The Bookster Podcast: First contact

Transcript

Hello, I am Simon and welcome back to the Bookster podcast from inside the SaaS holiday rental software company Bookster based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Follow along as Bookster, discuss their journey and their inner workings.

Thank you for joining us, and we hope that you find these conversations insightful and ultimately helpful.

Now, I'm joined today as always by CEO

Minute 1

and Co-founder of Bookster, Robin Morris.

Robin Morning.

Good morning Simon.

And also today we're lucky enough to be joined by Bookster's, account manager, Johnny Brannan.

Johnny, welcome.

Good morning, Simon.

Morning both.

Um, thank you for your time this morning.

Uh, we're sort of now a few episodes in, so it's nice to have, uh, somebody else to talk to rather than just Robin.

Thanks.

So, um, with that in mind, Johnny, maybe you could, uh, introduce yourself a little bit more and about what you do, uh, at the company.

Yeah, so I'm the account manager here at Booker and primarily the first point of contact for any kind of prospective clients coming towards Booker.

Trying to find out a little bit more about them, making sure that they're suitable for a Bookster and kind of being the, their first contact and first part of their journey, uh, on the way to becoming a Bookster client.

Great.

Okay.

Um, so perhaps if we step back a little bit,

Minute 2

first of all, before we get to sort of the day-to-Day stuff, um, can you tell us a little bit about your, maybe the history, what you have with Bookster and how you came to be the part of the team? Yeah, so, uh, well I joined Tribal Logic, so the, I guess another company back in the day, um, about five years ago now.

Um, so Caravan Site Finder was, uh, another side of the business that we had, which was a, a caravan listing directory for, for campsites and caravan parks.

Um, so my role there primarily was just to essentially renew people's subscriptions for their, their listing on Caravan Site Finder and to try and find some, some new clients for that.

Um, but ultimately we, we sold that business and from there we've just been focusing all our energy on Bookster.

So I think it was probably about nine months that we worked at, I worked at Site Finder before Bookster just became priority number one and, uh, we've just been keeping growing ever since.

Great.

And was there a difference between the sort

Minute 3

of clients you were talking to as kind of on Site Finder than the ones you are today? Oh, yeah, significantly so, with Site Finder as it was, it was just a listing directory.

So in, in terms of kinda bringing in impressions for people's listings, bringing them inquiries to hopefully get people to book their pictures or, uh, their, their campsites, um, and it was pretty much a majority a cold calling for that side of things.

There, there wasn't a whole lot of inbound leads for Caravan Site Finder.

Um, moving over to Bookster, the vast majority is inbound leads coming our way because they need something from, from us.

They, they need the booking engine, the channel manager, and the, the property management software as a whole with, with all the tools that we've got to make their lives, uh, a lot easier.

Right.

So, so the, the clients you're dealing with now are more, are business to business clients and rather than business to consumers? Um, yeah, I suppose e even the, the kind of business

Minute 4

to business, you've got the big businesses like agencies with 10, 50, a hundred plus properties, and even the people who are kind of running their own businesses solo, which is very similar to B2C, but it is a business that they're running, whether they've got one property or or five, they're running their own business and they maybe employ other people such as cleaners, guest liaisons, maintenance people.

Um, so there's a lot more to kind of find out from them about their business, uh, what they're looking for.

They're kind of the biggest pain points in their life and how we can make their life easier with, with Bookta.

Um, whereas reflecting back on Site Finder, it was just me reaching out to people, seeing if they needed a bit more help, getting in inquiries and, and people reaching out to them.

Um, so I think with Bookster it's, it's a lot nicer knowing that they're coming to us looking for something rather than me reaching out to them.

Minute 5

Sure.

No, absolutely.

Yeah.

So, sorry Robin, you were gonna say? I was gonna say, yeah, caravan Site Finder, I mean, they were both, that was, that was business to business as well, but it was, um, it was like an advertising platform, wasn't it? Yeah.

So it was a bit like, um, yeah, they, the reason that they want that the caravan, parks campsites want to list on something like Caravan Site Finder is to Yeah, it's just, it's an advertising, it's their exposure, exposure basically.

Not an awful lot of functionality really.

Uh, whereas Bookster is a software platform, it's all about functionality.

Yeah.

Really.

Um, whereas in your, you, you did have a, before you joined us, it was, you were on a more of a B2C role, weren't you? Yeah.

