers and think about why would we even care about this.

I think it's pretty obvious in most people's minds, but when you step back and look at the numbers for a minute, this really jumps out.

So imagine this, if you put in place something that would generate just 1,000 more visits per month for your website.

That's not that many. We all probably feel like we get 1,000 more. Somehow, right and we're gonna talk about how to do that today But if we could get 1,000 more visitors and our average conversion rate with 2% that would mean we're getting 20 more reservations a month If our average product price was $100 and we got two guests per reservation, we would say the average reservation values around $200 That would make our additional monthly revenue $4,000 an additional annual revenue for every 1,000 guests We add it would be another $48,000 so Double that at 2,000 we'd be almost 100,000 more and it just keeps going from there So we're talking about how do we put in place systems and processes that will allow us to do this and then replicate it over and over over I'm gonna go through just a few things.

I'm gonna hit a little bit of this pretty quickly and then We I'm happy to dive in individually with anybody that wants to get into this a little bit deeper I'm SEO so when we think about getting traffic to our website, we think about search engine optimization, right?

I heard this recently re-labeled as search everywhere optimization. Search engines are still a critical piece of this with Google right from the primary search engine.

That's where we're going to get a lot of that organic traffic. But we're also now looking at social media, right, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook.

are finding us there, it's driving traffic to the website. For those of us in the travel space, we're looking at OTAs as a source of business.

We're looking at voice search and AI, search through YouTube. All of these things are driving traffic to our site.

And there's an important principle when we think about SEO, be it on any platform. I'm going to talk about this and then I'm going to go through just a few examples of what we did on our site that allowed us to get over a thousand keywords in the top three results and has resulted in tens of thousands of visitors per month.

that's really help drive our business forward. But this foundational principle, and Google is really turning towards this, as well as all of these other platforms, you may have heard of it before called EAT.

And if we focus on this throughout everything that we're doing, and you'll see, I'm going to show you some examples of this here in a minute.

And it's so easy to do in the travel space. That's why I love this. We're in such a good spot because the things we have are easy to talk about.

So Google is now looking at your experience. Can you show firsthand experience in what you do? That's pretty easy for us.

Because we do tours. We offer these services every day. And that's an easy thing to portray. Expertise, what do we have on our site that's sharing knowledge in our field?

And not just, hey, I have all the facts about my tours. But what else can you share about your destination, your area, all of that?

It's going to contribute to being seen as an expert. Authoritativeness, are you mentioning? elsewhere? Do you have backlinks into your site from other authoritative sources?

And then trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is actually kind of interesting because it's a lot of different factors. Quality content, is it up to date?

Does it flow well all the way from the title to your meta description to your copy? Is the site secure?

Is your location accurate across all directories, including Google? It's going to look at that and say, can I trust this site?

So let me just share with you real quickly kind of how we did a lot of this on Moab Adventure Center.

And in fact, I'm just going to get off of this and go into our live site. We're actually designing a brand new website and I'm going to show you just a few things that we're doing here.

So the first thing you'll see on the navigation, we've got all of our tours and ventures. have our, but then that's not it.

Some people just stop there, right? we know this area, we're experts in this area, we include a little more information.

We have attractions, those are things to do in the area. We have accommodations, where to stay, campgrounds, things like that, area information, and we can portray all of that, and it increases that level of expertise that we have.

And we end up getting a lot of searches for Moab hotels, campgrounds, things like that. commercial intent, as we call it, may not be that high, but we know people are wanting to come to our area.

And when we know they want to come there, chances are we can sell some additional tours, and we have a wealth of content around that, and it helps build our tour content as well.

Just showing you an example of the home page here, with kind of some of those EEAT principles. So obviously, we're featuring all of our tours and so forth.

You'll see that here. We've got, if you look at Behind the scenes, you'd see that we have a very well thought out title and meta description and all of the content kind of comes together.

When we set out to do a website, we actually do a bunch of foundational SEO research within your given geographic region, within your activity, looking at all your competition, and we create this foundation and then we build the site on top of that.

And it really makes all the difference in the world in terms of the site's performance over time. And you'll see area maps, you'll see these things here, lodging and camping, top moab eats, transportation, guide.

So there's some of that additional information that we're talking about, FAQs, done right, search engines and all of these, and you can score in some of those top results where you're actually answering the questions.

So, let me come back to our slides here and we'll talk about the next section. We could have a whole, we could talk for the whole hour about SEO, but just touching.

briefly on it because ultimately it's what is going to drive traffic into our site. So, let's move into the next piece.

This is really talking about how can we, once people come into our website, how can we drive conversion, Because look at all of the things that we do to drive people to our site.

And if we don't invest in our site and do what we need to do there, we miss massive opportunities for conversion, We might be spending all this money and effort on traffic.

But not taking time on the site can ruin all of that. So, I want to just cover in our last 15 minutes here, just talk about five different things that you can do to increase conversion on your site.

I'm going to give you some really concrete examples of these as we go through this. So, you can see them here on the screen.

can talk about your e-commerce process. And I'll show you, like I said, examples in each one of these and hopefully you'll have really some concrete takeaways that you can jot down and say, I can do that on my site right now.

So first one is design. So here's an interesting stat. First impressions are made within the first 50 milliseconds of your page content becoming visible, 94% of them are design related.

So what does that mean? That means when someone hits your site, we want that first impression to be stunning, right?

I'm going to show you just a couple of examples. These are some sites we've done recently that really just draw you in, right, to the content.

Sometimes it's about messaging. We did a site for LLB and Outdoor Discovery and I love the messaging that they have on the site and it matches kind of what they do on the retail side of their business as well, resonates with people.

