What People Are Saying About R&G
David Peckinpaugh, President, Maritz Global Events:
“I have worked with Amy and Stephanie for many years and they are truly unique in our industry. They will help you uncover new and incremental opportunities for your destination and be invaluable members of your sales organization. I hired Stephanie and then Amy back in the early 2000's at what was then Conferon to start our business development efforts. They did a fantastic job for us and drove more than $10M in sales revenue during their time. When I was running the San Diego CVB, I recruited them away and hired them both to run our lead gen programs there. When I left the CVB, I encourage them to go out on their own. I hired them for work at both HelmsBriscoe and then during my first year at Maritz. Since that time I have referred them to the St. Louis CVA where they worked for John Bettag for several years and the Greater Birmingham CVB.”
Malinda Harrell, CMP, CASE, Director of Sales, Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau: (Finishing their third year)
“Our team has been extremely pleased with the results of working with Amy and Stephanie. They have increased the volume of new prospects that we are able to touch with proven results. The detailed reports and follow up timelines are extremely beneficial to setting our Sales team up for success by uncovering the prospects with true potential and updating those that we should not pursue. The team at R&G have a tremendous wealth of knowledge in our industry and have shared helpful suggestions as we look for unique opportunities to partner and increase bookings in our destination. Having R&G on your team is a SMART Business Development decision!”
Nicole Keshler, National Sales Manager, Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau:
“Working with Stephanie and Amy has been a no-brainer. These ladies have been vital in connecting us to potential business for our market. Their industry experience speaks for itself and their professionalism while working with our clients has been top notch. They have truly become an extension of our sales team!”
Chris Wagner, CTA, Director of Sales, Experience Minnesota’s Rochester:
“2019 will be our second year partnering with R&G Business Development Solutions. Working with Stephanie & Amy are a fabulous addition to Experience Minnesota’s Sales Team. R&G brings prospecting to a completely new level, with qualified referrals and meaningful call to action reports. Their efforts have impacted our new business opportunities in the Medical/Healthcare, Faith Based, and SMERF markets. Our team is excited to build off the momentum that R&G brought to the table in 2018 into 2019. I would greatly recommend R&G Business Development Solutions if your goal is to develop new business!”
Gina Mintzer, CMP, MHA, Executive Director, Lake George Regional CVB: (6 months)
“We’ve been working with R&G Business Development Solutions for the past 6 months to help us mine our database of meeting and convention contacts, determine future business opportunities and to better understand the needs of potential clients based on initial outreach. Our relationship has been a huge win for our small team. The feedback and results have far exceeded anything we could have done ourselves in the short amount of time. Their commitment, perseverance and partnership has opened doors that we may have not knocked on before. Their level of professionalism has helped elevate our own and help make our sales team better sales professionals.”
Barry G. Hoehn, MBA, CME, CHSP, Director of Convention Sales & Marketing, Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau:
“Recently, we began the process of purging our accounts that had not been worked in many years, they kept getting transferred to other sales managers, continually up-traced and never worked. In the first three (3) months that R&G Business Development Solutions, Inc. took on this project they have brought to Birmingham 47,606 total room nights for $4,760,000 potential revenue; have found 29 referral leads with sales appointments representing a potential 22,844 attendees for Birmingham, and they average over $1.5 million/month in prospect revenue. Their team are like ‘dogs after a bone’ they don’t give up on an account until Steph says so! When we began our 2016 Budget Process and had R&G Business Development Solutions in the plan, I had a lot of upper management asking why we don’t hire a college intern to do this work. A college intern would not have the capability to be as thorough as R&G is. Thank you Dave Peckinpaugh for recommending R&G.”
(Barry Hoehn retired in 2017 and Steve Pierson, Director of Sales, signed for their fourth year)
Carman Atchison, National Sales Manager, Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau:
“The lead details that I receive from R&G are always so thorough. The information is always correct, up to date, and qualified. R&G has been an essential tool in prospecting and saturating the NE territory for me.”Courtney Ingersoll, National Sales Manager, Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau:
“R&G has been essential for uncovering up to date information and potential new leads. Their proactive approach to helping us find new business is invaluable.”
