During this 1-hour session, we covered important topics for tour operators including:

👉 The 4 expensive marketing mistakes MOST tour operators make (so you can avoid them)

👉 The best ways to do organic, FREE marketing and get your tours in front of your ideal guests even if you don’t have a marketing budget.

👉 Why choosing and understanding your "ITG" is your single most important decision even if you're surviving month-to-month.

👉 How to focus your marketing so you can reach your target guests cheaper and easier than your competition

Brandon Lake:

Welcome, everybody. We will have a bunch more people joining us here over the next couple of minutes, I'm sure, so we're going to just jump in and get started. I'll give you a couple of quick introductions. First, I am Brandon Lake, the CEO of Resmark. We've got a lot of our clients and friends here. I also own and operate two different tour companies, Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions. Both businesses has been around for a long time. I started Moab Adventure Center about 23 years ago, and it's grown very nicely over time. We're really excited about everything there. Along the way, we built a software platform that is a booking system, marketing automation, marketplace, does all of those kinds of things. We also built a liability waiver platform called WaiverSign. Most recently, we have a digital marketing agency that does websites and SEO and paid ads as well.

Brandon Lake:

So we are very excited to have Kelsey Tonner with us today. I've known Kelsey for actually a long time. Met him at a conference a long, long time ago. He has done a lot in his career as well, and comes to us with a lot of very hands-on background himself being an award-winning tour leader. He's going to bring all of that to us today. He's now working ... Well, he's the founder of Guest Focus, that's a tour business coaching, and he's doing this for over 20 years. He helps business owners as a mentor, a consultant, a speaker.

Brandon Lake:

Some of you may have heard him speak at different places. He has now helped over 2,000 tour operators from 75 countries around the world. He's spoken at over 35 industry events and conferences. So you may have seen him at Arrival, have seen him at several other tourism conferences. Really does a phenomenal job, and he's got a lot of great online resources. If you haven't tuned into the Guest Focus YouTube channel, there's a ton of great stuff there, and he's going to be sharing some of that with us today.

Brandon Lake:

So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn things over to Kelsey. As we go and he begins to present this, if you have any questions along the way, please just throw those into the chat. We may take some time, the appropriate moments to kind of answer those along the way or we'll be answering them at the end, for sure, but anything that you want to know as he's presenting along the way as it relates to your business, please put it in the chat and we'll get to it. So Kelsey, welcome.

Kelsey Tonner:

Beautiful. Thanks for the lovely intro. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening or good night to all the folks who are here no matter what part of the world you are tuning in from. So just a couple of more of those logistical items off the top. If you do have your camera off and you are okay with turning it on, absolutely love that. I have this extra monitor here, and so I love keeping an eye on what's going on over there. If I see a lot of people dozing off or what I sometimes call that Tucker Carlson face where this is deep confusion or something like that, it's usually a good indication to me that I should, hey, take a beat, maybe say that in a slightly different way. So super appreciate that, and just know that I'll keep an eye over here as well as on the chat. So Brandon's going to be keeping an eye on the chat. If there are questions as we go through, like I said, we'll have a pretty free-flowing session here today. Then we'll then have some dedicated time towards the end for the Q&A.

Kelsey Tonner:

Also, if you are able to silence your phone, turn down the Instagram, some of the other things, I promise it's going to be worth your while, but I've not been accused of being a slow talker. So we're going to move quickly. That's our goal here today. So let's see if I can pull up just this intro slide. I think this one should work. This worked for us just a second ago. Portion, let's try that. Okay.

Kelsey Tonner:

So this is our topic today, How to Consistently Sell More Tours. You guys seeing that? Give me a little quick hands up if you're seeing that on your screen. Hell yeah. Thanks, Keisha. Beautiful. Without the scatter gun approach to getting new customers, even if you feel that every dollar you spend on marketing goes into one gigantic black hole. How many people have had that black hole feeling? Sometimes you're looking at your marketing budget, we're a little bit uncertain. Yeah, that's you. Matthew can relate.

Kelsey Tonner:

Look, I want to take a moment just to talk a little bit about why I think this is a crucial topic at this moment in time, and maybe just call it an elephant in the room. When we're talking about, "Hey, how to consistently sell more tours?" you might be expecting, "Okay. Hey, Kelsey's going to come on and he's going to maybe share some the marketing hacks," right? Are we going to learn about the latest thing that's working with Facebook groups or TikTok challenges or this type of thing? That is 100% not what we're going to be doing. The temptation that we found in working with as many tour business owners as we have over the last decade is there's this real allure of the quick fix marketing hacks, that shiny object, the latest digital tool, and there's a lot of content on that, whether it's workshops, blog posts, podcast episodes, even sessions like this.

Kelsey Tonner:

Today, we're going to be looking more at core strategies, let's say, that have stood the test of time, strategies that are going to work even in periods of a lot of change. That's why this is so important right now. Think about, obviously, the pandemic changed everything, but think about how much in each year after the pandemic what customers need, what they want, what they're looking for has been evolving and changing. As the market conditions evolve, who knows what's going to be coming in the next year or so? We just know that we're in a real period of dynamic change.

Kelsey Tonner:

So what I want to focus on here today is what are the strategies that are going to help us navigate those different ups and downs. As TikTok challenges come in and out, as tactic X and Y phase in and out, we want to give you tools to help you not only navigate those changes but thrive in them.

Kelsey Tonner:

So we all want consistent sales in our tour business, right? Through our work with operators, we've found there are four common and expensive mistakes that tour companies are making when it comes to selling tours and activities. We're going to go through each one of these mistakes one by one and, of course, share what to do instead. I'm going to tell a lot of stories here today, tell these are people either in our program or just best practices from super successful operators to hopefully give you some inspiration on what's possible when we can avoid these mistakes.

Kelsey Tonner:

I want to let you know that you are in the right place even if you're feeling some of this. Put up your hands if you feel like you've got a great tour, but sometimes it feels like nobody knows you're out there and you don't know the best way to get it in front of more people. We hear this a lot. Maybe. Yeah, awesome, a couple of hands there, especially if you're in a multi-day space, but maybe turning inquiries into confirmed bookings feels like an uphill battle like if you get a lot of expressions of interest, but conversion is tough, you're in the right place. Maybe you find yourself jumping around, getting distracted by a lot of different marketing tactics. You have trouble keeping out that noise and chasing those shiny objects. You're definitely in the right place.

Kelsey Tonner:

Maybe you invested in marketing agencies, but it turned out to be disappointing, frustrating, maybe wasteful of our limited resources. How many people have been there before? Who's really good at marketing? Marketing agencies. They promise the world they'll get you in the door and then we can be left frustrated. Lastly, maybe you're tired of no solid plan, the sort of sporadic feeling marketing efforts. Information overload, this is the biggest thing we hear from operators. There's just so much information out there, from blog posts, podcasts, courses, Facebookers. It feels like there's a million things to do and all of them are really urgent.

Kelsey Tonner:

Well, I just want to let you know that you are not alone. Every day in our program, I'm working with operators who are feeling this exact same thing. So if you are feeling that, just know that that's part of the challenge, part of what we have to navigate as tour business entrepreneurs. In talking with Brandon and Nikki, we did want to offer something special in addition to our workshop here today. So I'll just give this a shout out off the top. Maybe we can pop it in the chat, but we do ... I've cleared some time in my personal calendar over the next two weeks. If you did want to have a short call with one of our tour business coaches, we do offer these free 45-minute strategy calls where we can just give a second set of eyes on what you're up to in your business, and maybe talk through some of your goals. Every one of these calls, we make sure that you walk away with a couple of quick wins.