Let me jump out. I'm actually just going to show you. I'll go back. to this live site that we were talking about here and you can see you know the impact as you look at this how it brings you into the site.

Now one thing we want to test we'll talk about load time here in a minute and we'll do a lot of testing with this to see if we can optimize video versus edge and ensure that that load time is still fast enough that we can warrant doing something like this but it's a powerful thing if you have really quality video content.

Color choice, navigation, all of these things are going to immediately have this emotional appeal to whether you go right back to Google or whether you stay in the site.

Bringing people into your offerings right away you can see the first thing that we're doing you know developing some of that emotion and the next to imagery throughout the whole thing just making sure that that speaks to your customer.

Okay, next thing is testing this. So if you can get a tool in place to test your, not just your images and colors and messages and layout and everything, but actually see where people are clicking on your site.

So let me show you an example of this. are lots of tools you can use to test this. We use one called Crazy Egg.

We like that. I can actually see a heat map of what's happening. I have recorded sessions of users visiting the site.

I can see if I put something new in here, I could do some A.B. testing and determine, okay, if I use this button versus that button, if I use this word versus that word, this image versus that image, this color versus that color, and we can come up with these incremental increases to conversion that really start to make a difference.

Next one is load time. Oh, this one's pretty crazy, you guys. Conversions drop by 4.42% for each additional second.

takes a site to load. What does that even mean? So if you were doing 1 million in annual sales, every second would be worth $44,200.

Five seconds worth $200,000. So this really makes a difference. So if you're curious, well, where am I at with this?

What is my site rank? You can go to Google PageSpeed Insights. You can pull this up and you can actually run this assessment.

The one, there's lots of statistics on here, but one of the most important is called largest contentful paint. And that's the amount of it takes for the largest element on the page to become visible.

So if you're seeing something like this, I've seen about 20 plus seconds even. If you're seeing something like that, massive room for improvement and massive room for to bring in a lot more dollars in terms of conversion.

So, take a look at that. want to see this thing look like this. Under ideally, put your largest contentful paint under two and a half seconds, a passing score overall, and again, you can Google that page speed insights and see it.

Next thing is including a lead magnet. So our hope is that everybody comes to our site and converts, right?

But that is not always the case. If we put something on our site that will allow someone to download a first-timers guide to our area, something of value that you can come up with.

You could increase conversions by 20% with the right lead magnet. I'll show you an example of what we did.

We built a free insiders guide to Moab, Utah. We put it at the bottom of nearly every page. We put it at bottom because it's not our primary call to action, right?

It's kind of a secondary thing. you've scrolled through the content, you didn't book or check availability. Well, maybe you want this.

We had this requested year over 10,000 times. And what are we gathering a name and an email address so that we can utilize that email address through the whole process and through the whole customer journey.

The last piece here I want to talk about is optimizing your online booking process. This is this is also really, really interesting.

Average abandonment rate in the travel industry is around 81%. And if you optimize things properly, you could recover up to about 30% of that just by optimizing kind of it.

whole checkout and process, your trip, your tour page layout and all of that. So just as an example, we implemented a brand new checkout process on our Western River site and saw 15% increase.

increase in conversion, which is pretty fantastic. And it was just by us playing with how we show the layout of inventory.

That was the change that we made. And for us, because we're multi-day trips, we're able to show a full season of the glance.

And it made a huge difference. Let me show you, I'm going to just go back out of this again.

I'll show you a live page over here on the Moab side. So this is an example of the trip page we're building out here.

And you'll see a couple of things about this. One is imagery right up front. We have got the incredible imagery here.

We've got a video that you can watch. We then come down the page, and you can see that we have reviews being showcased right here.

We've got it. the tour name. We have another video that you can watch right here. We have this floating sidebar that stays with me the whole time.

What does it have on it? It's got some a little bit of scarcity and urgency. It's got some promises on it.

It has our pricing. It has some things that make this easier for the person who's looking at it and evaluating it to purchase.

They get really easy for them to check out. And then as they scroll down the page, that thing scrolls along with them.

And all of the information that they're going to need to make a decision is there. I have to give a little shout out to guest focus.

We collaborated on this together and they do a fantastic job at helping optimize tour pages and helping to create content like this.

what do I mean by the e-commerce process? So let me go ahead and click on this and I'll show you what this looks like.

So, when someone comes to the e-commerce process here, this is a mock-up of what we're building. with ResMark, we're actually looking at, rather than having a cookie-cutter solution for everyone where you all have the exact same checkout process, now being able to customize that a little bit and tailor it for each individual business, because no one business is identical in terms of exactly what you're selling and how people purchase it.

So, if you look at this checkout process, you'll see we have the same thing that we had on the page, right, a reminder with some of the imagery that evoked that emotion initially, some of the scarcity there, reviews are there to remind them, the guarantees are here, and then the process itself, people come through this, make their selections, agree to any policies that might be there, add the cart,

And we're experimenting with an upsell concept that allows them to bundle things together. You'll see a countdown timer here.

And as I go into the checkout process, perhaps I've added multiple activities here. You can see how all of this comes together.

And one of the keys is that we've got, you'll notice as I left the site and came into this, it feels very cohesive, right?

I didn't feel like I left and went into something else. I feel like I'm still here and that increases trust, it lowers abandonment.

All of these elements we're looking at will help with that. And then I just want to mention one last thing.

I'm not going to have time to go over it today. We just did a whole session about this at arrival, but I think it's one of the most powerful things that you can do.

And the whole process we just talked about in terms of conversion is really understanding your customer. And if you're interested in this, Nikki can send it out to you.

