MUZAK

Get your day off to the right start with your own MORNING MEETING. A Timeshare Sales Tip of the Day and a daily blast of music for your enjoyment! Published Monday thru Friday.

REMEMBER: When a timeshare rep approaches their sales guests and notices that the couple seems to be in their (e.g.) mid-60’s, most reps immediately begin to classify them as being ‘old’ and when they do so they often begin to think there might be a ‘use’ issue in that Mr. and Mrs. Jones surely won’t have many vacationing years ahead.

In fact many timeshare reps in their 20’s, 30’s and even 40’s will think the ‘old’ couple is just too damn ‘old’ to get out and enjoy vacationing (‘life’), especially if Mr. or Mrs. ‘Tour’ has a cane, a walker or is hunched over a tad, etc. These reps make a costly tactical mistake and start taking sales short cuts, etc. in order to blow the couple off.

To be fair, timeshare reps in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s will often make the same mistake. What both ‘age-groups’ (reps) forget, don’t know or understand is that inside every ‘old’ person is a ‘young’ person and one of the secrets in dealing with the ‘older’ tour is to realize that there is still a ’spark’ inside ‘em all!

As an illustration, take a sales guest (couple or single) today (in 2011) who is 65 years old and stop for a moment and think back to what was going on in their lives when they were much younger, say, back 35 years ago to 1976.

In that year Jimmy Carter was President, Pittsburg defeated Dallas in the Super Bowl, “Rocky” and “Taxi Driver” were box office smash hits, Alex Haley’s book “Roots” came out, and people like Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Linda Ronstadt, Boz Scaggs, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellingtion, Oak Ridge Boys, James Taylor, Elton John, etc. were all at the top of the charts.

And people (‘the sales guests’) were also likely listening to Hall & Oats, the Spinners, Paul McCartney and Wings, Paul Simon, Diana Ross, Seals and Croft, Queen, the Eagles and maybe even shaking their booty to K.C. and The Sunshine Band, the Commodores, Bee Gees, Lou Rawls, Donna Summers, Peter Frampton, Fleetwood Mac, Earth, Wind and Fire, the Staple Singers, Electric Light Orchestra, Jefferson Starship and Kiss, Steve Miller Band.

In fact you can take that to the bank, which is why when these ‘older’ people today are shopping at the grocery store, the mall, at the bank, the doctors office or in an elevator, etc., the marketing geniuses of those entities are playing those (and other) tunes as background music. Even T.V commercials do it and of course there is no shortage of ‘oldies-but-goodies’ radio and cable music stations for their enjoyment.

In our business we are always looking for those ‘hot-buttons’ and one of the big ones is that most ‘older’ sales guests, part of the wealthiest generation in all of history I might add, are still very much young at heart and spirit. The reps who ‘get it’ and treat these sales guests accordingly will not only make a ‘friend’, but they’ll make more (and larger) sales and laugh all the way to the bank.

TODAY’S VIDEO: Simon and Garfunkel – Old Friends