Kelsey Tonner:

So look, we put together a special, like I said, opportunity at guestfocus.com/resmark. I'll just call this out because, frankly, we have limited availability in the next couple of weeks. So if that's of interest to you, I would just maybe go and book that. Now, we do first come, first serve, and I know that we had a lot of registrants here today. So I just want to give that a quick shout out.

Kelsey Tonner:

My background, you got a quick insight there, obviously, from Brandon, but I was a tour leader. I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada. I don't know if we've got any other Canadians here, but you'll notice I say some words in a lovely quaint way. Oh, that's you. Awesome. Are you from Quebec? Matthew? Is it a proper Matthew?

Matthew:

Sorry about that. I was born in Quebec, but I live in Hawaii now, and it is Matthew. You got it, correct, yes, but I just tell people to call me Matty.

Kelsey Tonner:

Matty, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't fly out on the big island out in Pacific. Very cool. Well, look, basically, I grew up in Nova Scotia in East Coast Canada. Took any job that allowed me to travel the world, meet new people, see new places. Very quickly got in with a number of companies. I was a dog sledding guide. I led high ropes in Adventure, what was it, Adventure Tours through Wisconsin like the Great Lakes area. I've been down to Australia, and then picked up with Backroads Tours. With Backroads Tours, essentially, they're the number one active travel company in the world. These were hiking trips, walking trips all over the world. This is me down in Vietnam. It's probably hard to see a little bit here, but that's me in the plow here with a nice little Vietnamese woman who's got me doing a little demonstration here. I was the ox here.

Kelsey Tonner:

Basically, what was amazing about spending six years working with this company is doing this full-time. I was exposed to an enormous volume of successful tour companies. Backroads is really quality-focused. So on any given multi-day tour, working with 9 or 10 different tour businesses from who's doing the tastings, who's doing our cultural tours, our walking tour or maybe it was a wine tasting experience. So really got to see what made some of these experiences so special and what made those operators as successful as they were.

Kelsey Tonner:

That's what led us to create after stepping back from Backroads the Be A Better Guide project. Some of you may have seen those videos years back, but basically, this was us trying to create a community around, "Hey, anyone who wants to raise the bar on what it means to create memorable experiences for people?" We created a community around that. That was our initial business model. We did programs from Lead Amazing Tours, Extraordinary Storytelling for Tour Leaders, Seven-Figure Tour Business and on.

Kelsey Tonner:

Like Brandon said, I've been able to, in this industry, I guess able to articulate and codify some of these best practices, being able to speak at 35 international events and did training with all kinds of booking software companies around the world. So basically, three or four years ago, we just did a rebrand essentially to Guest Focus, where our overall vision was still the same, which is, "Hey, we want to help fill the world with engaging, inspiring experiences for travelers," full stop because we're travelers ourselves, but then our mission got a lot more specific, "Hey, we want to create the world's best coaching program for tour business owners," because that is a fantastic way to help fill the world with those amazing experiences.

Kelsey Tonner:

When we go traveling, we're tired of the mediocre mass tourism. Life is too short for boring. So ultimately, at the end of the day, we want to empower, coach, inspire people like you to create extraordinary guest experiences and thriving profitable tour businesses. So everything that we cover here today, myself, and we now have a team of 12 experienced tour business coaches who are essentially our Guest Focus coaches, and we've directly mentored hundreds of tour business owners. So the strategies, the insights, what we're talking about here today, these are real world best practices. They're tested, they're refined, and it's specific exactly to what we do. Cool. That's all we got for intro.

Kelsey Tonner:

So why don't more tour businesses get the results they're after? We find there are four sales killers. Here is number one. No ideal target guest. Too many tour business owners believe that their tours are ideally suited to all visitors to the destination, right? Heard that before? This mistake is enormously costly across your entire business, and it's honestly probably the single biggest thing that is holding back so many from building a thriving, profitable tour business.

Kelsey Tonner:

"If I could just get my tour in front of more people," is what most of us spend our mental energy on. I'm here to encourage you to shift your thinking on this. Now, the go-to consequence we might think about is just on the marketing end. We all probably are familiar with that idea of customer avatar or that buyer persona, and if we don't have a clear idea of who we're targeting with our marketing spend or marketing energy or marketing efforts, then the marketing can be ineffective. It can be expensive. All of which is 100% true, but this is where ... I would say here at Guest Focus, we want to remind you that it's so much more insidious than this.

Kelsey Tonner:

This mistake is bigger than just ineffective marketing and wasted marketing dollars. By trying to be all things to all people who come on your tour, activity or experience, you end up serving no one well. It's been our ethos, as I said here in the intro, to constantly strive to create unforgettable experiences for travelers, but the real secret to doing this and doing this extremely well is by niching down into smaller but crystal clear ideal target guests or put another way, let's flip this on its head. Your tour, your activity or your experience, if you're doing this well, should actually be uninteresting or unappealing to the majority of visitors to your destination. It's a nice reverse of this sniff test, and that feels counterintuitive to us because our instincts are, what, to sell as much as possible to as many people as we can, but by doing so, you don't only do yourself a disservice, but you do disservice to your guests.

Kelsey Tonner:

So let's go through a couple quick examples to continue to think this through. We want to, at the end of the day, be able to answer this question really succinctly. I help these specific people. Let's think about those bicycle tours that I led for many years. Just to clarify, this is the value proposition. It's like, "Okay. We're going to fly to the other side of the world. We're going to take a tiny piece of plastic, we're going to shove it up your rear end. You're going to bike 150 miles under the blazing hot Italian sun, and then you're going to get up the next day and do it again seven days in a row."

Kelsey Tonner:

So to a lot of people, this is not sound like a relaxing holiday. This sounds like something that may have been designed by your enemy, something that is a punishment versus a holiday, but for those folks that love exploring, being outdoors, for those folks that love the natural endorphin kick that you get from peddling or hiking your way through a destination, this is the perfect tour, but for most folks, not really.

Kelsey Tonner:

One of the members of our coaching program is Melanie. She, I guess you'd call them academically focused multi-day adventures. So they go around the world, but on Melanie's tours, you got homework. You got books that you need to read. There's things that you've got to prepare. You got a short presentation to do. We're going to be having a lot of classroom time during these tours. We're going to have visiting professors and some world experts. For a lot of folks, "Where's the beach?" This is not a tour for everybody, but she's having enormous success. For those people that are frustrated by maybe the surface level cultural immersion of so many multi-day tours, "My God, we're walking through Florence, Italy following this tiny flag and somebody's pointing up at Michelangelo's penis here in the statue, and we're just not recognizing or not truly appreciating it or going into the depth that's possible." For those type of people, Melanie's tours are that perfect fit.

Kelsey Tonner:

Last example down, let's go Lord of the Rings. We go down to New Zealand. There's all kinds of spectacular day tours where you can dress up like wizards and hobbits, run around, role playing with swords. Is this what most people want to do when they go to New Zealand? Heck no. I'm sure there's a lot of people on the call here who thought the movies were too long and overrated and boring, and this is the last thing on earth that you would want to do, but these companies here are multimillion dollar, hugely successful, hugely profitable companies because they're not trying to serve everyone. They are serving a very particular niche.