Michael Burns, Senior Vice President of Convention Sales & Services, Destination Cleveland: (2.5 years)
“One of the better decisions we made was to bring R&G on board for the 2.5 years they worked with us. Their communication and overall work quality and effort were great. We were able to get them focused on a lot of accounts that had not been able to consider us prior to all of our growth and it really helped jump start us as we built out our Sales Team. While every city has its own nuances and ways to do things, I do believe that R&G can definitely help you ramp up much more quickly and at the end of the day they offer measurable results compared to many of the things we invest in as a CVB such as print ads, banner space and so on. All important to utilize but way harder to measure results.”
(Michael Burns is now leading the sales and marketing strategy for one of our active clients – Oklahoma City CVB!)
Kristine Becker, Convention Business Development Manager, Travel Portland: (18 months)
“My responsibility is to increase business by prequalifying prospective markets and organizations to identify opportunities to grow our business. I've worked with R&G for over 18 months to obtain this goal and found Amy and Stephanie to be very professional, great communicators and provided detailed and accurate referrals. They took great pride in their work and delivered results making them a beneficial extension of our CVB. Though our contract has come to an end, Travel Portland will continue to reap the benefit of our business relationship for many years to come! I am sure we will work with them again in the future!”
John Bettag, Executive Vice President of Sales, St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission: (4 Years)
“R&G's team was invaluable to our sales organization. For four years their ability to identify new business opportunities for St. Louis helped to keep the sales team focused, while populating the sales funnel. Whether it is corporate, association, or government business they gave our organization that edge to consistently succeed.”
Jane Kantor, CMP, Director of Sales, Visit Bellevue, WA: (8 months)
“R&G has been a tremendous asset for our sales team. They are professional and tenacious and have provided us concrete and specific intel that we could not achieve on our own. Having experts in your corner that have solid understanding of what we need and the industry we are in gives us the edge that makes a huge difference. I appreciate the entire R&G team and applaud their efforts to help us achieve our goals.”
Tori Piersante, Vice President of Sales, Traverse City Tourism, MI: (6 months)
“For the many hours of phone calls and emails, helping us clean up our system, and the professionalism you displayed to get us so many targeted potential events, I just can’t thank you enough. You delivered on every promise and then some! You are a remarkable team and I’d be happy to shout that from any roof top! Again, thank you for all you did to introduce and re-introduce Traverse City to the many clients you engaged with. If I can provide a recommendation to anyone you’re working with, please send them my way. It would be a sincere pleasure.”
Lesley Mackay, Director of Meetings and Events, Ottawa Tourism, CN: (12 months)
“Ottawa Tourism engaged R&G to assist with cleaning up and prospecting a market that had very few touch points for a long period of time. Stephanie and Amy consistently kept us updated on the progress of the project, and we would receive weekly account updates, leads, and future actionable items for our team to follow up at a later date. R&G was a pleasure to do business with and we would not hesitate to recommend their services to our colleagues in the tourism industry.”
Demea Metcalf, Director of Sales, Destination Irvine: (6 months)
“R&G Business Development Solutions certainly live up to their name. Stephanie and Amy are experts at prospecting and seeing them in action over the last six months has been a pleasure. They are organized and persistent, which in turn, ensures positive results. Destination Irvine has benefited greatly from the moment they were activated and will probably reap the benefits of expanding our Client outreach efforts for years to come.”
Brad Weaber, Chief Operations Officer, Connections Housing: (1 year)
“R&G epitomizes the best in the business as it relates to the professional research and outreach of new business opportunities for our company. Not only have their tireless efforts resulted in highly qualified lead opportunities but they have virally put our company’s name on the map as far as brand recognition in the meeting and event industry. Their can-do attitudes and ability to turn on a dime with a variety of projects have made them an invaluable partner. We are well served by R&G!”
Dave Lutz, Managing Director, Velvet Chainsaw Consulting:
“Stephanie rocks! Great attitude, self-driven, superior out-put, high quality lead generation and a real team player. Pretty much everything you would ever want out of a high quality business development professional!”
Terence Donnelly, Vice President of Sales, Experient Inc.:
“I had the distinct pleasure of working with Amy while she was a Business Development Manager at Experient. She had the uncanny ability to not only 'bird dog' lucrative sales opportunities but also gracefully uncover all the necessary information.”
(Sadly, Terence Donnelly passed away on July 20, 2019)