For those who’ve started 2023 too busy to be productive, you may feel the overwhelm looming like a fast-approaching category 5 hurricane. Perhaps it has already arrived.

In years past, the new business cycle, triggered by the passing of one year to the next, psychologically heralded the change from old to new; the pace being an easing into the long stretch ahead, if you will.

All that has changed. As one year becomes the next, the closure which once helped you re-set and re-energise to tackle a new year has vanished faster than your Christmas bonus. Replacing it is the unrelenting requirement for an always-on, hyper-agile approach to life and work.

It’s exhausting. And it has a name – hyper fatigue.

And, if you think the “hybrid shopping” trend pertains only to groceries, fashion and tech, consider the clear benefits to your own organisation of introducing automation in the parts of the buyer journey that would be acceptable to your customers, if nothing else to free up your team to focus on what they do best – selling the travel experience.

An invention of our digital age, where today the average person processes over five times as much information than in the 1980s, hyper fatigue has the effect of putting our mental filters into overdrive.

Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention describes the affliction eloquently when he talks about the bouncer in our brain, besieged by shrieking distractions, becoming increasingly ineffective at filtering out the noise.

Every day over 4.4 million new blog posts are published, 350 million new photos are uploaded to Facebook and over a billion hours of YouTube videos are watched.​ That’s a lot of noise.

And the more information being pumped in, the less time you have to focus on any individual piece of it. The sacrifice is depth – depth takes time, depth takes reflection. And if you have to keep up with the noise, it’s impossible to achieve that depth.

Random acts of busyness

The consequence? Random acts rooted in the need to do something; often not the ‘something’ that would have a catalytic effect in unlocking actions that move your business goals forward. You fiddle while Rome burns, fixating on inane tasks that make you ‘feel’ busy.

In fact, there are many things that your customers would prefer to do with no human interaction at all. Have you asked yourself, your customers, which channels they would prefer to use? And for what tasks?

How to pursue an intentional focussed approach in a world that’s speeding up and taking you with it?

The answer is simple, yet difficult to contemplate when you’re almost entirely consumed with keeping up with the pace: Slow down to speed up, focus on the highest value and automate to free up.

There’s a time and place for digitisation. When you need technical support, nothing beats human interaction. If the transaction is repetitive and simple from a self-service perspective, automate it, e.g., checking the status of something.

Take the travel industry which, come January peak booking season, flounders in a tsunami of enquiries both from existing and new clients. Although each enquiry offers different value for the business, we tend to treat them as if they hold the same promise, churning them out with the frenzy of a toddler after a sweetie binge.

Take the opportunity to look for the “quiet quitting” signs – when your customers have abandoned their buying journey. Look at their behaviour, from that first interaction to the post-purchase engagement. You’ll see exactly where the friction is and be better equipped to step into the gap.

If your resources and time are limited, a better strategy would be to slow down to qualify your leads and focus on converting those of higher value – repeat clients, higher revenue, perhaps higher commission, instead of chasing after them all and jeopardising your chances of converting the right ones.

The power of relationship marketing

Travel businesses often spend an inordinate amount of marketing budget on generating new (unqualified) leads, but almost no effort on nurturing relationships with existing clients or higher-value customers who are further down the buying funnel and thus easier to convert.

We tend to focus on volume over value, diluting our marketing spend and resources by chasing after top-of-funnel leads which is an approach that is expensive, generic and lacks real depth. We don’t stop to establish what a good lead looks like or the real wants and needs of our highest-value clients.

And we certainly don’t spend nearly enough time nurturing relationships and establishing an emotional connection with these higher-value leads so that we capture their loyalty.

To achieve depth and real value, you must stop the churn and focus on your highest value – building loyalty through strong relationship sales and marketing. To achieve focus, you must leverage the technology that exists to free you up from low-value, repetitive processes and tasks.

What you gain, via the Wetu platform, is a digital workspace enabling the full eco-system of travel and tourism to share institutional knowledge and intellectual property, including digital marketing assets, that can be used to engage with and convert your mutual travel customer.

Buy back your time by leveraging tools like Wetu’s sales enablement and marketing eco-system – providing a platform that facilitates effortless connection, communication and knowledge exchange.

Eliminate the low-value task of scrambling for beautiful content that will inspire, engage with and convert your high-value leads, by storing or sourcing all the carefully curated assets in one digital workspace hosted in the cloud, delivering efficiency, convenience and speed.

Streamline processes and embrace automation to save time and money. From chatbots responding to frequent questions to using your CRM properly in lead nurturing, leveraging technology not only saves you time and money by automating mundane tasks, it also helps build loyalty by providing a better overall experience through personalisation and speed – both are expected by your customers in this always-on digital age.

Further, technology solutions such as those offered by Wetu provide critical data that measures results and refines strategies so you can begin to focus on the highest value – the highest-value leads that are more likely to convert and the highest-value activities that will move your business goals forward.

The result? Maximum returns on your limited resources and the elimination of hyper fatigue as you embrace discernment and purpose, and quit chasing after every lead, every task, and every opportunity.

Less really can be more. The bouncer in your brain will thank you.

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