I'll tell you what it is, and you can mention in the chat, hey, send me that, and we'll make sure we get it out to you.

So we did a little experiment. I'll give you just the five minute overview of what we did. I took chat, GPT, and Gemini, and Claw, and I did an experiment with these AI tools.

What my goal was is to get inside the mind of the customer and really understand what were their key purchase drivers, what were their hesitations and concerns and fears, how could I bridle that and bring it into our messaging.

And so what I actually did, and in fact, we've got a couple of minutes there, I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you this live, and we'll go through this process together.

So I'm going to go into chat GPT, and I have a, a file of prompts, it's actually 16 pages of prompts to get this, but I'm going to show you just a really, really simple version of this.

I'm going to paste a prompt in here. So basically, I'm saying act as an expert marketer, skilled trading customer profiles.

I'm going upload a file of customer reviews, information about our services, and data from Google Analytics. Once I've uploaded these files, I'm going to ask you a series of questions based on your analysis of the data.

Okay, so I'm going to ask this, and it's going to say, great, go ahead and upload the files. Okay, so now I'm going to grab these files.

What I've got here is a file with 500 of my most recent reviews from Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. I have a file that has product information, I'm going to the history of our company and all of our product stuff.

And then I have my report snapshot from Google Analytics, which I'm going to bring in here. And I'm going to upload these three files.

And then I am going to give it a prompt. Now, when I generally do this, I actually will do a more detailed customer profile while I'll paste in very specific things that I want, but I'm just gonna give you an example of what these tools can do.

It's pretty cool. Okay, so it's gonna read through my documents. And I'll actually take this when it's done and go through and have it find the hesitations and concerns that anyone expressed.

And then I will have it craft copy and headings and find the reviews that answer those. But you can see right here, it's going through all of these reviews and analyzing all of this about my business.

And then it's actually creating a customer avatar. of Mike and Lisa Roberts from Denver, Colorado. What their motivations and goals are, their challenges and It's giving me one of the reviews.

But pretty incredible, right? So what do I do with that? I take that and actually bring it through the content of the site.

So I'll show you on this page. This is what we gathered from doing this for Moab Adventure Center. We found that people who were in Moab really wanted to make the most of their time there.

Because they had a limited time, they wanted to make sure whatever they did was a good experience and they were choosing the right experiences and so this concept of make the most of your time in Moab, we knew would resonate with our ideal customer.

The idea of reconnecting and recharging was mentioned frequently in the reviews. So we brought that into headings. The idea of memories constantly mentioned.

So we brought that in. These were the things that they said were important to them. And so we brought that into the six reasons why someone might choose us.

The idea of authenticity was important to them, real adventures, real memories. So we brought that in. had to go ahead and grab some of the most compelling reviews.

This line writer came from one of our guests. don't think I would have come up with it myself. Moab guides that feel like family.

Fantastic. And so you can see how going through that process, now you're speaking to them, like, you know, they hit this site and not only does everything we just talked about resonate, but you're actually speaking their language literally.

And that is going to resonate and increase conversions. So. What have we talked about? talked about design, messaging. load time, creating a lead magnet, the e-commerce process, and this overall focus of dialing in your ideal customer profile, perhaps using AI.

It's an easy tool. If you want a full presentation about how this works, mention it in the chat, we can send you a link to the whole thing as well as the prompts if you want those.

Happy to send all that on and you can utilize it. So why focus on direct traffic and booking conversion?

It is one of the lowest hanging fruits I think that we have out there to really get this dialed in and probably the lowest cost.

So just give you an idea, our costs are developing an entire site in the way I described, doing all of the SEO is really, starts out at 13.50 per month.

We got rid of any big upfront costs because I know that's hard, hard for us with our business to swallow up $50,000.

site build so we can eat all the costs on that up front build out the site with the idea of creating a really good partnership with those who use our services and then over time we help them be incredibly successful and and do this but hopefully to the tune of several thousand visitors so you're really seeing a massive return on on that investment so there you have it there's uh my question any questions real quick on that before we turn it over to Josh and he wraps up the last piece of our segment we did have a good question come in and if anybody else wants to chime in but Thomas had asked how to realistically optimize the booking process for a big ticket item tour um so really good question Thomas I think the principles aren't that different from big ticket items and smaller ticket items I think the consequence is more critical right because we've But we've got something that for us is really, really important to optimize. But some of those same concepts that we talked about, in fact, here, really quick, I'll just put this back.

The same concepts of what you showed during the checkout process. Now, I'm not sure what booking system you use.

But sometimes we don't have a lot of control over that with the booking system, right? But if you're able to do something where you can actually, you know, the conversion process starts right here.

And in fact, if I show you, we've got big, I don't know how big ticket you're talking about, but if I pull up our Western River site, you can see something really similar here in the checkout process.

us, we're rebuilding this site right now as well, and I'm super excited about what we've built here. So we don't have the exact same guarantees on this, but the same concept applies here.

And some of these tours are 3,000 plus per person, and as you get into that checkout process, you can try to bring some of that in as much as possible.

So you can see some of these guarantees. You know, we brought into the checkout process there as well. We're pulling that back, that information back, and then just trying to make it as streamlined as possible during the checkout process so that you just try to reduce the abandonment throughout.

Hopefully that kind of answers that. We could certainly dig into that a little bit more. I don't take up too

time, but what other questions do we have?

is that your own platform? It is. So the underlying platform on this is called Duda, but we use in here, it's Resmark Web, and we've actually customized it with all of our own widgets and things like that that work well in the travel industry, particularly tours and activities.

so it's kind of a blend of that foundational platform, plus everything that we've built on top of it that we just continue testing and working through to make sure that it really works well for companies like ours.

