Increasing sales at Cruise and Maritime Voyages
by Lance
The challenge
Cruise and Maritime Voyages (CMV) had a problem. They were so successful they decided to double the size of their fleet, which increased the number of sailings.So what was the problem, I hear you ask? Well they now had three times the number of holidays to sell!
The sales team were great at selling the cheaper basic cabins and these filled quickly, but this had the effect of eliminating their market entry point and resulted in free upgrades being given to some passengers. This wasn’t sustainable if the business was to remain profitable.
The challenge was to design and deliver a training course that would equip the existing sales team and all new starters with the skills and confidence to match the holiday package to the needs of the customer and to up-sell where appropriate and possible.
This needed to be done quickly so that the team was ready for the busy booking period straight after Christmas. This gave us just two weeks!
The solution
1. I want it yesterday please: given that we only had two weeks to prepare, design and deliver the course, we immediately interviewed ten of the CMV team face-to- face at their offices to gain an understanding of what they wanted from the course.
2. the environment: visiting their offices enabled us to understand their environment allowing us to identify possible obstacles such as noise, etc
3. bespoke: based on what we found, we designed a highly interactive, practical and hands on course to meet the business objectives as well as the needs and desires of the team
4. delighting the customer: this was sales training that threw out the ‘sales rulebook’; it was all about delighting the customer by having the right mindset. We trained the staff to sell ‘the invisible – a dream’ because all they had to work with was a picture of the ship and a cabin. They had to engage, enrol and inspire their customers by making the sights, smells and feelings of the experience come to life in their imagination, thus delighting them at every stage of the sales journey
5. all hands on deck: course attendees were from sales, marketing and accounts departments; everyone gets involved in selling when it gets really busy
6. and for dessert: we ran a one-day coaching session for the team shortly afterwards to help them fine tune their skills even further
The result
We asked Gary Lloyd (Sales Director) if our training course had been value for money and he replied with: “your training has been fantastic, we’ve had a record breaking month (May)…and you can change May to any month, because every month has seen recordsbroken.”The primary measures of success used to validate our training were sales figures; which increased within the first month and then continued to grow withGary commenting that “every month has been busier than the one before”.
What Gary said…
“Your training has been fantastic, we’ve had a record breaking month.”
Gary Lloyd, Sales Director
