What will it take to succeed in hotel sales in 2023?
The skills required to succeed in hotel group, event, and BT sales are going to be hugely different here in 2023, but the disruptions that have caused these changes began much earlier. Traditionally, succeeding in hotel sales was more about personality than process. Target rates were locked-in well ahead of time and fees were few, so negotiations were much simpler.
A focus on filling the house made it easy to get concessions approved, but since most planners and BT buyers were novices, they weren’t asking for that much anyway.
Closure rates on inbound leads were much higher, because initiating an inquiry required more effort, such as calling a hotel or locating its “sales@” email address and sending RFP’s one at a time. Back then, one piece of business generated only a few hotel sales inquiries.
Prospecting? With 10 or more years of an up market from 2009 - 2019, it was easy to meet sales goals based on inbound alone, but if a GM or DOS required their staff to prospect, most salespeople could get away with firing-off a designated quota of emails or making a designated number of calls, targeting randomly selected “sales suspects” who were not necessary even qualified leads.
Changes were insidious over the last decade, constantly chipping away at outdated sales models, and affecting all aspects of hotel sales process. Increasingly, leads more often arrived electronically, as a result of the evolution of platforms for planning meetings and events, and for locating suppliers for high volume business travel. Soon, with a few clicks on a keyboard or taps on a smartphone, buyers visiting Hotel Planner, CVENT, or Lanyon, could issue an RFP to a long list of hotel sales offices.
Similarly, those planning weddings or social events could visit The Knot or Wedding Wire and send inquiries to dozens of hotel venues. As a result, today’s salespeople are fielding an overwhelming flood of leads, while the chances of converting any one lead has dropped into single digits.
As the profession of revenue management evolved, along with the tech platforms and data points that drive it, pricing decisions moved out of realm of the sales department, sometimes to be made by RM who does not fully appreciate the long term value of potential new client company or organization, or who might only obsess on RevPar and not total guest spend.
Also on the technology side, sales lead tracking systems that were originally developed by providers who were fully immersed in the needs of hotel sales got rolled-up into tech stacks that added feature after feature, which no one was asking for, few needed, and even fewer learned how to use. The most important features that hotel salespeople truly need to use to organize a tenacious, personalized follow-up process are now buried so deeply into sales CRMS that they have effectively disappeared.
Incredibly, based on the hotel sales process evaluations I conduct for our training clients, most hotel salespeople have reverted either old-school paper trails, or are attempting to manage sales leads by using Outlook calendar appointments or by flagging emails in an over-stuffed inbox. Prospecting itself has changed too. In the past, hotels held sales blitzes and sent teams out into the neighboring office buildings to knock on doors, hand out food and logo items, and make connections. Now, most of the office buildings themselves require security access, and the doors to the individual offices are locked. The receptionist staffing the buzzer is now a Ring doorbell, and with so many working from home there’s often no one not meet with anyway.
The buyers have also changed. On the group and BT side, the profession of being an independent meeting planner or BT consultant grew exponentially, often staffed by people who were formerly among the roster of top hotel sales producers. Now experienced “buyers” will routinely tell novice hotel salespeople things like “Here’s how to sell our deal to your revenue manager…”
On the social, event and wedding event side of the business, the profession of wedding planner has also emerged. What was only a few years ago a resource used mainly by those planning destination weddings, is now a resource that even those on modest budgets can utilize.
Site tours? With so many images, reviews and virtual tours being online, and with third-party buyers being located remotely, it became ever harder to convince decision makers to visit in person.
So, what have hotel companies done so far to response to these changes? In my opinion, manly all the wrong things, such as centralize and automate. Increasingly, hotel management companies and brands have created cluster or regional sales offices, staffed by remote sales teams located far away who can rarely visit in person. Although this could arguably bring some efficiencies, gone are the passionate, emotional commitments between a salesperson, their hotel, and their hotel’s frontline staff, which cuts both ways.
Remote salespeople at regional offices are tempted to cross-sell out of the originally requested property when enticed by incentives, even if it does not make sense for the buyer. Likewise, on-site operations staff may be less passionate about servicing a buyer’s special needs that were committed to by a salesperson he or she have never met in person.
Similarly, hotel leaders are looking to automation and the “self-service” booking of small groups and room blocks, a feature being provided by online hotel tech companies serving multiple brands in the same market. Have we learned nothing from the mistake made during the early 2,000s of turning over transient demand to OTA channels?
If rates for meeting rooms, event space, basic F&B, and rooms for all the a hotel’s comp-set show up transparently on one platform, will that lead to the further commoditization and “vanillaization” of this industry?
To be continued
Doug Kennedy is President of the Kennedy Training Network, Inc. a leading provider of hotel sales, guest service, reservations, and front desk training programs and telephone mystery shopping services for the lodging and hospitality industry. Doug continues to be a fixture on the industry’s conference circuit for hotel companies, brands and associations, as he been for over two decades. . Visit KTN at www.kennedytrainingnetwork.com or email him directly doug@kennedytrainingnetwork.com
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