Maximising Business Opportunities Through Strategic Sales Travel
Travel expenses are viewed as necessary but painful expenditures with vague returns.
The financial cost alone is enough to deter business owners from investing in business-related travel. And if past trips didn’t pan out like you thought they would, or your profit margin is inching lower than management would like, it’s often a recipe for investment uncertainty.
But what if you could turn these trips into your most potent tool for growth?
This article unravels the often-overlooked benefits of sales travel for business growth, highlighting common pitfalls and providing a fresh perspective on how to turn every trip into a strategic investment.
In this article:
→ Understanding Sales Travel
→ Why is Sales Travel Important?
→ How Does Sales Travel Drive Business Growth?
→ Sales Travel Costs vs Benefit Analysis
→ How Should You Measure the ROI of Sales Travel?
→ 3 Sales Travel KPIs Your Business Can Track
→ How to Leverage Business Travel for Maximum Impact
→ 5 Ways to Optimise Your Sales Travel
→ How to Enhance Client Interactions Through Travel
→ From the Founder: “Why Travel Rarely Disappoints”
In Short
- Sales travel is often seen as a necessary but painful expense with vague returns.
- Instead, it should be viewed as a crucial investment for business growth.
- Sales travel directly impacts business growth by fostering stronger, more personal connections that boost the likelihood of closing big deals. Well-planned trips can yield far greater returns than any direct costs incurred.
- Common mistakes people make when it comes to business travel include not targeting the right people for meetings, poor itinerary planning and failing to follow up effectively post-travel.
- Mastering sales travel is not just about managing costs, but about maximising every opportunity it presents.
Understanding Sales Travel
What is Sales Travel?
Sales travel refers to business-related travel undertaken to meet existing clients or potential buyers face-to-face.
Importantly, any travel for business purposes – especially sales-related – needs to be strategic. This means maximising appointments on the road and efficient itinerary planning.
Why is Sales Travel Important?
Sales travel allows your people to engage directly with the people who make the decisions. Speaking with clients, in person, facilitates negotiation, trust-building and faster decision-making. Overall, it allows you to maintain visibility and influence with the people who buy from you, ensuring your business stays top of mind.
Ultimately, the value of business travel lies in its ability secure important sales and close big deals.
How Does Sales Travel Drive Business Growth?
Unlike traditional expenditures, travelling to meet clients directly impacts business growth by fostering stronger, more personal connections that are crucial for closing large deals.
Costs vs Benefit Analysis of Sales Travel
Yes, traveling to meet clients incurs costs – flights, accommodations, time away from the office. However, these expenses should be viewed through the lens of potential gains. If a $2,000 trip could lead to a $50,000 deal, the return clearly justifies the investment.
But this doesn’t mean all businesses should blindly increase their travel budgets. The key is in the precision of planning – who you meet, the potential deal size, and the strategic importance of the interaction.
If your planning is on point, benefits include the potential for high-value deals, stronger relationships, a deeper understanding of your market, and more effective market penetration.
How Should You Measure the ROI of Sales Travel?
The returns from business travel hinges not only on the direct costs involved but also on the indirect benefits such as client retention, contract renewals, and enhanced market presence.
3 Sales Travel KPIs Your Business Can Track
Consider the following metrics when it comes to analysing the efficacy of sales travel:
- ROI: The financial expense relative to the revenue generated from each trip.
- Meeting conversion rates: Track how many in-person meetings turn into actual sales.
- Client retention rates: Measure how many customers visited are retained over a given period of time post-visit.
Continually evaluate the effectiveness of trips and adapt strategies to ensure the highest ROI.
How to Leverage Sales Travel for Maximum Impact
5 Ways to Optimise Your Sales Travel
Understanding and leveraging the full potential of business travel can transform it from a cost centre into a revenue-generating activity. The key lies in strategic planning and execution. Every trip should be viewed through the lens of opportunity – whether it’s to solidify existing relationships, explore new markets or close pending deals.
1. Align travel objectives with business goals
Align travel objectives with your business goals to ensure each trip has clear, measurable targets.
Ensure you set a clear budget for any sales travel, considering the potential ROI from the projected deals, and allocate resources for unforeseen opportunities that may arise from sudden client requests or market changes.
Action item: Before booking any travel, define the specific goals for the trip and the expected outcomes to measure its success.
2. Target the decision-makers
The essence of travelling to meet clients isn’t about the frequency of flights or the distance covered. It’s about ensuring that each trip targets the right individuals — those who are key decision-makers capable of making significant business deals.
Not getting in front of the right people is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. If you’re not meeting with those making the buying decision (whether positive or negative) about your product or service, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Instead, focus efforts on high-value clients or prospects who have the decision-making power. First, create a targeted list of clients and prospects who have the authority to make purchasing decisions. Then, use CRM data to analyse client history and prioritise those with the highest potential for revenue generation.
Action item: Identify and prioritise travel with high-potential clients who have decision-making power.
3. Plan effectively
Despite upfront costs, the return on investment can be substantial when travel is planned effectively. A well-organised trip can yield substantial returns far exceeding your initial investment.
Implement practices such as advanced booking, choosing cost-effective accommodation, and combining trips to reduce costs.
Effective planning also means every trip is packed with high-potential meetings. This might look like coordinating multiple meetings each day or planning routes that maximise client engagement.
