Ready to win £50 in Titan Rewards? 

Answer three questions via the quiz below before 12 June to get yourself in the running! You can also complete an optional challenge – to discuss a client's budget without using the word "budget" – to hone your sales skills further should you wish. Good luck!

The competition closes at midnight on 12 June 2026.

This video is part of the TTG Smarter Selling Series in partnership with Titan Travel, a collection of six bitesize videos designed to enhance your sales selling skills:

• Tuesday 21 April – Episode 1: How and when to communicate your value
• Tuesday 28 April – Episode 2: How to make connection convert
• Tuesday 5 May – Episode 3: Your killer questions for initial conversations
• Tuesday 12 May – Episode 4: How to set the agenda, and why
• Tuesday 19 May – Episode 5: How and when to address the "B" word (budget!)
• Tuesday 26 May – Episode 6: What are the do's and don'ts of powerful proposals?

Each episode comes with a quiz and an opportunity to win £50 in Titan Rewards, with one lucky agent who's completed all six quizzes being entered into a prize draw for £300 in Titan Rewards (these can be spent at 250 retailers, including Marks & Spencer, Argos, Dunelm and Odeon). So make sure you watch all the videos and complete all the quizzes for a chance to bag the biggest prize!

Who is Helen Roberts?

Helen is a leadership and sales coach. She is passionate about helping businesses build high-performing teams empowered to drive their sales strategy, deliver exceptional customer experiences and exceed their targets.

Her career at Kuoni spanned 20 years, starting as a personal travel expert and progressing to sales director, where she led the retail strategy for eight years. She developed and executed a highly successful sales and service blueprint, creating an award-winning customer experience through the development of an innovative sales and service philosophy and exceptional team engagement. This blueprint empowered the team to go above and beyond, showcase their personalities, and truly wow customers. She has since helped numerous businesses achieve similar success, also working with them to implement new sales processes and service models.

After a hugely fulfilling career, driven by a deep desire to help others, she has taken all of her insights, along with her passion for people engagement and exceptional customer service, into developing new leadership and sales coaching programmes. She now coaches founders, directors and sales leaders to maximise performance and deliver results consistently through empowering, inspiring and engaging their teams.

Video transcript

Pippa Jacks: Hello, welcome to episode five of TTG’s Smarter Selling Series, joined by Helen Roberts who is our leadership and sales coach expert. Hello, Helen. Episode five, gosh, we are racking through them. Episode five is titled “the ‘B’ word”, the budget word, which we know is something some agents struggle with and perhaps struggle to move beyond. Over to you Helen… What’s your take on asking about budget, when to ask, if even to ask? Share some of your experience and insight.

Helen Roberts: Yeah, I know it's quite a polarising topic, so I’d love to sort of hear some people’s thoughts on this. For me, let’s just stick with what we’ve said throughout the series: value before price. If you're asking about budget, frankly for me, I would steer away from... certainly the word “budget”, because I think it does have connotations of sort of cheap, which you know, is something to sort of think about and be aware of. If you're asking it, think about when to ask it, not up front, because you’re framing the conversation around price rather than value. And what I mean by that is you're then making it a conversation around, yeah, the cost of a holiday rather than the customer’s needs, wants, desires. It’s very hard to get away from that. You're almost, if you’re asking for budget, often you’re creating an artificial ceiling. I hear it all the time where you’re asking for budget and then the customer plucks one out, and then you’re both trying to sort of aim for one, and it’s a distraction from the main purpose, which is to create, you know, a dream experience for that customer.

Pippa Jacks: So you think sometimes customers don’t have a budget in mind themselves, but agents might kind of force themselves to tell them one. I guess you can understand from an agent’s point of view, perhaps if they’ve lost a booking because of going over what a customer had in mind, they might feel like, “Well, I don’t want to waste my time here, I want to make sure I’m making suggestions within budget”. Can you kind of understand?

