Join a team of passionate, knowledgeable travel-makers, who’ve lived, worked, and explored extensively across Asia and care deeply about their communities and environment. You’ll build Inside Travel Group’s relationship with travel advisors and agencies across the US collaboratively, with a focus on quality work and tenacity to strengthen our existing partner relationships and find new industry friends to introduce to our cultural adventures.

Overview of the role

The role of the BDM is to be the face of ITG within the North American travel trade industry. Travel advisors will know you and associate you with our brands, destinations, and the quality of our work/trips. You will build awareness, our reputation, and know our partners better than anyone.

Your primary focus will be to grow the lifetime value of our key trade partners through building strong relationships and driving additional inquiries/bookings. To achieve this, you will deliver trainings, marketing materials, and rewards to our key accounts/advisors. You will take a key position in tracking, measuring, and influencing the strategy and tactics to achieve this growth.

Your secondary focus will be creating new relationships with best-fit advisors in our market. You will research, contact, and engage with agencies and advisors who have not yet worked with us to establish their suitability, moving them along the advisor journey to productive partner and/or supportive promoter. As part of this, you attend industry events with established ROI and explore new events with good potential, continuing to track the effectiveness of all.

What you will be doing

• Ensure advisor satisfaction through friendly acknowledgment of inquiries and bookings, and gathering feedback throughout the life of bookings with us, especially upon client return.
• Nurture relationships and provide online trainings for home-based advisors.
• Co-ordinate sending of thank-you gifts to advisors for significant booking milestones and special occasions.
• Assist with creating marketing materials and promotional campaigns for trade partners.
• Assist with generating and analysing trade marketing, inquiry, and sales data and suggesting actions to continually improve outcomes.
• Visit our existing key trade partners to nurture relationships and provide training in-person.
• Onboard new advisors, with structured milestones, to ensure they get the best possible experience of our two brands, allowing us to quickly identify the potential from each new advisor.
• Attend key conferences and events in the industry solo, together with Trade Manager, or with other members of the Sales/Marketing teams.
• Proactively identify and target new best-fit advisors and visit them where appropriate.
• Assist with delivery of trade training to the US Office Sales Team.
• Support Sales Team Leaders in providing advice to our Sales Team on day-to-day trade issues, including handling issues that require escalation.
• Record/track all trade marketing activity – comms/training/events/visits/etc.

What you will need

• At least 12 months BDM experience, ideally for a high-end, specialist, or niche product.
• Basic knowledge of Japan and our InsideAsia destination countries.
• Skill at pitching and presenting to small and large groups, to win new business and provide training both internally and externally.
• A confident and outgoing manner in networking situations, to create new leads and widen your network within the industry.
• The ability to analyze sales figures using Excel and present this information in a clear way.
• First-class communication and collaboration skills; able to work with other departments and managers both internally and externally in a constructive and honest way in order to get the job done.
• Excellent complaint-handling skills; the ability to find win-win outcomes to preserve key relations.
• The ability to identify improvements needed and proactively implement change.
• An ability to work autonomously, with less frequent direct supervision.
• Unrestricted Driving license.
• Understanding of the US travel industry.

For more information, please visit: InsideTravelGroup.com/Careers

To apply for this role, please send a resume and cover letter to: jobs@insidetravelgroup.com

Please answer the following questions in your cover letter:

• Tell us how your network led you to find this role.
• Tell us how you would apply your industry relationships and knowledge to develop business with travel advisors and agencies at Inside Travel Group.
• Tell us what integrity means to you.