And it's super easy to edit too. You can kind of see that in here. We do all the edits and everything for our clients, but if you did.

You need to get into something and make an edit. You literally are just clicking in here and changing it and confirming it and publishing it.

So, super, super easy. And then we can have content come from the booking platform into the site and pre-populate things and makes it really nice.

Anything else?

Yeah, a lot of people are asking this will be recorded. absolutely, after Josh gives his side of it, we'll all work all that out and get everything over to you.

Excellent. Certainly, if you have any questions regarding SEO, websites, how to increase traffic, how to increase conversion to really improved direct bookings, well, Nick, you can send out my contact information.

You're free to reach out directly. I'm happy to share anything that I've learned. in our business over the years that might help yours and if you're interested in utilizing any services along website SEO, anything like that, we're happy to help there as well.

So there you go. And we'll turn it over to you, Josh.

Thanks, mate. was really insightful. I always work in a hell of a lot for you every time we connect.

If I got ShareScreen, access NIDI, you should be able to share your screen. So there's cool, so many familiar faces here, which is great.

And a lot of you probably know me, but let's just give a bit of a light and quick of mind.

Can you say that? It's perfect.

I think it was in 2009, and I started this company Melbourne Private Tools. So as I say, I sold this company in 2017, so this is not my website, can't comment on the the quality of it, but the company I launched and grew was one that offered a whole range of really premium private experiences through Southern Australia, most predominantly single day tours and some multi day tours.

We had like a fleet of luxury Mercedes vans, and it was a great business, and after a couple years of really trying to figure it out with pretty much zero budget things, I started to figure it out, I grew that company pretty quickly.

clean to you know seven figure level and beyond over the next few years. So probably three to four years in things changed a little bit and like when I started the company it was it was me just a man with a van no you know business or tourism experience and and just trying to sort of figure out a way that to make things work.

A few years in I saw lot of trends in the corporate market and so I dedicated corporate side of the business MPT corporate events which became really important to to the to the overall company as well and then a couple of years down the line I haven't actually got the site for this thing I don't even know if the company that took the board my business I don't actually know whether they still run those outbound tours but the third sort of primary division of the business was my outbound multi-day trip so this was my signature trip to

Southern Spain, so it was a really deep dive in there, so you're really high to get 13-day trip. took groups of like 14, and you know, all the way back in 2015, that was that was 11,000 per person.

And I think when I saw the company, we had like the weight list of about 20 or 30 people to get onto that trip.

So that was that was the company, it was there was Melbourne private tours, inbound premium private leisure, team markets like the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and a few others.

There was my corporate side of the business, NPT corporate events, and then there was my outbound multi-day trips as well.

So collectively, when I saw the company, was probably doing around $3 million a year, and with a nice even spread of revenue through those channels.

So I might just grab some slides now, and So, actually, what I'll do is I'll zip all the way back to the start with those and we'll see what I can get through here because my pathway was very, very, very different to Brandon's.

I should have had him to heat up shouldn't I? There we go. I speak to a lot of experienced business owners, I've had hundreds and hundreds of conversations over recent years and almost like, when people come to me, it's when things aren't going great and they can't get traction, the business isn't growing, the way they love the at this and most businesses or most.

to, you know, experience business owners are heavily reliant on these two channels. the direct office, we've talked a lot about direct with Brandon today, or they're reliant on bookings that are derived from OCA's.

the conversations, like it's crazy how similar the conversations are. Some of the lines I've looked at, I can't get any traction.

I had all these goals and ambitions when I started out, but it's a grind. It's not growing as quickly as I'd like it to.

And I don't know why. Or if everything was going great, and now it's not, and I just sort of don't know why.

And when I scratch the surface and ask a few questions, almost in almost 100% of cases, they rely on bookings that are coming direct or through OTA's to sustain their business.

So that's what I see most regularly. Peace. Now, the stuff I'm talking to you guys about, it's just stuff that I learned, it's the stuff that I had a level of success with, and it's just what I sort of know to be true through my own experience and through those that I work with in my inner circle.

when I sold my company, this is what my kind of way of real sale, the sales channels look like.

So I had a really diverse range of channels through which I was driving inquiries and bookings. For me, my major channel was my agent bookings, and that probably was good for about a million bucks a year through DM's destination management companies inbound two operators, travel design, travel consultants.

And so that was that was one of my major channels. Other ones go down this right side here as far as I think that I was sort of defining as resellers, hotels and accommodation providers, there's

for, you know, probably three to 400,000 a year, other resellers that could be like visitor information centers or, um, or, you know, online platforms was, was a small chunk.

Over here, uh, direct organic, uh, 70% was really obviously really important to my business. Um, but it wasn't, there wasn't like strong heavy reliance on that channel.

Corporate market was growing quickly. was about sort of six to seven hundred thousand year, and, uh, and then partnerships and collaborations with clubs, groups, society, membership, organizations, associations, know, school groups, education groups as well.

So, collectively, collectively, it allowed me to build a, like, you know, like a seven-figure company where things seemed to be, like, fairly sort of seems, and I was able to grow pretty efficiently.

that's what I learned from my own experience and others that I've helped is that business is that's especially like really small sort of micro businesses that don't have robust, you know, marketing budgets, the ones that do pretty quickly and officially the ones that got a diverse range of sales channels, okay.

what, and again, this is stuff that is, it just makes sense to me. It's not like the golden rule that doesn't apply to everyone, it's just like the way I see things and the way that I see people growing an experienced business, right.

And then it really, I feel like it complements the brilliant stuff that Brandon has done in his own business and for so many others really, really well.

