Here's something I've watched happen more times than I can count. A Director of Sales and Marketing at a hotel opens a vendor's website in the ninety seconds between two calls. She doesn't read the feature list. She doesn't talk to sales. She looks at the thing — the way she'd glance at the cover of a proposal before reading a word of it — and she comes away with an opinion about whether these people would be easy to work with.
I used to file that reaction under noise. The stuff that happens before the real evaluation starts. I've come around to thinking it is the evaluation, or at least the first round of it, and that we've been treating the first round as if it doesn't count.
Because here's the awkward part for a company like ours. We sell hotels a presentation layer. TrueTour is, at bottom, how a sales team shows a ballroom, a suite, a terrace, a meeting space in a way that a planner can actually trust before she ever visits. We ask hotels to believe that how you show a space changes whether someone buys it. That's the whole pitch.
So when that same hotel opens our website and it feels dated, or busy, or vague about what we do, we've just quietly undercut the argument. We're the presentation company with an unconvincing presentation. You could reasonably push back and say a buyer knows the difference between a marketing site and a product — and sure, on some conscious level she does. But I don't think that's how the ninety-second judgment works. I think she reads our presentation as a sample of our taste, and our taste is exactly what we're asking her to hand over the keys to.
That's why we're investing in the brand layer, and why I keep insisting it belongs on the product roadmap and not off to the side. The TrueTour teal, the way we frame a product moment so you can see in one glance what it does, the rebuild of the public site so a busy VP of Sales can understand the thing between meetings — these aren't decorations on top of the product. They're the product making its own case before anyone logs in.
There's a version of this work that goes wrong, and I want to name it so we don't do it: making the site prettier and calling it done. Pretty isn't the goal. Clear is the goal. A hotel team reviewing vendors is busy and a little skeptical, as they should be, and they need three things fast — what the product does, how it helps their team, and whether the people behind it can be trusted with the details. If our brand answers those three questions quickly and honestly, it's working. If it just looks nice, we've missed.
The funny thing is this is the exact discipline we coach hotels to bring to their own content. Show the space clearly. Keep the path simple. Respect the buyer's time. Help her picture the decision before she has to make it. We say it constantly. It would be a little embarrassing to keep saying it from a website that doesn't do any of those things.
For a long time the product carried the whole story by itself, and it carried it well enough to get us here. I don't think that's the right ask anymore. The brand should carry its share — and when it does, everyone downstream has an easier job. Sales has a clearer thing to point at. Buyers have less to decode. The product gets to be understood before it's even opened.
That's what we're building toward. I'd genuinely like to hear where you think it's landing, and where it isn't.
Chad Kimner is the Chief Operating Officer at Visiting Media.