She is a certified travel advisor and co-owner of a boutique travel company, Cultured Travel, that builds group trips and travel experiences for people who want more than a place checked off a list. Her background is in education. She spent over a decade teaching and leading student tours before she turned that same gift for bringing people together into a business built on shared adventures. Anyone running a relationship-driven business that depends on group interest, timing, and trust will recognize where she started.

The Challenge

When she came to me, her marketing was working. People were filling out interest surveys, signing up for webinars, and buying tickets to guided trips. The problem was everything after that first spark of interest. Every survey response lived in her inbox as a notification she had to open one by one. There was no easy way to see who wanted Iceland versus who wanted Spain versus who had not decided on a destination at all. People who registered for an event got no consistent reminders, so turnout was left to chance. And when someone bought a ticket through her booking platform, there was no reliable bridge between that purchase and her CRM, so she could not be sure her paying customers, or the guests traveling with them, were even being tracked.

Underneath the day to day mechanics was a bigger worry. She had built something people genuinely wanted, real connection and dream trips, but she had no system to catch the people who were interested and gently keep them warm until they were ready to book. Every uncaptured lead was a missed relationship, and in a referral driven business like hers, that is the whole game.

Meeting the Guide

I came in as her CRM consultant with one goal: build a system that would do the quiet work of following up so she could spend her energy on the human part of the business, the calls, the trip design, the relationships. My belief is simple. Technology should free people to be more human, not bury them in busywork. So rather than hand her a generic CRM setup, I sat down with her survey data, her destinations, and her booking platform, and built workflows around how she actually runs her business.

Building the System

The first piece was visibility. I set her up so every survey submission, whether someone was interested in Iceland, Rome, or a destination she was actively marketing, was organized and searchable inside her CRM, instead of buried in email notifications.

From there, I built destination specific nurture campaigns. For each trip she is marketing, a contact who shows interest is automatically enrolled in a sequence: a welcome text, then a cadence of emails spaced out over weeks, each with a call to action to reply with questions or book time on her calendar. For the people who filled out a survey but had not yet chosen a destination, I built a separate nurture path so nobody with a spark of interest was left without follow up.

For her live events and webinars, I built a full registration and reminder workflow, with reminders at seven days, three days, twenty four hours, two hours, and one hour before the event. We also rethought the cancellation option together. Instead of giving people an easy out, we kept everyone registered and simply followed up with a replay if they missed the live session, so no interested person ever fully drops out of the pipeline.

To help her see who was actually engaged, I created smart lists that automatically tag anyone who opens a nurture email, so she can tell at a glance who is warming up and who needs a different kind of outreach.

Finally, I connected her ticketing platform to her CRM, so when someone purchases a spot on a trip, both the buyer and any guest traveling with them are automatically tagged and saved to the CRM, no manual entry required. I also built in custom values so key details, like an event's name, only need to be updated in one place to stay consistent across every email that references it.

The Transformation and Results

What used to require her to open individual email notifications and manually piece together who wanted what is now organized and automatic. Contacts who have not picked a destination are surfaced and nurtured without her lifting a finger, dozens of them at a time, rather than falling through the cracks. Hundreds of purchases from her booking platform now flow directly into her CRM, tagging buyers and travel companions automatically so her list stays accurate as her business grows.

Event turnout is no longer left to chance. A steady, tested cadence of reminders now runs quietly in the background for every event she hosts, the same system I use in my own outreach. And with engagement tracking in place, she can see exactly which leads are opening her emails and leaning in, so her time goes toward the relationships most ready to deepen, instead of guessing.

Success Achieved

Today, her CRM runs the follow-up work in the background so she can spend her time doing what she does best: building trust and designing meaningful travel experiences. Had she kept managing this by hand, the volume of interest her marketing generates would have quietly outpaced her ability to follow up, and warm leads would have gone cold before she ever noticed. Instead, she now has a system that catches every spark of interest and keeps it warm until she is ready to turn it into a relationship, and eventually, a trip.

Built to Last: The Training Library Advantage

Every feature I build comes with its own custom training video, recorded specifically for that client's system, not a generic tutorial. As I built out her survey tracking, her nurture campaigns, her event reminders, and her booking integration, I recorded a growing library of videos walking through exactly how each piece works and how to adjust it. That library means she, and anyone she eventually brings onto her team, can learn to run and modify the system without depending on me for every small change. It saves real time and money when onboarding new team members, gets them productive faster, and strengthens how the whole team uses the CRM over the long run. A CRM only pays off if the people using it actually understand it, and a well used CRM is what keeps relationships strong, referrals flowing, and a growing business supported for the long haul.

If you have questions about building a system like this for your own business, I would love to talk it through. You can schedule a CRM consult below 👇