It's just like an alternative approach. I think they complement each other beautifully. So the way I see, you know, if people struggling and they come to me and I ask them, you know, how would you see your sales strategy is like a really proactive one or is

really reactive, like they're crossing their fingers and they're just hoping that the bookings flow and they're hoping people find that they're hoping that people feel they're tourists, or is it a proactive one where they're identifying their ideal custom or other potential types of customers where they hang out and they're going to them and they're positioning themselves like a definitive authority and getting a relationship with them.

So that's just the way it seems to make having proactive strategy and a reactive strategy. And I always work towards having a proactive sales strategy to build my audience, to connect with decision makers through different channels and to market and promote my stuff.

So hopefully that makes sense to you. So I guess all I might like to do or make my goal for this.

session is just to kind of allow you to think things, think about things in a slightly different way and think about your business and think about the way that you acquire customers and think about the channel through which you do that.

So just take a minute or even after this call to think about the channels of sales in your business.

where do your, through which channel do you drive inquiries and bookings in your company right at the moment? So a few you can sit up for those of you that are, I guess, heavily reliant on direct channels and that don't have necessarily, you know, they might have, you might have other channels that you have had a level of success with or other channels that you think, yes, I would love to grow my business through that channel, but I just sort of don't know how.

Okay, so one of us is would be agents, and that goes without saying it, and that is, you know, broad ranging, that's, you know, destination management companies, inbound two operators, independent travel designers, travel consultants, travel wholesalers, through those traditional travel distribution channels.

The corporate market is an obvious one, so does your product align with, or is there potential to resonate with the corporate market for things like management retreats, or tent building days, or pre- and post-conference tours and events, or company Christmas parties, or reward and recognition programs, or client entertainment, or partner programs.

Is there a scope? Do you feel like there's some alignment there? It's not what she is there for you.

Hotels and accommodation providers, it's one that I loved in my, that's, that is where I've got my most immediate traction of product.

growing our business, like having a really great strategy to grow my business through global hotels and the combination of all of us.

School and university groups can be absolutely golden and so many different types of experiences and tools can align beautifully with that particular channel, school and university groups.

Clubs, societies, organizations, associations that have got a passion or an interest in your niche, like almost limitless in opportunity, both locally, domestically, and more broadly, wedding and event planners, ESL, like English language institutes.

In Australia alone, think there's like 600,000 students studying English all like desperate for stuff to do to learn a little bit more about culture, have, you know, like experiences and fun.

What in the twine with the studies they're doing, and that's only in Australia, obviously other destinations, those about the same, your ways would have considerably more English language students, partnerships with other two-up activity or experience business owners.

could be experiences that do something different to you, but in your same destination. It could be experiences that do something that are very small to you, but in a different destination.

the world's going for partnerships there. So, I guess what I want you guys to do is be sort of thinking, yeah, I've been very focused on and very geared towards growing my business in this very narrow-minded approach to this channel.

What other opportunities are out there? I mean, I want to get, you know, you're thinking about an idea. And, you know, like thoughts about where other opportunities for you might exist outside of the channels that you're investing at the moment, okay?

So hopefully that kind of gets there, creative juices flowing a little bit. What I see is a bunch of challenges that people have, you know, a problem that we need to find solutions for whether I bring a recognition to the fact that there are different ways to grow So that's, you know, for many of you on this call now, you might be thinking, you know, get it.

see it. I totally see how I can grow my business through the corporate market or through school groups or through, you know, waiting at event planners that can like stag parties or wedding parties or what, like, there's a myriad of channels.

So that's the first, like, you know, a recognition that there's other different ways to grow your business. But there's a bunch of problems that people run into.

The first one, even when I'm part of these people, where do I find on this decision-making. It's like, where are they?

How do I actually connect with them? That's the first challenge. We'll go a little bit away to solving that on over the next few minutes.

We are going to, I'm just looking at my time. The time now, I've got to talk about, so I'm probably going to to speed things up a little bit.

Let's see this as a broadening of your mind to get ideas flowing and to sit back and think, okay, I'm not thinking about the big picture here and the opportunities that are out there for me.

The second is, once I know where to find them, we're actually stating them. How do I actually bring a sense of awareness to what I do?

How do I, how do I warm them up? How do I bring like a, how do I position myself in the definitive authority?

How do I get people to lean in? How do I nurture them? How do I get them to lean and get familiar and comfortable and excited about what I do?

Okay, that's the second. From that point, there... The next challenge that rises is, well, what I actually needed to get it to actually raise their hand and say, I want to onboard you as a preferred supplier, or I've got an incoming group I'd love for you to provide it quite a fool, like that's someone raising their hand, well, how do I get on that next tour of yours, that's someone raising their hand, okay?

From that, we need to convert, okay, because there's a lot of people that might raise their hands in your business, but a lot of them don't become customers, so how do you give yourself the best possible chance of actually converting customers, okay?

We're not going to be able to tackle and solve that problem in this call, but I just want to bring a sense of awareness to the different levels that it takes to acquire a customer with like a proactive outreach strategy, okay?

So just jump into a couple of those channels, all right? So agents as one, now we're just going to grab one particular channel.

So I thought I'd just share this with you, it's a bit of a raffle report that I have. Pulled for the archives a few weeks ago, I was walking a few people through it in a circle, but to give you a sense, like I stole my business in July of 2017, in that year, up to that month, my number one, 80, 70, $230,000 in private toolbook, so my next was about 151, So if you crunched those numbers, reckon probably the top 10 was worth about close to a million dollars in bookings in that first nine months of the financial year, which that, for any of you, for a lot of you, it's like the Holy Grail, because those numbers for me were identical in 2016, basically identical in 2015.

