What You Can Learn About Sales and Marketing From A Timeshare Presentation

Two weeks ago, I attended my first timeshare presentation while I was vacationing on Maui.

I wondered whether the presentation would be like the South Park timeshare episode with low brow salespeople and unending presentations.  I didn’t really care. All I knew was that I was going to get hotel points worth $200 in exchange for “no more than 90 minutes” of my time. And hopefully, I’d learn something about sales and marketing too.

Lesson 1: Stir the imagination of your prospect.

Stand here at this beachhead. [OK.]
Have you gone snorkeling yet? [Yes.]
Isn’t it beautiful! [Yes.]
Did you snorkel over there? [No.]
There is sea turtle colony 50 yards to the right. [Wow!]

One of the selling points of major timeshare companies is that you can trade your primary timeshare for time in another property.

Have you seen any whales yet? [Yes.]
Aren’t they amazing! [Yes.]
There are over 1,000 humpback whales that migrate past this beach each year!  [Oh, Cool!]

Don’t feel like going to Hawaii next year? That’s OK you can exchange your week in Hawaii for a week in Paris, Tokyo or The Maldives instead. Look at all the places you can go!

Lesson 2: Make your sales presentation interactive.

Every bit of the sales presentation was interactive. I was hoping to surf the mobile web and email my girlfriend during the presentation. No such luck. This was a 1:1 presentation. The salesperson was constantly asking me questions and using interactive environmental displays and interactive computer displays to keep my attention.

I must have looked like a fish, because they brought in the Closer; the Closer was a strong sales veteran.

At one point, she had a giant flat screen computer monitor and a custom web application for computing my lifetime spending on vacations.

How many weeks per year to do you vacation? [3]
What do you spend per week of vacation?  [$2,000]
How many years remaining in your life do you plan on taking vacations? [I dunno, 40?]

Her web application spits out the final calculation…

See, you will probably incur $240,000 of vacation expenses in your lifetime. Would you consider investing a small portion of that sum in a timeshare?

Lesson 3: Appeal first to the right brain, then the left brain.

People making their purchasing decisions based upon emotion (right brain) and then try to justify those decisions with logic (left brain).

Flickr photo by user Rosino, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

The timeshare salesperson asks you about your dream vacations, and then writes your dreams with magic marker on the whiteboard.

She then does some math and shows you how much money you can save by buying a time share. She writes those numbers on the whiteboard and also on a paper worksheet.

Lesson 4: Offer incentives.

There was an incentive worth approximately 10% of the purchase price if I chose to complete my purchase within 48 hours. [I declined].

Then, I was given a “2^nd chance offer” of 50% off a 1-week Hawaiian vacation if I would commit to come back next year and see the presentation again!  [I declined].

Lesson 5: Know about secondary markets

There is a secondary market for timeshares. Web sites like www.sellmytimesharenow.com offer timeshares for huge discounts. The same timeshare that cost $75,000 on my tour was for sale for $15,000 on the secondary market!

When you buy a new car, the car loses 10% of its value the minute you drive it off the lot. When you buy a new time share, the time share can easily lose 50% or more of its resale value upon purchase!

When I asked about secondary markets, the salespeople were smart. They didn’t discourage me from using the secondary markets; instead, they calmly told me about the disadvantages of using the secondary market – the disadvantage being that you lose certain exchange rights.