Kelsey Tonner:

For most of us who aren't ... The equation differs. You might be thinking in your head, "Well, what about a place like the Louvre where we have a huge diversity of visitors who are coming through and passing through?" It's like, yes, let's keep in mind that most of us are not the Louvre. Most of us as small to medium-sized tour business owners, we don't need hundreds of thousands of customers. Most of us can have hugely profitable businesses with sometimes hundreds of customers, sometimes with just thousands of customers, and we sometimes lose this bit of perspective. Okay.

Kelsey Tonner:

I think we've flogged that a little bit. We'll have some time in the Q&A to dive into that, but that is our first step is let's be crystal clear on choosing that ideal target guest. Secondly, what is this mistake number two? Little or no customer research. So it's one thing to choose an ideal target guest, but it's another thing entirely to understand, empathize, and wrap your head around what they actually want, what they actually need.

Kelsey Tonner:

Here's a simple little Venn diagram that can help this out. You know the Venn diagrams. We've got two overlapping circles. On the left is you and your tour business, your vision, some of the values that motivate you, some of your goals in terms of maybe number of bookings, maybe profit margins, sales, what you want to put into the world, your ideas for those experiences. On the right is that ideal target guest, the people that you want to serve.

Kelsey Tonner:

Now, in their box, they have their own priorities, their pain points, needs, wants, desires, dream scenarios. Where these things overlap is where we have product market fit, is where we have the most profitable products to create. The most profitable tour businesses live in this space. What we often find with tour business owners is sometimes we're too far to the left or sometimes we're too far to the right. So if you're too far to the left and you're in that blue side of the circle, you've got a lot of ideas for tours, but we're not necessarily maybe validating. We're not necessarily in tune with, "Hey, is this something that the market actually wants?" We're going to go through here. I did put in a couple of slides on this.

Kelsey Tonner:

So look, customer research lets you serve your guests at the highest possible level. That's really what we're after. Why are we doing this? Why are we taking the time to maybe actually get on the phone, get on a Zoom call, actually talk to some of the people that we're trying to serve at that highest possible level? It helps you generate more of these rave reviews, more referrals, more sales, but also, of course, the cost of our marketing is going to plummet. We can get that right message in front of the right people.

Kelsey Tonner:

Well, I sometimes like to think about this. Imagine you come to me. Here's my value proposition. I'm going to design the perfect holiday for you and your family. Well, it's going to be a weekend. You're coming to a destination. I'm like, "Yup, no problem. I'm going to take care of you. I've got a great sense of what's going on here in this destination. I'll put together a perfect holiday,' and we hang up the phone. I go and I start putting together package, the offer, but I didn't ask you any questions about what was important to you, what you're hoping to get out of the holiday, who are the members of family, what are your pet peeves, what really pisses you off or drives you crazy when you're traveling.

Kelsey Tonner:

That would be a massive red flag, wouldn't it? You'd be like, "Whoa, that doesn't feel right," but that's what so many of us as tour business owners are doing. Think. If you flip this on it head again, it's almost like audacity to design and put together a tour or product without taking the time to even have a conversation with some of the people we're looking to serve.

Kelsey Tonner:

Now, many of you, no doubt, are getting some of this information through online reviews, but we can see here that we can be more proactive than this. The companies, again, what we're sharing here today, when we looked out and we said what is common across some of the most successful tour activity businesses in the industry, doing this type of guest deep dive is what we call it. Doing this type of customer research before you put together a tour activity or experience, before you put together your offer and sales page is the key to success. So instead of making this mistake, little to no customer research, what are we going to do instead?

Kelsey Tonner:

So what is this guest deep dive? It is a specific method. We're essentially finding out essential information about your potential customers. It's going to give you clarity about what opportunities exist for products and services, plus the confidence to move forward when you're investing your time and resources. Having that ability to see if there are gaps, if there are needs, wants and desires, if there are people being underserved in some way, this is a tremendously profitable thing to do. If you are keenly in tune with not only, "What type of tours can I design?" but, "When I'm thinking about what other tours, products, and services can I create, how can I create really compelling bundles or packages? What sort of one-click upsells could I add to my checkout flow to make your business more profitable?" At the end of the day, we get there by serving those ideal target guests at the highest possible level.

Kelsey Tonner:

Mistake that most tour operators make is that we create a tour activity or an experience, and sometimes this can take months. We can invest a lot of time putting together the contracts, scripting everything out, getting ready half a year, and then we put it out into the world and it doesn't sell or crickets. So this is hugely costly, not only from the time, energy spent on it, but the opportunity cost as well. A guest deep dive keeps you from speculating, keeps you from guessing what your customers want, and it's going to help you minimize risk when you're building and growing that tour business.

Kelsey Tonner:

So we see on the slide here, it's the perfect tool for times of turbulence and change. Is a guest deep dive something we do once and then we just don't do it again for, I don't know, five years, 10 years? Of course not. A guest deep dive is something that in our coaching program we help people do on average at least once a year. It's a way for us to validate and test some of those assumptions. It's also a great way to, like we said, add experience, answers, upsells, cross-sells, create compelling packages, but it's also a really great way to fine-tune your offers.

Kelsey Tonner:

So many of you probably have tours that are selling pretty well, but when we get that product market fit, when something really just clicks for your customer, we're talking about a whole lot of momentum and inertia that gets built into the business. I think I'll tell a story here in a second of how we can do this. So this is really one of the secret sauce is, "Hey, how are we going to survive a recession? How are we going to survive another maybe dramatic event that comes through?" This is how we can give our tours the best chance to sell in any market.

Kelsey Tonner:

All right. So I don't want to leave you totally empty-handed here. What's the most important question we can ask? Sometimes we do this, but we don't know the right questions to ask. So here is the numero uno of the guest deep dive, writer-downer. What are your biggest challenges or frustrations when it comes to, and then you insert the area of the market that you're trying to serve. When organizing a hen party or a bachelorette party in city, for example, what are your biggest challenges or frustrations when it comes to doing outdoor activities around New York City? Let's say you're a tour operator that takes people out of the city, gets them out hiking, onto a river, snowshoeing possibly in the winter. Finally, what are your biggest challenges or frustrations when it comes to booking a field trip, let's say, for your English as a second language class?

Kelsey Tonner:

This is the most important question to ask, and why we ask it in the negative, I guess, is people don't always know what they want, but we have a pretty damn good idea of what we don't want. I always love the analogy of thinking about your exes. Some of us, that was maybe a while back, but maybe we didn't know what we were looking for in a romantic partner, but, man, a lot of our exes sure helped us find out what we didn't want. We have a very clear idea of what we did not want in a partner.

Kelsey Tonner:

Famous Henry Ford quote on this, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses." That hits home that sometimes people can't articulate exactly what they're looking for, but if you can really zero in to, "Hey, what are some of the things that you're struggling with? What are those challenges?" Empathizing, appreciating, and deeply understanding your target guest becomes your secret weapon.

Kelsey Tonner:

This is the one I want to share. I'll share Clint's story here after we state mistake number three. Cool, cool, cool. All right. I'll keep pressing on. Feel free to jump in, Brandon, if you have questions. My chat window popped up.

Brandon Lake:

Kelsey, I will ask one question here about the ... because-

Kelsey Tonner:

Yeah, do it.