Uh, I worked at a, a self storage warehouse, so basically selling empty space, which was the vast majority of people moving houses, and they've got a period of time where they need to store all their furnishings.

Minute 6

Yeah.

Um, which was, yeah, very different strange way to make money selling empty space, Selling empty space, like selling ice to the Eskimos.

Oh, yeah.

Um, so how do then people, how would you find people getting in touch with you sort of now with Bookster? What's the most common sort of route in to finding you? Yeah, so the vast majority of people are, are inbound leads.

So I think most recently we found quite a lot of people through word of mouth, um, especially kinda in Scotland where we're based and where we've grown our client base.

Um, we, I guess we're, we're international, we've got clients in Europe, we've got clients in America.

Um, but yeah, most people are coming into Bookster.

They're looking for, that could be an availability calendar that they want on their website.

That might be all that they're searching for initially.

They come to Bookster and they find out all these tools that we've got that can make their life easier.

It can help increase their exposure, it can save them time.

Minute 7

Um, we've also got kind of people clicking through adverts.

There's Facebook groups where people are, are finding us like hosts of, of, uh, holiday rentals that are just kind of chatting amongst themselves.

And someone will say, I use Bookster, they're great.

And from there it just kind of, it's like a domino effect really, of, of people being able to find us in a, in a number of different ways.

So inbound would be the opposite of that would be you cold calling them, basically? Yeah.

So inbound means they, they talk to us.

Yeah.

So they ask us something, so either they register Yep.

Or they ask for a call or ask for a demo.

So they, they're basically initiating the contact, um, as opposed to us sending them an email or us, uh, phoning someone up or whatever.

So yeah, that's inbound versus outbound.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just, and

Minute 8

They, and I guess the inbound stuff is through your website, I guess you, you're saying people contact you that way, is it? Yeah.

So people will register on Bookster.

Um, like I mentioned, it could be that they're just looking for a calendar or they might know that they want a, a property management software specifically.

Um, but they'll register on Bookster so that they can get a feel for it.

They can play around with the software.

Um, but at that point, I've got some of their contact details and I'll start to reach out to them an initial phone call where we can try and establish what they're looking for a little bit more about their requirements and how they run their business to make sure that that Bookster's gonna be suitable for, for what they're looking for.

So we, yeah, most of the time they're not simply, um, I mean they, they do sometimes ask to have a demo or they ask for a callback.

We've got some forms for that, but most of the time what they're doing is literally right, signing up to Bookster

Minute 9

and getting access into the, the console and being able to start the process of setting up themselves.

That's what most they're doing most of the time, isn't it? So they, they are literally starting to use it themselves and understand it themselves.

So Johnny, when they, when you contact people, do they, uh, say, oh, I've been having a play around? Or what do, do they say that they've actually used it at all? Or do they most of the time say, oh, I, I tried, I just registered and left it there? It, it varies greatly.

So I would say probably almost 50 50, like some people will go in and they can create their first property, they can add some photographs and the details about their property.

Um, but a lot of people will log in and they don't really know where they're going from that point.

Um, a lot of the, the holiday, uh,

Minute 10

the holiday rental owners maybe aren't quite so tech savvy.

Um, so those sorts of people need me to kind reach out, essentially, give them a helping hand and a guide, um, and from myself and even the rest of the Bookster team to essentially get them up and running.

But then you've got the kinda flip side of the coin where people can sign up by themselves.

So Bookster is self signup if you're kinda able to do so and if you want to.

So they can go in, they can create their property, they can pick the package with the, with the features that they're looking for, and they can get up and running all by themselves really.

However, I think the vast majority will kind of come to us and will need a little bit of help, at least to get set up and make sure that everything's in place and to help them feel confident to, to use the software moving forward as well.

Well, for sure.

I imagine, um, people who have already sort of played about and you know, signed up to a certain extent, how you deal with them would be different to sort of a cold call.

Minute 11

Uh, 'cause the people are always sort of halfway there already, I guess perhaps, um, would that be sort of right in that you're not trying to, you're not trying to entice them in at that point, you're just trying to reassure them, I guess it's an easy product to use.

Yeah, Of course.

Well, we get people who register and have a play around, but they're also maybe registering on, on other softwares.

There's obviously, Bookster isn't the only, the only property management software out there, so there is a lot of options.