So I could start every year, I could open my bookings calendar and see, like a million dollars in confirmed bookings, six to nine months out, sitting in my bookings calendar, which first

All business is like, the holy grail, I could rely on it, I could make intelligent business decisions, could, you know, like marketing and commercial activities, could make vehicles, could recruit knowing that I could rely on that revenue.

So agents, know, get the right relationships in place is just gold. Okay, so if you're going, I'm going to have to skip through a few of these things pretty quickly.

But if you haven't sort of died into the world of growing your business through agents, what I'm seeing is that in many respects, there's a bit of a shift back towards, especially at the high, like the high ends, high ticket premium to surname clients, there's a shift back towards having like a really trusted travel designer.

So going a bit of water here to look after their travel arrangements. there was a time when we moved away from that in more recent times to the water.

but especially in the premium black, the high end, there's a level of sort of bragging rights people want to put their faith in a trusted travel designer for their travel experience so they can get back to their friends and family and they can talk about that unique experience that I had that no one else has had like them.

So agents just knock that out of the car, you know what I mean? If you can solve that problem by creating a unique experience, because there's a very competitive space in the age of world people.

They're clambering over each other for a point of difference. So as far as I've read a file, been tackling that first problem for someone that's sort of wanting to start building their network, their audience of the right agents, there's so many different ways that you can reach out, can start to build like a network of agents and get them on to like a

at least and get them into a place that you can start building a relationship that could be through your local tourism board, working with a couple of key people in the local tourism board.

talk about that more in a second. It could be just simply through LinkedIn searches, could be through agent platforms like a virtual OSO or a signature travel network or dozens and dozens and tens of dozens of different types of agent platforms like host companies that have a network of agents within them.

Some will work with any supplies or products that they choose, other that might be a little more challenging. It could be other tour or activity or experience business owners, either in your destination or other destinations that are working with that have a great relationship with the right agents.

That could be a really good fit for you. It could be just simply finding independent travel designers and for those that specialize in or sell your particular destination.

You could have a cold email. strategies or campaigns to start out reaching to a whole bunch of agents building relationships with those that, for which your experience really resonates.

But there's a myriad of ways that you can start growing an audience of agents. I'm just grabbing one of these chances here to highlight a few things.

So let's say, for example, you're wanting to build a relationship with the right kind of of agents. One of the most logical places would be to start with your tourism board.

Within that tourism organization, you're going to have people like market coordinators or business development or product development people. You're going to have like the international marketing team.

You might have like a familiarizations team who are the gatekeepers to everyone in a whole bunch of different international markets that sells your destination.

So that would be a first place to start. But simply using LinkedIn, destination plus different types of... you know, like searches, destination manager or destination specialist or, you know, if you're selling a Laskin experience as for example, a Laskin destination specialist, it could be, I'm literally like flying through these slides now.

So we'll probably, I'll do my best to do as much as I can. But obviously, you know, you'll be able to reach out to me and I'm sure the replay available on the slide that could be available as well.

It could be travel agent networks that, you know, could be a good opportunity to activity business owners or tourism products that have got good relationships with the right type of agents currently within your destination or within your circles or networks or various communities.

It could be just simple searches for destination independent travel designers plus your destination. But basically, there's a myriad of ways that you can start to fill your business with a whole bunch of agents that really have a, like a,

interests and a customer base that love and what you do in the destination you work in. Corporate market, another example, I'm just probably going to limit it to a couple of examples here.

Have you got a product that resonates with, that aligns with the corporate market? Is there a stroke for you to do things like high-level management retreat, sort of create something that speaks to that type of corporate need?

Conferencing, company Christmas parties, reward and recognition programs, client entertainment events, partner programs, end of financial year or end of quarter events.

Are you able to offer different types of experiences to different types of departments within organisation? So there is like a world of different needs and opportunities within the corporate market.

You might have had a small level of success with that market previously. You know, there's probably not a lot of products that come across in recent times that haven't got something they do with the right iteration could really speak to the corporate market.

when you get it right, it's almost like launching an entire new business or revenue stream in your company. So I'm actually going to start really skipping through some things here and we'll get into getting to a couple of other, because yeah, we're going to totally run out of time.

As far as those decision makers within the corporate market that you want to be hitting up, the ones through my business that it was obvious time and time again were tasked with company corporate entertainment needs and things like executive assistance or personal systems or company owners, CEOs, HR managers, sales and marketing managers, event managers, those are the ones.

runs that time and time again, had the responsibility of organizing corporate experiences for their shoulders. they are the ones that you want to be speaking to.

Okay, Nicki, we're going to be immediate questions right now, and I'm just going to have to zip through a few no, we've we've been answering our friend and has been going through and answering some of them, Greg has as well.

So if anyone hasn't been answered, please.

Okay, cool. All right, just keep going, Josh.

Okay, another channel that was one that worked so well for me, a lot of people have had a lot of success or they get it.

Obviously, it's hotels and accommodation providers, but what people, you know, the obvious thing to love about hotels is that the time between outreach and opportunity can be really, really quick.

Okay, so you can go from never heard of you to your first working in a matter of Okay, commission levels can be low up relationship.

really easy to build. The problem with hotels is that people find that it doesn't scale because they do it kind of in the wrong way.

So that being they rely on you know droppings, the pavement pounding to build those those relationships which obviously is very very difficult for you to actually scale that up.

So the way I saw it with hotels is two different types of needs. is the front desk, the concierge group, the concierge team, but then at the back end there was the sales and marketing team to deal with a lot of like incoming groups.

Okay so it might be organizing like an inbound group from a foreign destination and to work directly with them to create like good experiences with longer lead time.