Brandon Lake:

We had a question come in about how to deliver that question. Denea is saying that she does it with phone call screening, and so trying to figure out, which I love, and we actually have in our business, we have kind of a script, not that people follow it word for word, but it really gets to getting at the heart of the problem that the person is trying to solve when they're on the phone. What is it that they're really looking for? Because then over the phone, you can really sell to that, which is amazing, which I love. So it sounds like she's doing a little bit of that, but her question is where else do you suggest doing that because it's hard to find ... You want the people that are somewhat interested in that. How do you target the right group so that you know you're asking the right people the question? Because you ask the question to the wrong people, you could go down a completely wrong-

Kelsey Tonner:

Exactly the point I was going to make, Brandon. You're picking up on this. These mistakes are ordered in order of importance. So you could do something like a guest deep dive. We could ask this question to someone like me. Let's say you run a tour business here in Vancouver, and I've got a young family. I got three young girls under six. What I need and want from a tour, my pain points, my frustrations are totally different than the German backpackers who are coming through town or the baby boomer couple that is retired and looking to travel and have some of those experiences.

Kelsey Tonner:

So the first key insight or reminder is you absolutely should focus your guest deep dive just on your ideal target guests, 100%. Well, I've even done this. Just as a quick side note. When we were doing this in our own business, some of our initial programs were really aimed at tour leaders, and we ourselves shifted to serving really tour business owners, entrepreneurs. So when we were doing some of what is essentially guest deep dive, when we were doing some of our customer research, I actually created a filter where you could indicate what you were in a survey.

Kelsey Tonner:

So it said, "Hey, I'm a guide, a freelance guide," or, "I work for someone else," or B, "Hey, I run my own tour business," or, "I'm more entrepreneurial," et cetera. I was actually able to filter out any responses from individual guides who didn't run their own business, who didn't have some of that entrepreneurial ambition, et cetera. So there are ways that you can do that with a survey, but basically, there's four. In our program, we go through the complete training on how to do the guest deep dive, but here's the quick high level.

Kelsey Tonner:

You can do this, and it's our first and foremost recommendation to do, obviously, over the phone or in-person conversations with your ideal target guests, at least 5 to 10 of these conversations. That's the best way because you can dig deeper, you could scratch something, you can say, "Hey, can you say that in another way?" or, "I noticed you mentioned this. What do you mean by that?" So that's the most powerful.

Kelsey Tonner:

Secondly, if you do have a large customer database, and you know that your ideal target guests are represented within there, a survey is a fantastic tool to do this at scale. So we even have templates and one-click copies in our program of how you can set up a guest deep dive and do that survey, and that allows you to manipulate that data. So survey is the next one.

Kelsey Tonner:

Third one is stealth. You can actually do this passively. So I know one of our members of our coaching program, he's based in Ireland and he does two to three-day Irish experiences for visitors. There's a number of Facebook groups dedicated to tour planning, "Hey, what are the best sites to see in Ireland?" So he was able to glean all kinds of insights just from being a member of those groups and looking for, "Hey, what are the problems? What are the challenges? What are the questions people are asking?" That type of stealth guest deep dive is hugely, hugely effective. You can find the right group of people. In this day and age, it's pretty magical.

Kelsey Tonner:

The one that we just added, honestly, in the last 12 months is AI. You can now do a guest deep dive leveraging something like ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude and actually get some pretty spectacular results. We always recommend this as an add-on, but if you were looking to move quickly, if you have not yet uploaded your ideal target guest into a large language model and started manipulating and probing, you can get a lot of really incredible results.

Kelsey Tonner:

I was doing it this morning for one of our coaching members, and I said, "Hey, this is this company based in Hawaii. Here is their ideal target guest. I want you to come through and generate 10 of their biggest concerns, objections or hesitations before buying." Did the same thing. I said, "I want you to go a little bit deeper. What are some of the specific to this destination, specific to the competitive landscape? What are some of their biggest challenges or concerns?" It was able to generate beautiful stuff, stuff that I hadn't even thought of, someone who has only been to Hawaii a couple times, but right at the top, it pulled out, well, there was a real concern in Hawaii about having an authentic experience. Is this just one of those tourist traps? Is this some sort of exploitive of Hawaiian natives? I was like, "Oh, beautiful." How amazing is it that we could address that particular challenge or pain point on our sales pages, in our marketing messaging, in our offers? So long answer, but those are the four different ways that you can come at that guest deep dive. Great, great question.

Brandon Lake:

Love it. Love it. That's great stuff. I've done a bit of that too and found another good resource is Gemini, if you guys haven't used that yet. It does an incredible job with creating an avatar and doing that exact same deep dive with it.

Kelsey Tonner:

Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. Look, we got two more mistakes, so we'll push on. We've got lots time for Q&A. Keep those coming. Love that. Okay. Mistake number three, generic tour design and delivery. So what we're doing, I'm walking you through, is what we've codified into our Guest Focus formula. Basically, what we mean by that is some of the most successful tour businesses on the planet are able to keep their guests at the heart of everything they do in their tour business. I'm not just talking about the guest experience, but we're talking here about guest-focused tour design, offer design, guest-focused sales, and guest-focused marketing. So let's slowly transition to what that guest-focused looks like here into design and then into putting offers together.

Kelsey Tonner:

So applying Guest Focus formula so far, .we've made a decision around our ideal target guest, and I'm going to nip you in the bud. Some of you're already thinking, "Well, this is great, but I've got three or four ideal target guests." I'll be straight with you. That's a very complex business. You're adding a lot of headaches to yourself. Basically, what you're saying is, "Oh, yeah, well, I actually have four or five times the work." It's almost like running four or five different businesses if we're going to take this seriously.

Kelsey Tonner:

Now, at a certain point, does it 100% make sense to go after potentially a different ideal target guest? Yes, but I would encourage you to do that at a much later stage. I can't tell you the number of businesses that we've worked with, that we've grown to multi-million dollar tour businesses off a one tour. People forget this. That's the other's instinct. It's like, "Oh, I have to add more tours, more product. That's how I'm going to grow my business by having 15 different offers so it's going to resonate with all these different people that I'm trying to serve."

Kelsey Tonner:

No, no. Honestly, you can do it. Look, you can build a business any way you want. What we're trying to do is say, "Hey, here's a faster track," or, "Here's some proven methods. You can follow them or not follow them. It's totally up to you, but I'm telling you the right thing to do, choose that ideal target guest, get a best-selling tour activity, an irresistible offer, and then what's the best next step? Is it to go serve another ideal target guest? Hell no. Create another product, service that you can sell to that same customer. That's the right next step.

Kelsey Tonner:

The more you can increase the shopping cart value, the more you can increase that customer lifetime value, the more profitable your business will be, the less headaches you have, the amount you can reduce the complexity. So that's the quick caveat here. So we've made that decision around the ideal target guest. We've done the guest deep dive. That first question of the guest deep dive is just one of probably five core questions, by the way. So just in case you're thinking of like, "Well, that seems kind of like a limited customer research," there's additional questions that we ask and we do ask about their dream scenarios, "Hey, what does that perfect day look like or that perfect experience be?"

Kelsey Tonner:

Let's say we do all that, but then most operators do what? Well, we default back to generic tour design and delivery. We see often what's in the market. We look out and we're like, "Well, they must be having success," or, "Oh, I see the offer is priced around this," and we default into competing with so many other people that we don't need to compete to, compete with, rather.

Kelsey Tonner:

Here's the story of Clint. So he's a Discover Canada Tours. He's based here in Vancouver. Clint and his team were approached one day by an English as a second language school, and they said, "Hey, look, lots of people come here to study English all over the world. Vancouver, it's a beautiful place to do it, but they don't just want to be in the classroom. They want to get out and see some of the coasts. They want to see the mountains, et cetera. Could you help us do this? This is not really our sweet spot." He said, "Yeah, sure. Hey, tell me more about what you need." What's he doing? He's guest deep dive, "What are some of your biggest problems and challenges?"