Um, don't get me wrong, quite a lot of them have the kind of same bulk of features.

But I would say from, from our kind of feedback Bookster is really user friendly.

It's easy to navigate.

Um, so a lot of people are able to kind of try it out when they do first get started, and it's easy for them to kind of figure that side of things out.

Um, but yeah, in comparison to I guess, cold calling, um, which occasionally we will do, I'll maybe do some prospecting, maybe looking for people who have a website, but maybe they don't take bookings on their website for whatever reason.

Minute 12

It's just inquiries.

But we know from our own research that having a calendar on your website that people can click through and make a booking and that, that's much more successful rather than waiting for someone to make an inquiry and you have to get back in touch with them.

As a, I was a holiday rental owner, I'd rather people were able to make their booking and look at the availability rather than reaching out to me and saying, when's, what's your availability? That's gonna take time outta my day to try and respond to them.

Whereas if you're using something like Bookster, they can go in, they can check the availability themselves and they can make the booking.

Um, and with the kind of cold calling side of things, when people are registering on Bookster, that's what we'd call a warm lead.

So they're already looking for something like this.

If I'm cold calling people, they might not even, they might not want a, a, a property management software.

And it's, I would say a very low success rate for those sorts of things.

Minute 13

Um, so the inbound leads are, are definitely the, the bread and butter, but you still have to go out and, and search for, for clients sometimes.

And I guess you personally might have to have quite a thick skin as well for people turn around and say that they're not interested.

I mean, it's for, for myself, I've kind of worked in, I guess sales, uh, as a whole kind of my whole career from starting at McDonald's trying to upsell people to a large meal, um, to, to now getting people to sign up.

And that's very much a warm, um, so I've completely forgotten the question that you've asked me there, Simon, Off strategy.

We're all thinking of Big Max now, apart from Robin.

Um, so no, that was, well, let's reframe the question a little bit, I guess.

Um, how do you know, or maybe you don't, the suitability of clients for Bookster, uh, so who to contact and,

Minute 14

and you know, how do you tell who's gonna be a suitable person? Yeah.

Well, a lot of the time, like I said, if I'm cold calling, for example, I'll look and find people's websites.

And if they don't already have a, a booking engine in place, then that's someone I know they're very much likely to be a good fit for Bookster.

But there's also other factors.

Um, so it could be what kind of properties that they have.

So Booksters primarily for people who have kind of whole home holiday rentals.

There's a lot of people who just rent out rooms.

Uh, it could be a guest house, could be A, b and B, and those sorts of things aren't ideal for Bookster.

Um, so if I find a website that doesn't have a booking engine, might get my hopes up a little bit, and then you dig in a little bit deeper, or you actually get on a phone call with them and you, you find out a little bit more about the kind of details and the ins and outs of their business and find, oh, maybe they're not a great fit for Bookster.

And that's also similar with the people who are coming into us from registering.

Minute 15

Um, we get people who, like I said, have guest houses, b and Bs.

Um, and what we really are ideally after is the people who are renting out those full properties, kinda multiple bedrooms, well, could be one bedroom, could be multiple bedrooms, they've got a kitchen in there.

You've got all the, the amenities that, that you're looking for when you're, you're making a, a booking as a, as a guest.

And if you've found someone who fits the bill, uh, you think they're gonna be a good fit, um, they, but they might just not be interested for whatever reason.

Um, at what point do you realize this isn't going nowhere, and how much time do you spend on it before you say, well actually I'm not gonna bother pursuing these people anymore? Yeah, well, I guess the, the worst thing that can happen is someone says, no.

And that's, that's something you learn really early on, but, and not to, not to be pushy, but when you're, you're calling people,

Minute 16

even if they've registered and they're a, a warm lead that's come through, maybe the first couple of times they're gonna say, ah, sorry, I, I'm busy, or Now's not a great time to talk.

So essentially just what I try and do is kinda let them know that I want to find out more about their business.

And for me finding out more about their business and how they operate, I can kinda link that back to how Bookster is gonna be of use to them rather than phoning someone up and saying, Bookster's the best software in the world, it's gonna make your life easier.

That is true, but like they, uh, they, they're not gonna want to, they don't want to hear about Bookster right off the bat.

They want to know what we can do for them.

Um, so actually making it about them, about their business and making sure that they are suitable to, to fit with how Bookster works is probably the real way to, to get them to open up a little bit to you and trying to build a little bit of rapport.

