We know how to sell successfully.
But we also know how to keep the business.
Help Line International has developed two sales techniques and brought them to incredible levels: sales consultations on one to one basis and telesales.
The company was purposely created to pick up the business left by the runaway companies. When a marketing company would disappear we would contact the developer whose product they sold and offer to complete the business left by that company subject to offering a special deal to the left over clients. We would also attract the exchange company to enroll such new members with the discount or even for free. We would add our service fee on top and come up to the clients with the special “Salvage program”, where someone who lost some ten thousand dollars to the runaway company would still get the same membership he was buying at a cost of some 2,000.00 -3,000.00 dollars including the issue of the trustee membership certificate and all the legalities paid.
We had to admit that among the marketing companies that did not provide the clients with the products were not many that did not have an intention to complete the deals. In many of the cases the companies became the victims of the corruption, absence of the protection of the legislation, wide practice of criminal groups protection, which were taking away the businesses from the foreigners. These all doesn't justify leaving the clients with nothing. It was just something we have chosen to do & we liked to do.
Help Line International did a real cleaning up act for the industry in Russia. We have reduced the bad publicity and issued over 767 membership certificates where the people who lost the money and trust got at the end the really good product most of whom are still happily using.
Was it difficult? Yes, very difficult! It took a few visits of the clients to our office where during the one-to-one meeting with the managers they were explained what happened and why it would not happen with us. In many cases we had to sell the product from the beginning. With everybody we explained in details the legalities and club structure. But we were not forgetting about the emotions as well since timeshare is a very emotional product. We offered all the client s to pay the completion to the trustees account. The clients took as much time as they needed to make the decision to trust another timeshare company again. There is no pressure and as a result there is no cancellation. Within over 700 completed timeshare weeks we seen only 25 cancellations which were absolutely genuine where something dramatic happened to the client before they received the membership certificate.
For those clients who were too scared to pay again we even offered to credit their deal. We paid for the timeshare ourselves and when the certificate was on the table in front of them they would pay us the money with a small percentage on top. It was only ones that the clients let us down.
After five years of conducting successfully “Salvage programs” in St-Petersburg we have started them in our Moscow office. But we realized that there are a lot of clients in similar circumstances in other regions of Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, where the marketing company is gone and people would not know if their money reached the resort or not and whom and how to contact. A few years after we have created the telesales which conducts such complicated negotiations over the phone.
We are proud to say that we help the clients to gain the trust to the industry and the product over the phone, sign the contract over the mail and pay the money by bank transfer without visiting the office, without seeing the sales manager or the company paperwork not because we don't want them to do, but because they receive our professional replies to all their questions and because we explain them well how their rights and money would be protected.
We have not stopped our “Salvage programs” thou there are no marketing companies disappearing.
Our new target group for “Salvage programs “ are the clients who lost their membership for nonpayment of maintenance. Bad financial circumstances when you can't pay you fees can happen to anybody and the frustration with the product if for some reason you can't book the holidays for a few times can be really big. Doesn't matter what was the reason why the family stopped paying the maintenance fees and lost the timeshare, there is always a chance that these circumstances have changed. We approach those clients on behalf of the club or as on our own to offer them get back in to the timeshare world of holidays. In many cases the holiday pattern or the tastes of the family have changed. The children grew up or became less flexible with holidays at work. We take everything into consideration and find for them the timeshare that world really fit. At any time we can offer a few products direct from the developer as well as for some clients we offer the resale deals.