Kelsey Tonner:

There's all kinds of challenges. One, most of these people don't speak English all that well. Two, zero percent of them almost have transportation of any kind. Payment processing is challenging for folks who maybe can't either navigate the website, maybe they don't have credit cards or they have different payment methods. So Clint was able to work with the school and put together a series of offers. Then Clint's big insight was, "Oh, wow, I wonder if there are other English as second language schools here in Vancouver." You bet there are. There's about dozen of them.

Kelsey Tonner:

So Clint was able to go and start approaching these other English as second language school and say, "Hey, what is it that you're struggling with? Would you be interested in us helping get your students out into some of the beautiful experiences they can have around Vancouver?" So ultimately, what Clint was doing was recognizing an opportunity, an underserved portion of the market, and he adjusted his buyer persona, his ideal target guests to these schools. So Clint and his team built a multimillion dollar tour business, over 3.5 million in annual revenues, serving exclusively English as a second language schools in Vancouver.

Kelsey Tonner:

You know who Clint wasn't competing with anymore? The hundreds of other tour operators serving travelers and tourists that pass through Vancouver every year. He wasn't spending a dime competing on Google Ads or Facebook Ads to try and get the tourist dollar because he had identified this one niche and was serving it better than anyone else.

Kelsey Tonner:

This is a funny story. I was back last summer to Nova Scotia, and I was visiting my grandparents out there. I brought my young girls. So I've got a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and two-year-old. We came across this cafe. This is the Cotton Tale Café + Play. You can see the picture up here. This is a cafe that is oriented entirely around families. Now, look at this place. Some of you have young kids, you're probably already seeing here like, "Whoa, this place seems like magic." I can't even tell you how amazing this place is. They had a little dividing wall where you kind of chuck your kids over here. There's an indoor play space. All the electrical sockets were covered up. They had a Lego area for the older kids, but my two-year-old was not going to choke on the Lego bits. The cafe had fun food like star-shaped plates and food that kids would actually eat. Plus, great coffee for the adults, parents to just sit down and, oh, my God, get a minute to yourself.

Kelsey Tonner:

I cannot tell you or you can easily imagine that this was like a 15-star experience for my family. Contrast this to the experience of going to a Starbucks with three kids under six, right? It is a world of difference, an order of magnitude better experience. Now, think about what I did afterwards. Did I leave them a five-star review glowing? Hell yeah. Have I told every single parent or family of kids like, "Oh, if you're going through this part of town, you got to go check this place out. It's amazing"? Was I willing to pay more? Yeah, there was an actual fee to go in and use this play area that then you could use as credit towards the cafe. Was I willing to pay more for this type of experience? Absolutely.

Kelsey Tonner:

This is what we're talking about. When you get this right, it's that product market fit. It builds so much inertia in your business, and it is moving away from the generic tour design. They could have had another standard coffee shop. They could compete with all the other coffee shops that were around, but you know what? They chose to actively make this cafe uninteresting or unappealing to the majority of visitors. Think about that.

Kelsey Tonner:

If you want to go work on your novel in a nice quiet space, the last thing you need is my snot-nosed kids, checking Lego into your lattes. This would be a nightmare if you're trying to catch up with an old friend and you need a quiet space or to work on your business or something, but they're not trying to be everything to everyone.

Kelsey Tonner:

Cool. Let's push on to mistake number four. We've got lots of time for our Q&A. Mistake number four, I was talking about when we're putting together our offers, so not talking about your guests' problems. People buy to solve problems, period. Another great writer-downer. People buy to solve problems. So when it comes to effective marketing and sales, you need to keep focused on the problems that you're solving for your guests. Put it another way, we should stop talking about our problems or our goals or how great we are on our websites, and instead talk about our guests' problems and goals, whether this is an elevator pitch to people, your tour descriptions, your homepage, your blog, your promotional campaigns, your ads. Lead with the problems that you solve for your guests.

Kelsey Tonner:

Your sales and marketing communication should be anchored to this. Only then can we effectively capture attention. That's all marketing is, right, is capturing attention and creating irresistible offers, which is sales, getting the attention, having an irresistible offer.

Kelsey Tonner:

Okay. Let's make this concrete. We're talking bachelorette parties. These girls are having a good time. We're about to have a good time too. We worked with Sydney Petal Pub to help them sell more tours and grow their tour business, and they noticed that these bachelorette parties were booking their experiences. Maybe some of you have had this experience. Wow, we do get the occasional bachelorette party, but how can we get more of them? How can we build this out as a sales funnel?

Kelsey Tonner:

So we help them do a guest deep dive. Who did they talk to? They talked to these bachelorette organizers. They got them on the phone. They asked them, "Hey, what's your biggest challenge, frustration when it comes to organizing a hen party, a bachelorette party? What would your dream scenario look like?" So this gave them a ton of clear guidance on what additional products to create, what could be packaged together, et cetera.

Kelsey Tonner:

So this is what it looks like. I wanted to actually have a concrete example of what this feels like when you can now go back and mine your guest deep dive. You might be thinking, "Oh, that customer research, we did it once, now we've got the vibe." No, you're going to use this. This is guest-focused marketing and sales. Here is a direct quote from one of these ladies, "Another thing that's proving challenging is finding activities that have all-inclusive price with all the alcohol included." They're going maybe doing tasting or a bar hopping thing, and it's frustrating to wait in lines to pay for these drinks and, "Becky forgot her purse. Becky's always forgetting her purse." So what do we do? Possible feature, tasting fees and alcohol included. No brainer, right? Hey, leave your wallet. Leave your purse at home. Leave Becky at home. If you focus on fun, we'll take care of the tab the whole afternoon.

Kelsey Tonner:

See how we're getting clarity about our product? We're not only, yes, this is impacting the design, but how we are positioning it. We're talking about the problems. Here's an objection or concern. Transportation, huge issue for these ladies. "I'm not sure how we're going to organize transport to all our different tours and activities. It's a real pain to order loads of different Ubers, especially splitting the cost aspect." Maybe you've been to bachelorette or bachelor experiences. You can relate to this. So possible feature, rate on our sales page included pickup from your hotel or Airbnb. Forget the pain of ordering a ton of Ubers and splitting the cost. We'll pick you up right from your hotel or Airbnb.

Kelsey Tonner:

You notice what's happening here? We are using the exact language of the people that we're looking to serve when we're putting together the offer. What did they tell us? The pain of ordering a ton of different Ubers. Well, forget the pain of ordering a ton of different Ubers. This is what guest-focused marketing and really effective marketing, where people feel like they're, "Oh, my gosh, these people get me," or, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I'm looking for." This is how you do this and how you can do this at scale and how you can do it consistently.

Kelsey Tonner:

Finally, we had that dream scenario question. "Honestly, my dream scenario would be a weekend where all the hassle's taken out of it. We can just go out and have fun, great food, fun nights out, and brunches with bottomless mimosas." This bottomless mimosas thing came up a lot. We quickly identified it was a thing. Possible feature, bottomless mimosas. Sometimes we overcomplicate this stuff. Sometimes it's like find a hot market, ask them what they want, and give it to them. The best way to experience a relaxing time on Sydney Harbor? Join us for a delicious hassle-free brunch on the beach with bottomless mimosas. Hell yeah.

