24 concepts that rule sales for a travel agency in Zoho CRM

"Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

Kant, I: Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Logic, I (1781)

Zoho CRM is an excellent tool to implement not only the sales process of a travel agency, but also its operations process.

Zoho CRM is a generic tool, with a general purpose that has been designed for any type of business. Implementing the sales process of a travel agency requires a Zoho CRM customization process. This process implies aligning the native CRM concepts with the concepts handled in the travel services business.

In this article I will explain the entities of the travel business. A topic I have been working on for the last few years at Zeus4. The objective is to make explicit by name the concepts involved in the business. A necessary step before any undertaking to use a CRM in a travel agency.

The concepts (business entities) are the candidates to be represented by the CRM modules, where the data that needs to be properly managed to convert the highest number of sales into profits for the travel agency and also to do it in an efficient, productive way, are recorded.

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You just have to customize some of these concepts that already exist as native modules in Zoho CRM; others need to be created from scratch. In any case, adapting the CRM for the travel agency business can be more or less hard depending on the level of precision with which you approach the customization project and especially, the degree of automation you want to achieve. Anyway, starting the project with well-defined concepts is a key success factor.

First, we will identify the parties involved in the business.

1. The potential customer.
2. The travel agency.
3. The tourism service providers.

The travel agency works as an intermediary, between tourism service providers and clients. Hence, our implementation in Zoho CRM will require managing relationships with customers and with the providers of these services.

It is an objective of the travel agency to turn a potential customer into a real customer. This happens from the moment a deal is initiated from a travel opportunity. A customer can be treated with the Account module of Zoho CRM when it is a natural person; otherwise, when the customer is an organization, it is represented with the Account module.

Secondly, we will focus on tourism services. These relate to their providers and the customers who consume and pay for them. There are also the travel agency's own services offered to customers, whose revenues for the agency may be directly billed to the customer, or included as part of the overall prices of the tourism services.

The sales process requires to get to a pre-trip agreement (deal) as accurate as possible between the seller (the travel agency) and the client. The most usual thing is that the agency quotes the services involved in detail, budgeting the costs to be paid by the client and the conditions under which these services will be provided. Dates, schedules, places, should be well exhaustive in these quotations. In the case of a combined package of services, a detailed itinerary of the trip may be included.

At some point of the sale, it is necessary to ask the customer for the travelers' data, which are necessary for the quotation, reservations with providers and other procedures.

So far, we have seen the following business entities:

1. Potential Client
2. Contacts
3. Accounts
4. Travel Agencies
5. Provider
6. Services
7. Sale process
8. Deal
9. Travelers
10. Quotes
11. Itinerary
12. Reservations
13. Bill
14. Payment

All these entities have been successfully implemented for different travel agencies in our CRM4 Travel Agency generic solution, commercialized in Zoho Marketplace.

During the sales process, and then during operations, the travel agency performs a set of more or less common activities, such as the following:

1. Calls
2. Email delivery and reviews
3. Meetings
4. Internal tasks

Zoho CRM allows you to plan these activities and associate them to the entities in our first list and consequently, implement their follow-up. Thus, when you open the view of a customer or a specific quote, you can visualize all the email exchanges, phone calls and other related actions, which show how the treatment of a particular issue has evolved during a negotiation.

Regarding the activity tracking, Zeus4 has been working for many years and has experiences in different industries; some of its implementations can be seen in its products: CRM4 Travel Agency, CRM4 Freight Forwarder v2.0, CRM4 Realtor, Magaya Extension for Zoho CRM.

But these activities also allow the coordination and teamwork.

When several members of the sales team participate in the negotiation of a trip with a customer, either because of specialization in certain services or because revisions and/or approvals of a proposal are required, then the sales activities are distributed within the sales team.

When there is a team involved in sales, problems related to responsibility and authority over data, as well as rights to view (or not) certain agency information, must be addressed. In these cases, it is justified to manage the following concepts in the CRM:

1. Employees
2. Roles
3. Permits

If these team members are also organized in some way, then it may be necessary to handle other grouping concepts such as:

1. Departments
2. Groups
3. Regions

A more interesting topic is how to use Zoho CRM mechanisms to implement these concepts, and how to provide them with automation, in order to be more competitive and obtain more sales.

But if you want to focus on taking care of your agency, selling more trips and not breaking your head and spending your time implementing a CRM, contact us.We will handle the implementation and put our know-how and products in your organization; so you will be able to focus on selling more.