The goal is to turn every dollar spent on travel into much more in revenue. Plus, comprehensive preparation means you’ll be ready to address the needs and expectations of your key debtors.
Action item: Plan the itinerary to maximise time spent in valuable meetings, minimising downtime and travel time. Where possible, schedule back-to-back meetings with different clients in the same geographic area to optimise each trip.
4. Track your return on investment
As a business expense, sales travel often carries the stigma of being high-cost without apparent immediate returns. But when done correctly, sales travel is an investment with high yields.
The ROI from business travel hinges not only on the direct costs involved but also on the indirect benefits such as client retention, contract renewals, and enhanced market presence. Managing and optimising these returns involves careful planning and execution.
Action item: Implement a system to track the outcomes of each business trip, including deals closed, relationships nurtured, and opportunities identified.
5. Follow up strategically
At its core, the success of business travel is measured by the quality of interactions and the depth of relationships it helps build or enhance. Client communication should be paramount before and during any journey, but a solid follow-up strategy will significantly increase the impact of sales travel.
To implement this, develop a robust follow-up plan for after each meeting to keep the momentum going and close deals faster. Use personalised emails, thank-you notes and timely proposals to reinforce the discussions held during the meetings.
Action item: Develop a robust follow-up strategy to capitalise on the progress made during face-to-face meetings.
Why Travel Doesn’t Disappoint
“In business, we’re always looking at proactive ways to grow our revenue base and grow our profitability.
Quite often, that leads to investments, whether that’s in salespeople, marketing expenses, advertising, staff training, or so on.
But can I tell you a business expense that very rarely disappoints?
Travel.
Specifically, getting in front of people who already buy your product.
Getting in front of those people – regardless of where they are – very rarely disappoints as an investment.
The first assumption we’re going to make is we are getting in front of the right people.
You’re not just getting in front of random people. You’re not getting in front of people who aren’t making decisions. You are going to locations or you are getting in front of people who are going to make a buying decision, whether positively or negatively, to buy your product or service.
Frequently we hear people say, “But it’s expensive to get in front of people!” Because, quite often, the clients we deal with – you’ve got to fly somewhere; you’ve got to take a lot of time out. People have busy calendars; as in, the people in your business have busy calendars, and don’t have time to get in front of them.
The reality is, travel is probably one of the most important – if not the most important – thing they can do with their time.
Let me give you a real-life example of someone we work with.
They worked out, over the course of a full financial year, all the appointments that they had with either prospective clients or existing clients. They backtracked a calculation that worked out every appointment, on average, was worth around about $50,000 worth of new revenue to the business.
As I said a moment ago, a key element is to ensure you’re getting in front of the right people. This business was clearly getting in front of the right people.
But do you know what working out the $50,000 per appointment meant?
It meant that people in the office who didn’t have those sales roles were like, “Why are you in the office? Why are you here?” Because if they weren’t in the office, they knew that they were going to be statistically earning $50,000 for the business per meeting.
(I should have mentioned this earlier, but when I say $50,000 per appointment, this is a business that deals in quite heavy asset sales. So an average transaction for them is somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000. So to give you some perspective, each appointment was worth around 20% of the value of an average sale.
In their case, it was worth it to go and spend a couple of thousand dollars to get in front of somebody. And a couple of thousand dollars could include flights, it could include car, it can include time of the individual to get there, and the time they spend as well.
If I’m selling a smaller dollar value transaction item or service, then naturally my cost needs to be lower than that.
But do the statistics, do the analysis, and very rarely does travel ever disappoint.
If you’ve got a business and your budget is over on your travel expenditure, that is generally a good sign – so long as you’re intelligent around the people you’re getting in front of, and how you’re going about that process.
To give you a counter example of the $50,000 appointment business, someone who we used to work with – and they got bought out by private equity – I was talking to somebody in their finance team who we worked with at that time. When I asked her how business was going she replied, “You know what? We weren’t getting in front of our clients. People were going to site and visiting our clients when we weren’t. They took advantage of our opportunities, and they pulled the rug from under our feet.” And they were finding it hard to build that traction back up.
So if you’re getting in front of the right people, it isn’t just that you are selling the product. You’re staying top of mind for those individuals who are making the buying decisions, or influencing greatly those buying decisions.
If your business is investing in travel and not making it work, there are two common explanations.
First, it’s highly likely you’re not getting in front of the right people.
Second, your salespeople – who I’m assuming are the ones going out to site and visiting prospective clients or existing clients – are not putting enough planning in place around what they want to do with the visit.
To optimise your sales travel, here’s two things I recommend.
First, jam-pack that day. If you have to fly somewhere, get as many appointments as you can.
Second, if you’re on the road, plan out those times so that you’re as effective and as efficient as possible on that journey, and with the expenditure you’re making on the day or days that you’re away.
Conclusion
Turning Business Travel Into a Strategic Business Tool
Investing in travel to meet clients isn’t just about maintaining relationships; it’s a strategic move that places your business directly in front of the people who matter the most — the decision-makers. This practice keeps your business top-of-mind, helps close significant deals, and ensures that your company doesn’t just remain a name in an email, but a significant presence influencing substantial business decisions.
In conclusion, while video conferencing tools like Zoom are convenient and essential, they can’t wholly replace the personal touch that face-to-face meetings provide. As you plan your next business strategy session, consider the powerful impact that strategically planned travel could have on your business’s growth trajectory.
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