Kelsey Tonner:

The takeaway, messaging should come from your market, not your mind. Messaging should come from your market, not your mind. This is what guest-focused sales and marketing looks like. This is the last example that I'll go through. I got a couple of screenshots, especially for some that you folks that if you do have, Brandon, maybe even in your case, more of a, well, like aerial parks or zip line. This is an eco experience. I'm not sure if you've heard of these guys, but Rotorua Canopy Tours. They've won, I think at some point they were the top outdoor experience in the world on Viator TripAdvisor rankings. A lot to appreciate, but I want to show you that you can do guest-focused marketing, even if you just have one core, sorry, guest-focused marketing and sales even if you just have one core experience.

Kelsey Tonner:

So when you get to Rotorua Canopy Tours website, you'd notice this, "Hey, who are you traveling with?" You say, "My friends, my partner, my family. I'm a senior flyer." What happens when I click on senior flyer? Well, I'm taken to a dedicated tour description page. A dedicated offer page for who? For senior flyers. Who's front and center? Well, a couple of older folks having an amazing time.

Kelsey Tonner:

Now, this will be ... I'll read it out loud. You probably can't see the copy here, but look at some of the language that we're using. "Retired from work but not amazing adventures? Rotorua Canopy Tours is a must for every kiwi and unforgettable and enlightening adventure. Perfect for all ages from 6 to 106." What are they doing with the testimonials? "Our guides were kind, patient, very warmly encouraging of everyone in our group, which ranged from a 5-year-old to a 70-year-old." Think about that. What some of the concerns are if maybe you're a senior flyer? "Oh, am I going to be holding up the line? Is this going to be uncomfortable?" We can address this with specific copy, with FAQs, with testimonials.

Kelsey Tonner:

Let's go back and I forget which one I did, my partner? Hey, take your relationship to new heights. Look at these two beautiful young people having the date of their lives. "Share an experience together. Whether you're a first-time flyer or up for challenging each other, we've got an experience that will take you on an intimate journey together." Who doesn't want that? Do we have social proof from this ideal target customer? Yeah. "Was there with my fiance. It was just amazing, excitement of the zip lining with a stroll through the canopy." "Used the promo code COUPLES at checkout." Even your promo code is set up around your ideal target guests.

Kelsey Tonner:

Look, I put in some stuff here. This would be great. For those of you that are interested in having a quick strategy call, one of the things that we love doing on those calls is going through your sales pages. We can very quickly help you identify. We're looking for 12 essential elements on any sales page. It doesn't matter if you're multi-day tour operator, a single-day tour operator. These are them. We don't have time to go through them here today, but if you would like a second set of eyes on your tour descriptions, how you're selling, and where you might have blind spots or gaps, grab one of those free strategy calls. We'll pop the link up here in a second.

Kelsey Tonner:

We also have a number of best practices when we're thinking about implementing this from floating book now buttons to just like some of the risk reversal. Most of us don't have a background in e-commerce and in sales. Most of us are focused on creating amazing experiences, and we just don't have that background or skill, and that's where we can provide a ton of value in not only doing this in terms of the content and the copy and layout, but really with your media and the implementation of these sales pages.

Kelsey Tonner:

Here's the quick writer-downer. If you're looking at your own media, do 50% of your images have smiling guests and smiling guides? Yes, no, that's a pass/fail. Just a rough rule of thumb, but 50% smiling guests, and not just any guests, but your ideal target guests. It's called future pacing. We want people to be able to envision themselves having your experience. So here in the top right, that's a photo from those biking tours in Vietnam. Look at that. How amazing. Can you imagine yourself? How easily you can imagine yourself on this biking tour pulled over? Here's this school children let out from the local school, and I'm able to pull over and have this really nice, authentic, amazing experience or here on the food tour in Charleston. Very easy to imagine myself in that moment.

Kelsey Tonner:

This is just some of the examples of work that we've done. This is John down in Charleston. We were able to lift his conversion rate up to 6.5%. The stakes are real here. When we're talking about guest-focused sales and marketing, we're talking about more money going into your business, more bookings, and more profit.

Kelsey Tonner:

So I'll do the quick recap and then we'll do a, yeah, hit that Q&A. So start typing in the Q&A if you've got it. Mistake number one, no ideal target guest. What are we going to do instead? Encourage you to niche down. Niche down way more than you think you need to, way more than you probably are right now. Narrowly focus on that ideal target guest. It's amazing all the positive stuff in your business that will flow from that, not just a tremendous amount of clarity around where you should focus your marketing spend, but a tremendous amount of clarity on what alterations, design changes you need to make to your products or service to get that product market fit.

Kelsey Tonner:

Mistake number two, little or no customer research. What do we do instead? Remember that guest deep dive. Deeply understand their needs, wants and desires. Let that empathy be your competitive advantage. Mistake number three, that generic tour design and delivery. At the end of the day, even if you're armed with all that, those first two steps, you now have to work towards that product market fit. Let these insights, just like the bachelorette experience, drive the design and delivery of our tour. Mistake number four, let's lead with our guests' problems. When we are packaging, marketing, and selling a tour, position your tour activity or experience as the solution. That's what we're doing. We're selling solutions.

Kelsey Tonner:

I'm going to cut this one for time. Where do we go from here? Yeah, yeah. You don't need any of this. This is this special gift here today. You're excited by this. You want a second set of eyes if you want to know, "Hey, am I hitting those 12 essential elements?" Like I said, this is first come, first serve. I cleared some of my own calendar just for Brandon and Nikki in the workshop here today. So guestfocus.com/resmark if you do want to grab that free strategy call. Like I said, it's a win-win. We love just getting people some results, introducing them to some of these best practices. Then yeah, if you're interested in working with us, we'd love to talk about that, but basically, we just want to get you some quick wins like we did here today. So Brandon, I think I'll just leave it there if that's good with you, and then we could do some Q&A.

Brandon Lake:

All right. Kelsey, thank you so much for all the great info today. So fantastic. You can really see how implementing these strategies would really make a difference in a business. I'm curious. Just a couple of questions and feel free, all of you that are on the call still, go ahead and plug your questions in. I've got a couple that I jotted down as we went along too that I'm curious about, things I've heard from others, other clients we've worked with as well. You mentioned a 6.5% conversion rate. That was one example. Is that a pretty fair average of what someone would expect when they say maybe they haven't been doing this sort of focus on the ideal customer and they have kind of fairly average tour descriptions and so forth? If they went through your program and really got some good updates on their website and in their language and on their phone calls and did the work to figure out who the ideal customer is, crafted their market around it, would they expect something similar or what has been that range in your experience?

Kelsey Tonner:

Yeah, it's a great question and it's a common question. It's a really good metric to be tracking or to try to track in your business if you're not presently doing it. There's a couple layers that you can look at this at. So this is the first clarification I would say, Brandon. So the first is just like your total traffic to all pages of your website to, "Hey, what percentage of those ultimately proceed and make a booking?" Obviously, you can do this through Google Analytics, you can work with your booking software company to help get that.

Kelsey Tonner:

The other place that you can look at a conversion rate that we quite frankly work with a lot of our members on is also just the direct to the sales page. So there you can have a more granular approach product by product, but you're saying, "Okay. Of the people that have visited this particular sales page, what percentage then have gone on and become a customer?" So that's a more narrow focus, and the 6.5 that I was sharing there, that was actually doing an AB test, where we're showing the visitors, "This is version one of the sales page and this is version two," and which one is ultimately getting more people to booking. That's where we see adding things like risk reversal, adding things like features and benefits, improving our media. People so underestimate their images.