Minute 17

And so is there an example that you can share perhaps of somebody or what type of company or people that have, have not been suitable for Bookster and Oh, well, with, uh, with inbound leads, for example, there's, there's people who, like I mentioned, they're maybe looking for a calendar for their website, but we've had, uh, we had someone registered on Bookster, they wanted a calendar, but what they were looking for was, uh, an appointment based calendar, so maybe an hourly basis rather than Bookster's calendar for properties where you book on a nightly basis.

And they were, I think they were a yoga studio, wasn't it Robin? So people are reaching out and I reached out to them and said, ah, what are you looking for? And they're saying, oh, it's a a availability calendar.

Oh, what's your business? Oh, I run a yoga studio.

And I mean, great for them, lovely business, yoga's great, but it's not gonna be a suitable fit for Bookster.

And in a similar vein, there's also a, a Romanian company called Ter, who is basically an online library, uh,

Minute 18

where you can share books with people.

So every so often we'll get a bunch of leads coming through with a Romanian phone number.

Um, so regardless, I'll still phone them up just to make sure.

Right.

But it's most, more often than not under the expectation that they're looking for us slightly different Bookster website.

Yeah.

We have, there's a suit or they, uh, Taylor's, yeah, A tailors or maybe an old tailors, I, I don't dunno if they're still still going, but, uh, called book as well, book suits.

So get that.

I, we talked about that First episode.

Yeah.

Um, actually a huge number, not necessarily that they get as far as Johnny, although you may be confirmed or not, but people searching for, uh, holidays.

Yeah.

So they, you know, they, they search for, I dunno, they might put type something into Google, like, uh, holiday let software,

Minute 19

but what they're really looking for is like booking.com.

It's crazy, but that people literally would type that in.

Yeah.

You know, holiday let software, and then they might register for Bookster thinking that it's a way to book a holiday.

Um, and I suppose the lesson from that partly is obviously there's crossover terms you can never exclude.

'cause that is a total fit for what we do.

So as far as language is concerned, we're, we're attracting the right person as it were.

Um, but the other lesson is that people, you know, even if you're trying to be as clear as you possibly can, some people just will skip through something.

They won't actually read anything about what they're saying, like registering for, signing up for, they've got a preconception, they about, you know, I want, I'm looking for a holiday.

Oh, this website's asking me to register.

I haven't read it, I'm not gonna read anything around it about what it says it is.

I'm just gonna register.

And we get that quite a lot.

Yeah.

Minute 20

Frequently.

Um, so yeah, that's the sort of lesson of people don't read stuff.

Yeah.

We can blame our marketing director, Kelly, for being too good at her job.

Um, I guess, uh, sort of a question that we had sent in, uh, from one of our listeners is probably quite, uh, relevant to the discussion we're having just now, especially as actually this weekend, I think Mark's four years from when, uh, businesses were told to close go home and, you know, we had Covid happening.

So the question that's come from, uh, James, uh, Davidson, thank you, James, is, um, what the question is, how do you keep the business operating during Covid, uh, when presumably clients aren't getting any business themselves, so it's relevant to sales, I guess, uh, Johnny and that obviously at that point, perhaps people weren't looking to, to take, you know, to take bookings, uh,

Minute 21

to get themselves onto your software, perhaps.

So when, how did you, how did your job, if you like, change over that, that Covid period? Um, well, ultimately I was, I was put on furlough.

Um, so for a little while I, I didn't really have much of a job to do.

Um, but what we tried to do was firstly take our clients into consideration, um, at that point.

So we knew our clients weren't gonna be making any, any money from their, their bookings, and a lot of them maybe reached out to us.

Um, so kinda understanding the kinda human side of it, we would essentially pause their, their Bookster subscriptions because as much as it would've affected us and, and our income, it, it wasn't fair for us to charge people to be using Bookster during that period.

Um, but we also knew that we had a lot of these clients who couldn't take physical bookings from guests around the world, but we knew that people like key workers were in need of accommodation.

Minute 22

Um, so people who were doing kind of childcare duties, nurses, doctors, paramedics, um, who maybe needed to isolate from their own families.

Um, and we have all these clients who would've had empty properties at the time.