There's great opportunities there as well. So I'm going to jump through, yeah well okay. Listen, much there's just so much to say.

One of those channels when I sold my company that was The easily the fastest growing, for me, when I sold, I think we've constituted about 12% of revenue, which was about 500,000 a year in sales, was partnerships and collaborations.

we're dialed in a really great strategy to grow partnerships and collaborations through clubs or groups, societies, membership organisations, government departments and more.

So we're able to identify the decision makers within these groups, and many of which had a real passion or interest in the types of experiences that we offered, the beautiful thing about it, the fact that the opportunities for partnerships were literally limitless, commission free, and you could, once you identify them, could deal directly with your ideal customer.

So for you guys and not not all before you on the call, I guess to step back and think about, you know, where your ideal customer really sort of hangs out both online and in the real world and who shares your customer.

So let's say, for example, you run up the top of people looking to the different types of partnerships and collaborations could be things like camera scores or camera clubs or photographic societies or art clubs or other, you know, two or activity experience business owners in different destinations that do the same thing to what you do.

If you run something in the like, you know, food tools, culinary tools could be high-end restaurants or culinary clubs or cooking schools or wine clubs.

These are the logical ones that you would potentially want to partner with and find your ideal customer within your channel, OK?

Cycling tours could be bush walking, bike stores, cycling clubs. Just once you start getting your creative juices flowing and you start to feel real.

that network, that target list of different types of groups or societies or clubs then, you know, really, really exciting.

if I was, you know, anyone who is wanting to grow their business beyond the channels that they're currently limited by, one of the easiest things that I would do first of all is to sit down, be creative and start to build a list of like 50 potential partners or collaborators that you can offer something to their audience, that they can love, it's going to really like land, it's going to come between the eyes, I'm going to resonate with them, okay.

School groups, university groups, college groups, completely different channels. If you're running, you know, science or college. group or you know outdoor education group and you're running like you know repelling or collecting experiences so you might have done a few groups and what I usually find with people is they say oh yeah I did I did a school group last year or I did a you know like a like a sixth grade you know like history walking into a last year like okay so you did one and they loved it they found you they found a place for you in there um in their curriculum but can you imagine what it would do to your business if you could multiply that by 20 or 30 or 50 by dialing in something that is going to land between the eyes of a decision maker within a school university group and could become a part of their yearly curriculum that like clockwork on repeat they do with you year in year out it was like it's it's untold.

what that would do to your business, okay? So, and the thing about spool groups is that, first of all, it's beautiful for ironing out seasonality.

So, a lot of spool groups either you can shuffle towards periods of the year that are less busy like outside of pick times or outside of, as far as the wind goes outside of that peak Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and shuffle towards Monday through Thursday, which is going to do incredible things for the ironing out of sales and revenue through your business either week to week or months to month.

Obviously, no conditions. You get a customer for life. How cool would that be? So, let's say the difference between the corporate market and school groups, or the corporate market, yes, they will travel out of season, that's awesome for your business.

Yes, they will travel Monday through Thursday rather than Friday. Yes, that's awesome for your business because then, know, a lot of, a lot of experience business, I also have the same problem, which is we're flat out, chocolate block, turning people away Friday through Sunday, but then we're dead Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

obviously finding those channels, they're going to iron out the seasonality and your business is amazing. But with the corporate market, you may have experienced this, I've definitely given I was running my business, you're going to have the situation where you're going to have like a team building weekend and you're going to have Mary from HR who organizes this team building, so experience, you know, on a Wednesday, whatever it is.

And she says, you know, post experience, that was amazing. Thanks so much. We'll be back. What are we going to do next time?

And you're like, oh crap, okay, I guess it's back to the drawing board, better figure around because that's like the core experience that I run.

So we'll have to come up with something new if I want to continue to retain their business, whereas school groups, very, very different, you're going to have

that the customer for life, you know, you don't need to reinvent what you do. You're going to have, let's say, a sixth grade history walking tour.

Well, they're just going to, there's a cycle of students that run through the organisation. So going to be able to run the same thing onto a pit over and over, year after year with the same groups without changing.

Okay, so it makes it really easy to scale. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to skip through how much, how are you going for timing?

really need to sort of think about winding things up pretty quickly. I've just gone up good. I've been giving you as much as I can in a short period of time.

yeah, what are a couple of minutes just to land?

Yeah, I mean, we're, we're out of time, but if you want to start wrapping things up, if you guys need to go, go, we want to be, you know, respectful of your time too.

Okay, so the stuff, the people that organise this stuff through school groups and university groups are going to be,

you're looking for them when you're wanting to connect with them, you're going to be looking for people like you can't coordinate as you're out there, education coordinators, heads of faculty, directors of personal capacity, which sounds like a weird title, but I think it has a lot of education groups that have people in that title.

They're the ones that you want to be building the relationship with to win the business of like, you know, education groups, okay?

ASL, English language institutes, English is a second language, English is a foreign language, you may have never heard of it, you may have never considered it, but a world of opportunity, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of students from foreign places in your destination to learn English, why we got money, don't have anything to do, and would be desperate for someone to guide them, to a way for them to get the best out of their experience.

learn about new culture, have a bit of fun. Recruit all their buddies from their languages to shoot. So that is like a gold mine for anyone who hasn't died into that world to consider how your products might align for an English language student.

On a note, we talked about a lot of these channels. One of the best ways to cut through is because you can't ever assume that someone's going to figure it out for themselves.

So when you are marketing to a group, it's not like, hey, we do this thing. I'm sure you guys will find it interesting.

It's like I've created this thing specifically for people like you. I have created this to our immersive history walk through Insert Destination and I've created it specifically for sixth grade history students that want to bring their course curriculum to life.