Kelsey Tonner:

There's a great marketing agency I super appreciate in our area. Blend Marketing. They would talk about how they worked with an aerial park operator. They just changed the photos that were just pretty average photos of people in the zip line to just high quality professional photos of this little girl going down. You've got the bokeh blurred background. She's having the time of her life. Do that image change alone on the page lifted the click through rate, just even the clicking into the Book Now button by over 100%. It was wild The impact that sometimes just those small tweaks can have, especially our media and other things like site performance is something we didn't have time to get into today, but just if your site is loading slow, if those images aren't optimized, this can crush your conversion rate.

Kelsey Tonner:

So back to the core question, Brandon. Have I seen double that type of conversion rate closer to 10% and higher? Yeah, it's definitely possible. It all boils down to how is the traffic finding you. So if you have a blog strategy, an SEO strategy with a ton of content where people are finding your company, they're finding your brand, you're providing helpful information to them, but they may not have that commercial intent yet like, "Hey, I'm just at the early dreaming stage," you might have a lower conversion rate, but overall higher traffic, and that's not a bad thing necessarily. We obviously want to increase the number of people that might be visiting an educational blog post or a helpful post on topic X, Y or Z to actually come visit your sales pages.

Kelsey Tonner:

So just keep in mind that a lower conversion rate isn't necessarily a bad thing if you've got larger volumes of traffic. Again, if you had hypertargeted paid ad strategies where you knew that they had a lot of buyer intent, whether it was through keyword ads or other types of targeting, you could see a much higher conversion rate because the traffic is much more qualified, meaning they are also qualified for that buyer's intent, but no question. If you don't know what this number is at all, first, get some baseline. Get those two baseline conversion rates, and then basically work from what you've got right now. That's the best thing, Brandon. You don't necessarily compete against the neighbors or industry averages, which can hide some of those details, but once you figure out what yours is, now you're playing against yourself, and the goal is to beat yourself, and we got all kinds of ways to do that.

Brandon Lake:

That's awesome. Help clarify a little bit. If you look at your online traffic, those of you who are some of our website clients here and so forth, I think even a 2% increase in conversion rate can be very significant when you're talking about-

Kelsey Tonner:

Oh, massive.

Brandon Lake:

It's often a very small percentage that even convert in the first place. So seeing that big of an increase is pretty significant. So I love this, and I think any of you who are considering this as well, doing a free strategy call, seeing what Guest Focus has to offer, pair that with what Resmark could potentially offer on the Resmark web side, if you want to check out resmarkweb.com. Kelsey, you alluded to it a little bit, but if you combine the right messaging with the technology and something that's going to load quickly, the conversion rate increase just from every second you shave off of load time is huge. So combine that with some new imagery and all of those updates that could really make the magic happen on your site from grabbing that emotion and just driving home the right message to the right person together with a platform that can load all of that quickly and be easy to edit and manage, that's a super winning combination and well-worth the investment.

Kelsey Tonner:

For those of you that we know, I'm guessing most of you do have a booking software solution, but this is one of the first things we help operators integrate if they're not using one. Just from that conversion rate perspective, if you're still requiring people to send you an email or fill out a form in order to process a booking, this is incredibly impactful in that conversion rate because you're adding a huge amount of complexity, you're adding a huge amount of time. Delay is the death of the sale. So a huge part of those 12 essential elements contributing towards an effective conversion rate is an easy way for people to see realtime availability, an easy way to get you payment, an easy way for you to manage that on the back end. So this is the right way to do it. It's amazing how it's still a minority of operators that actually even have booking software companies.

Brandon Lake:

Well, and it's incredible what some of the things ... We at Resmark, we just actually implemented a new option for those who are doing multi-day trips, a different way to display availability. We tested it initially on our Grand Canyon trips for Western River Expedition. Saw a 20% increase in conversion. It's crazy. So the right technology can make a big difference there, so that's huge. Just a couple other questions here real quick, Kelsey, and we'll wrap it up.

Kelsey Tonner:

Yeah, please get them submitted or if it's easier for you to just come off mute.

Brandon Lake:

How long does it generally take if somebody has interest in the program that you're offering, they get started with it? Is it an ongoing process for 12 months or more? Is it a few meetings? How does it work?

Kelsey Tonner:

So the way that the program actually works, like I said, we've been very blessed to really build out a team of business coaches. What we heard from working with lots of folks, and we used to have just an entirely online course driven model, but what we heard over and over from folks is that they wanted accountability. They wanted the ability to have a mentor. They wanted to be able to interface with somebody who had walked the walk. They were looking to do somebody who's kind of been there, done that. The biggest thing we're helping people with is that sense of overwhelm. It's so easy for us to ... Many of us are operating alone or potentially with partners, but to not have someone to turn to.

Kelsey Tonner:

So when we get hung up on things or stuck, analysis paralysis, like I said off the top, a lot of us probably have, "Wow, there's 20 things that I could do in this next month to grow my business, but I don't know which one to do and what order," and then there's self-doubts of like, "I'll commit to something," but then we kind of maybe bail halfway through or, like we said, we get distracted by that other thing.

Kelsey Tonner:

So one of the big innovations I think with our program is this bi-weekly. So every two weeks you've got that 30 to 40-minute call with that coach and the mentor. We actually have an accountability dashboard. We write down, "All right. Once we get clarity around your goals ..." Everything we do in our program is designed to get you to those goals faster, more efficiently, less time reinventing the wheel. We've got these in our success path, over 200 hours of recorded training, so you can access that, but what's beautiful is that now it's paired with the coach.

Kelsey Tonner:

So the coach can say, "All right. Just ignore most of this success path. We're just focusing on your conversion rate. This is the only resource that you need. Hey, here's six other companies that are doing this extremely well. Let's model, let's emulate before we innovate. Start doing what some of the most successful operators are doing before we then can experiment and do our own AB tests and going deeper."

Kelsey Tonner:

That's I would say one of the biggest things is really just having that accountability partner can be massive. I'm blessed that we have so many incredibly successful operators. Many of them are actually running their own businesses still. That's what we love too. These are folks who, "Hey, we grew and sold a business years ago," but these are people who are actually living and breathing it right here right now. As you know, Brandon, how helpful that is in keeping track of the curve balls that are coming our way in the industry, right?

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, so much. So much is changing all the time. One last question from Matty, and Matty, I don't know if you want to jump in, unmute and kind of ask this. He was talking about his skydiving business in Maui. Surprised by those who are willing to try skydiving, but he gets a lot of cancellations due to weather safety concerns and things like that. Did you have a specific question around that, Matty, that you wanted to-

Matthew:

Yeah, I guess I didn't really phrase that in a question. So basically, I think the main question I want to ask is you talk about points of frustrations and those points there, and I kind of feel like I already know what the points of frustrations are with my guests slash customers. I think the biggest one they got is the uncertainty of if it's going to happen or not, and then when they don't understand the uncertainty, they kind of think that it's more assured than it actually is because we try to tell them that, "Hey, skydiving is weather-dependent, so don't think that this is for sure," but sometimes they in one ear out the other, and then when the time comes, I actually cancel them due to weather. Then they get super frustrated.

Matthew:

We do have strategies in place to try to mitigate this in the sense that we do really early morning weather calls. So we try to get them before they leave the hotel rooms or whatever to tell them, "Hey, this is how the weather's looking like today. You can come out." In some cases, "You can come out and give it a try," but it's far from for sure. Other cases, "Hey, it's good, come on out," and in other cases, "Hey, it's not good at all. I would not recommend coming out today."