So we essentially set up a, a website for kinda NHS worker accommodation to just try and be the middleman to facilitate these key workers actually having somewhere to stay, um, to essentially minimize the risk of them passing anything on to, to their families.

Um, and I think that that works really effectively.

What would you think, Robin? Yeah, I mean, I think it, it, yes it did, but I mean, I suppose the short answer was, um, it, well, we, we sold Caravan sightfinder literally just, you know, a couple of weeks really before, uh, COVID Mm-Hmm.

Minute 23

Started to become very clear that Covid was gonna be a problem.

So, uh, that to some extent that was good timing and some extent it was bad timing.

So we, uh, yeah, we had a little bit of money in the bank so that we could see ourselves through Covid, but also, uh, we were kind of concentrating fully on Bookster.

That was the only thing we were going to do.

And suddenly we had literally no clients to, you know, so, well, I mean, we had our existing clients, but we had no way of really getting any new ones.

So, uh, yeah, it, it was pretty bad from our point of view, I suppose, but also more so from our clients' perspective of that they, yeah, they, they suddenly had, there was no tourism.

Um, and you know, although a chunk of, usually a chunk of our client's business is, yeah, either workers, so commercials a lot of

Minute 24

that dried up, um, people moving house or people maybe they've got a flood in their house or a fire or something and they need somewhere to stay for a short period of time.

So some of that kept going, but certainly, you know, the tourism side of things, you know, really dried up.

So our, our clients really struggled, a lot of them.

Um, and so yeah, it was, it was, it was hard.

It was definitely hard for our whole sector really.

No, absolutely.

Um, I guess the, the, the, uh, the good thing about Bookster is, I guess because you are quite a small company, perhaps it's easier to sort of, uh, sort of flip what you're doing slightly and, and change into what this, there's new thing you did for a while in terms of trying to find people accommodation and stuff.

So it was, and rather than trying to turn a big company around you, you're quite flexible, I guess.

And, and that's a good thing.

Minute 25

Yeah.

Um, sorry, go on.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, as soon as kinda the first lockdown kinda ended, there was a bit of a kind of a boom.

I think everyone who, who was a holiday rental owner at the time when they were allowed to open back up, or maybe even when they knew we were gonna open up soon, but they weren't quite sure, a lot of those people maybe had a couple of months to actually get things in place for their own business.

So at that stage, I, I think I was still furloughed and then we were just getting leads coming in, people booking demos.

So it was, it was really quite fast buildup when things did start opening back up, um, which really helped us and, and ultimately helped the clients as as well.

Um, but yeah, it was, it was a really kind of fast turnaround from lockdown ending to bringing on all these new clients and all the existing clients getting back up and running again.

Minute 26

Um, It was, yeah, there was definitely a post there.

Yeah.

And I think, yeah, there was, there was a kind of boom or rush afterwards, then it sort of flattened out actually weirdly.

So it sort of, I think there was a kind of a, a pause.

Um, and now at the moment I would say it feels like it's back to what it was pre pandemic Yeah.

In terms of our, you know, our business, our clients, the number of people we are taking on and dealing with and growing.

Um, yeah.

So I would say that's where we're currently at, so, yeah.

Well, it's good to hear that you've, you know, you've bounced back, I guess like, uh, a lot of other places as well, but that's, that's good for, good for Bookster.

Um, and thank you James for the question.

It was a good question.

Thank you.

Um, if anyone else listening has a question they'd like to send in for us to answer on a future episode, please do send it to podcast@Booksterhq.com.

Minute 27

Um, it's podcast@Booksterhq.com.

Um, I think looking at the time, gentlemen, we'll probably wrap this one up.

Uh, it's been, uh, it's, it's flown past, so thank you very much for your time this morning.

Um, Johnny, nice to have you on the show.

Thank you very much.

Thank You Simon And Robin, always nice to see you as well.

Thank you very much Simon.

Um, we'll do this again very soon.

I should mention there is our sister podcast, uh, smashing your holiday rental goals.

Um, so that is out there in the world.

We'll put a link to that in our sort of show notes as well.

So if you'd like to listen to that one and, uh, leave a positive comment and a comment for us as well be gratefully received, uh, if you would like to do that.

Thank you very much.

Um, right.

In that case, we'll wrap up.

Thank you both.

Um, thank you for listening.

Thank you for watching on YouTube and we'll see you again very soon.

Goodbye.

Cheers.

Bye Bye.