Okay, now that's a that's going to resonate with someone within that institution that's tasked with you know, head of faculty to bring that curriculum to life.

They're like, all right, yes, that's later between my eyes. get it a hundred percent. Now I'm listening rather than, I do these two of the, you know, lots of different types of people, maybe it might be right for you guys as well.

Okay, if you can tell someone that you've created something specifically for them, then it's going to cut through and really resonate with them considerably more, okay.

What I might do is, I'm just going to jump through. There's a few things I wanted to talk about right down towards the end and there's like, clearly I've just been completely ambitious to the point of ridiculous that I could get through all the stuff that I wanted to get through.

So a few things that I wanted to just say, um, back going back to proactive and reactive. So a reactive business owner.

that is one that comes to me and says, I don't know what's going on, I need help. Business was great last year, it's not now, I have no idea why, I need help.

People were finding me, the phone was ringing, the email was pinging, everything was going great. So what's the problem, I don't know, I've got no idea.

And so I asked them, do you have a proactive outreach sales strategy, or is it very reactive, you waiting for people to find you, or possibly just hoping that that's the case?

And that's generally what I find. So just consider that, think about the way that you require our customers, is it very reactive?

Or do you have a proactive strategy to grow your business? Okay, so one of the things that I would do, suggest you can do is to get a virtual assistant into your business.

Okay, someone that you are gonna be able to affect a sales strategy, kick it over. on to someone, let's say, in the Philippines, six to 10 bucks an hour who is gonna be able to run these outreach strategies on autopilot while you get on with the task of running your business and they get on the task of driving these like outreach sales strategies and things like that.

The second is to work to a plan, like a sales plan. So when we work to a plan, things happen.

So I just, maybe I'll just show you a couple of things that I'm talking about here. So when I'm talking about onboarding a virtual assistant, maybe just to start to think about being organized and how you would actually onboard someone if you haven't got supported your business already because bang for buck, it's gonna be the best that you'll ever do is to get someone that's really a lot like savvy, I'm hard living like it.

administration skills who can actually get these sales strategies implemented and do a lot of the grunt work so they can run sort of an auto pilot in the background where you get on with running your business.

so you want to be thinking about how you can actually onboard them. So what are the specific, what are the tasks that you would need someone to do?

I'm happy to share this template with people if they want to reach out to me. Well what exactly is the task and how long would you use envisage that task on a day-to-day week-to-week basis taken and then start to think about a job description for a virtual system.

Someone you can bring into your business. That's going to be the title, the an overview of what they're going to do, know specific skills and requirements that they need and how they would apply for that role.

So for example we're going to have an experienced virtual system who's going to do this thing. and this thing.

As far as the overview of the projects, what is it that they're going to be doing specifically? Well, here it is.

They're going to be managing databases, going to be built like various research projects, and they're going to be components of online research and building potential type at least of partners.

Here's the bullet points of the stuff they're going to be isn't required skills that they're going to need. I was hoping to go through this in little bit more depth, but that's the realities of the time constraints we've got.

let's consider how you're going to start getting someone into your business. That's the first thing. The second thing on that last slide that I talked about is planning.

Having everyone in your little tiny little team aligns and working towards a plan. when I say plan, start thinking about what

you want to achieve in the next year. Okay, what's the goal? What's the major number one goal? What are the sales targets that you've got?

Because once it leaves and breathes, and you can start working towards it, then things are going to happen a lot more quickly.

Okay, so that's ultimately what we will achieve. A million bucks, which is going to mean, let's say fictitiously 360,000 new sales.

Okay, what are we going to do to make that happen? Well, we're going to do these things. Both on direct sales.

We're going to get an outreach strategy in place. We're going to get an outreach campaign to school and university groups, etc, etc.

Right, so now we know exactly what we're going to do to reach that goal. So now we're going to break down and dive deeper into each particular specific activity.

But what are we going to do to grow the business through direct sales and reach those targets? Well, first thing we're going do is decide who's going to be up.

Okay. So that could be, create a playbook for responding to direct inquiries. It could be implementing like a time basis conversion file.

Don't worry about what that is, but what are the next steps that are going to help us to achieve that?

How much time are we going to spend doing it? Is there going to be any sort of budget? Yes or no?

And what's our monthly cycle target going to be? So once you start planning and once you start working to a plan, things are going to start happening.

Okay, so I'm going to have so much more to say, and I was so naive of me to think I can get through all the things I wanted to say in such a short period of time.

But I guess to wind it back into distilling to one message, that would be just a step back to think more broadly about the way that you're growing your business.

Right now, think more broadly about the way that you acquire customers. I don't have all the solutions and the answers for you in this like this 20-minute little micro session here.

But to complement an Epic world-class customer acquisition strategy that Brandon has that works on autopilot and brings people to your site and converts to me the customers that currently have some proactive outreach strategies to think differently about the different types of people that you can serve and who really resonate with what you do and to think about how you can grow your business through some alternate channels.

think that's going to really set you up for success as well. Okay. That's really, well, not all I've got to say that I was planning more to say but at the time we have available that's all that's safe.

So that's awesome. Thank you Brandon. Thank you Josh. guys put on a great presentation. Guys, the replay will go out tomorrow morning.

I'll give you all the resources. Anybody who registered and attended, I'll get those out to you tomorrow. We're doing another webinar, beginning of December, going into 2025.

And let me send you guys over some links, if you guys need access to that. But I appreciate you all for staying.

Cool. If you need to ask Josh, any questions, Brandon, any questions, got the contact information. Cool. A lot of great feedback.

I appreciate that interactiveness.