Matthew:

So we try to do these as much as possible, give them a heads up on it. That said, some people do get quite frustrated about it. They're probably running with a bunch of people and all that and they're like, "Oh, it's like herding cats," and it's just frustrating for them. So my question would be, what do you suggest when the point of frustration, the biggest point of frustration for your guests is something you can't really do much about?

Kelsey Tonner:

So there's two ways I'd tackle this. One, we can talk a little bit more about some of the strategies that you can do because, obviously, we can mitigate it here. Two, I would just challenge you to go back further in the journey because that challenge or frustration is definitely something ... I would say that's almost like for those folks who have already bought. So you're doing a great job here of, "Hey, how do we mitigate disappointment or mismatched expectations and make sure they have a great experience?" but when I'm talking about their pain points and frustrations and challenges, I'm often talking about the people that you haven't convinced yet, the ones that have concerns, hesitations or find alternates to your skydiving experience there in Hawaii, and then they're hesitant doing yours. So I would shift your focus earlier.

Kelsey Tonner:

This is kind of funny. I noticed this mistake a lot in FAQs. So every tour sales page, your individual product page should have an FAQ, but a lot of the FAQs that I see are more like FYI post-purchase related FAQs, instead of where I think the missed opportunity is objection busting. Really dive deep.

Matthew:

I get it.

Kelsey Tonner:

What are the top 20 reasons that people are not buying this experience? It might be that it's ... Obviously in something like skydiving, concerns about safety. It might be, "Oh, it's just too much hassle." This could involve your competitors. You want to be able to address not only in your FAQ which should be on the tour sales page, not your general, just general FAQ. You can have one there if you want, but I'm talking about objection busting for that specific offer. Many people don't do that. They link out to another page. That is a conversion killer. You're sending people away from the page where they can give you money. You want to keep people there. Free writer-downer, no outbound links from your tour sales page. Ideally, you have a main CTA, call to action, which is what? Check availability, book now, right?

Matthew:

Okay.

Kelsey Tonner:

Slight exceptions down at the bottom. If you want to have, obviously, your footer, if you want to have related tours, there, but if you are linking out to an FAQ, "Oh, go over here to check out our cancellation policy. Oh, go read our guest reviews over here," conversion killers. Keep them there on the page. So that's the first way I'd answer it.

Kelsey Tonner:

The second way is, okay, let's talk about on the guest experience side. I love this. There's a number of companies that do this really well, but the framing is straight talk, and it's to not shy away from what are some of the real downsides or potentially negative experiences that someone might have on your tour. So a great example is like, "Hey, you're coming to Rome to see the Coliseum in August. We're going to have to have some straight talk about how your experience might not match some of the marketing materials that you might've been exposed to, which is it's going to be hotter than Hades, and there's going to be 10,000 people all crowded around you."

Kelsey Tonner:

So if I was selling tours at that time, I'm going to have a call out of straight talk to set those expectations, and then you address, "Hey, here's what we do to help mitigate this." You're going to earn people's trust. You're going to better manage those expectations so that you can still wow and delight, and you're not starting from a back foot. So again, don't shy away from that on your sales page.

Kelsey Tonner:

I love framing it as straight talk even if ... Well, my God, there's two places even in my own career. I used to work down in Costa Rica, and I don't know how many of you have been down there and seen the ... Oh, what's it called? Arenal, the famous volcano. There's literally like three days a year that you can see this freaking volcano. It is just sucked in with cloud. It's in a freaking rainforest. All you see is the base of this volcano, but what does every single marketing image, every image that you see is this beautiful, perfect cone-shaped volcano that, I don't know, maybe 30 people have seen.

Kelsey Tonner:

So the other place that this happened was in Iceland. Iceland have all these sunny days and beautiful things, and people don't realize even if you're going to Iceland July and August, it's like the North Atlantic. It can be cold, it can be rainy, you can be socked in, and so that straight talk really helps calibrate those expectations including-

Matthew:

Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. Go for it.

Kelsey Tonner:

No, I was ranting, so I'm glad you did.

Matthew:

So you would say it is worth sacrificing conversion rate slash bookings in this context then, that you give them some straight talk. You might decrease your bookings overall, but you're going to increase customer satisfaction.

Kelsey Tonner:

Yeah. I have to see evidence that it would actually be decreasing your bookings. Sometimes being that transparent and that honest helps win trust. So if anything, I haven't seen data that straight talk ... Backroads, the biking tour company, they implemented that. Conversion go down.

Matthew:

I don't have the data. I don't have the data, but sometimes, for example, if you don't show the picture of the beautiful volcano, less people will be inclined to book a tour around that beautiful volcano and it's like the-

Kelsey Tonner:

I see what you're saying there with the images. So again, it's framing in our guide training resources, and we pride that as part of our coaching program. We actually have this four hours of world-class guide training that you just get as a member of our coaching program. One of the things we cover in there, but you can give this to your team, is the framing. So when that guest is on that tour, this is the best possible tour. You better have some reasons why this is an amazing time to be on this tour here today and some special reason. Now, they don't need to know that this is the crappiest time of year to come on this tour, but we're going to make this experience extra special for them and find a framing.

Kelsey Tonner:

If it's rainy, I'm thinking here in the Pacific Northwest, and it's like, "Oh, it's rainy." "But there's no more perfect way to experience the Pacific Northwest rainforest than with that fog and the drizzle. You guys are so lucky to be here today when we've got this ethereal experience. I think this is going to be something you remember for a long time." That's the process.

Matthew:

Then you think buying a boat is a good idea? If I can't take them on the airplane to go skydiving, I should buy a boat and take them on the boat maybe?

Kelsey Tonner:

Yeah, if you like competing with boat tours. Look, I think it's a bit-

Matthew:

I was trying to buy a boat. I need to convince the wife though. I'm just joking. Thank you for answering my question.

Brandon Lake:

Good question, Matty. Thank you. Awesome. I've got more questions, but I think we're over time a little bit here, and I want to be respectful of everybody's time. So thank you so much, Kelsey, again for joining. What we're going to do is we're going to take this link that you see on the screen. We'll send out some additional resources also from Guest Focus and from Resmark. For all of those who are here on the call, Nikki will be sending that out to you, so expect to receive that in your email here shortly. Absolutely, this is a free strategy call, so take Kelsey up on that. It's awesome that he's personally cleared some time on his own calendar. He is awesome to be able to sit with and have some input, as you can see. Super awesome to talk to and will be full of insights for you.

Brandon Lake:

Again, if that leads towards anything where you're saying, "Man, I think I need to just rethink my whole website," or whatever, Resmark would be happy to help you with that software, whatever you need on that end as well. Love what we're talking about here, Kelsey. I think it can really make a difference in tour business. I've got a few things spinning into my head of improvements we're going to make even on our own stuff here.

Kelsey Tonner:

Hell yeah. Book a strategy call. No, it's great. Look, I love that you do this and it's spectacular. The folks that have the most success in our programs and in this industry are the ones that are like you folks here today, which is you're curious, you're hungry, you know that you've probably got some blind spots and the things you know you don't know and then the things you don't know you don't know. So like I said, if you want to grab that call, guestfocus.com/resmark. It'll disappear once the Zoom shuts down. So just a handful of spots left if you do want to grab one of those, but I'm really looking forward to speaking to a lot of you there.

Brandon Lake:

Okay. Awesome. Thank you everybody for joining us today, and until next time, we'll see you again soon. Thank you.