Helen Roberts: Oh, I do you know, I fully sympathise. It's soul-destroying, isn’t it, whenever you’ve poured your heart and soul into it for weeks? Totally, absolutely get that. We’ve all done this where we fold previous experiences into our sales processes, so if we're burned by, you know, just one or two examples of losing because of price or whatever, that then we shoehorn a way to find out budget because we don’t want to be burned again, and that probably is... it isn’t the best thing to do because again, you’re limiting yourself. But there are other ways that you can ascertain budget, you know, get a gauge, aren’t there? You know, where have you travelled before, depending on what the customers are saying, where they’ve been, what... where they’re at in their research. Or, you know, if they’re in the store, talking about their lifestyle and, you know, how they dress or whatever. So, really, there are other ways, and again, we’re embracing the art of small talk, aren’t we? We’re getting to know them. There are other ways that are subtler but possibly even more powerful that you can find out, you know, what a customer is most likely to spend or what they’re most likely to like without coming out with an outright budget question, which totally limits, you know, the remainder of that conversation.

Pippa Jacks: Yeah, that makes sense. And you did mention price matching there. You think just trying not to talk about that up front?

Helen Roberts: Absolutely. Again, it’s just planting the seed, isn’t it? So, steer away from it. Back yourself. Communicate your value. And my biggest challenge is: just challenge yourself on where you do need to ask. If you are going to ask it, ask the ‘B’ word not beginning with B, maybe say, “what's your price range? What are you looking to invest?” However you want to sort of do it or say it. Maybe ask towards the end of the conversation. Sometimes it’s nice to ask with context. You know, if someone’s wanting to do so... like a particularly big part of the itinerary, you might say, “Well, I’m just asking because, you know, this can sort of take quite a large part of the, you know, the holiday investment up”. So there might be some nice context that you can give as to why you’re asking. Mention it at the end, but don’t let it be the last thing that you say so it ends on a bit of a sort of transactional note. Always end with, again, with value and building that excitement.

Pippa Jacks: Okay, that’s excellent advice. Our challenge for episode five is around not using the word budget as well, isn’t it? We would really love you this week to try to not ask that question at all in an interaction with a customer and see how long it is before they talk about budget and how much they’d like to spend. See if you can get away with an entire conversation without asking that, or certainly leaving it until later in the conversation using some alternative words, not the ‘B’ word, and using different clues and signs to inform yourself about what might be a sensible bracket to work towards. And we’d love to hear how you get on. Good luck with that one, and we will see you for our final episode next week, episode six.

Erin Taylor: Hello everyone, it’s Erin again from Titan. I’m here to tell you about all of the value that we include in our holidays. I’ve already talked about how much you get included for your customer’s budget. However, let me break it down in a little bit more detail so you can really see what’s included. So, number one, we have our amazing door-to-door service. So they don’t need to worry about airport parking, the stress of getting to the airport, and putting fuel in their car. That is all taken care of; we take that away from your customers, so we are in charge. All of the international flights and local flights are included where possible to ensure that your customers don’t have to worry about connection times or even which airport they’re going to fly from. That’s all taken care of too. Named hotel accommodation; so we make sure that we are telling your customers what hotel they’re staying in so they can have a little look to make sure it’s up to standard for them. But just a little sneak peek: it’s normally always, where possible, a four or five star. We have your amazing expert tour managers and local guides to really ensure that they’re getting the very best out of their holiday, and like I said before, they are more knowledgeable than any guidebook that you can buy in a shop. We also have hand-picked excursions, so they’ll be able to see beforehand exactly what excursions are included in our tours to ensure that it’s what they are wanting to do. You can go online or in our brochure and it will break it down for each day of the itinerary what they are doing. So again, you can have a look and see how much money that’s going to save them as if they were to do it themselves in resort. We include meals on most of our tours, so they’ll be able to see how many breakfasts, lunches, and dinners they are getting. So again, that helps them budget in advance. And then we also have dedicated free time. So in the itinerary breakdown, it will tell them how many days or hours they have free time so they can have a little look in that destination and see what they’re wanting to do – maybe that’s just a little wander to the beach or to explore the streets that they’re in. But they might be able to have a chance to sit down and have some lunch or a coffee that they would like to be able to budget for. Thank you so much for watching, and come back and join us next week for our final episode.

Competition terms and conditions:

• Applicable to travel agents in the UK and Ireland only. By entering this competition you agree to the TTG competition terms and conditions.