
I had lunch with a prospective travel and tourism client last week and we enjoyed a little downtown Sacramento dining, I mentioned that one of the things that make the Sacramento Convention & Visitors Bureau stand out is the level of personal service we extend to our customers and visitors, and more specifically what exactly we do for our travel and tourism clients.
The client seemed intrigued and asked what I meant as he had worked with many CVB's over his 20+ years in the industry. He said he rarely found one that did anything unique. In fact, he had shied away from using CVB's as a resource because he had many of his own contacts and often found working with a CVB to be more cumbersome than he felt was necessary.

He was genuinely surprised at this. "Other CVB's send leads out to everyone whether the business is appropriate or not, which results in a flurry of unwanted phone calls, emails, etc.," he said. "Essentially, wasting my time."
Whether we get his business or not remains to be seen, but this discussion with the customer reminded me how the simple effort of listening to the customer and treating customers needs first were somewhat of an anomaly in this modern day of marketing and sales.