Why Sales should be out sourced

Sales management should be outsourced.  Most hotels especially independent do not have formal sales programs in place.  By that I mean having all the tools needed   Professional sales scripts PDF’s.  A formal program where all contacts are recorded all e-mails sent are recorded and daily recap is sent to the manager and ownership.   Gorilla sales is usually only done half hartley if at all.  Even thou it is one of the best methods there is for producing room nights on a consist bases.   Sales needs to be micro-managed and the general manager is usually not in a position to do so concisely day in and day out.  Plus it puts some distance between the general manager and the sale person.  The sales person’s performance is being reviewed daily by someone not on property.

 

Most sales manager at hotels are really just order takers and usually when you don’t need order taking.  When there is a big event in town and everybody and his brother wants a room.  You don’t need someone who during these times usually wants to offer discounts and says I had all these people wanting rooms but you said no.

 

In fact I would venture most general managers and especially owner have no idea what their sale person is supposedly working on, and if you asked the sales person you would get vague answers with no decision dates no real data phone number e-mail address etc.

 

With a professional sales program management by an outside company your sales person is held accountable on a daily bases.   Instead of attending meeting held by this group or that group which very seldom produce any rooms.  They are hitting 10 to 15 accounts on a daily bases.  Seeds are planted and watered regularly and you know

When an account has truly been cultivated and not just happen stance.  Plus the data is

Kept for the hotel and should the sales person leave you still have a record of every phone call every e-mail sent you know what the conversations were and you get to keep all of the contact information.

Access to Globa accounts

Access to global accounts:

Things are always changing in the hotel world.  One of the latest twists is access to global accounts.   That brands have started something called tire II revenue management.  They are pushing to create a secondary revenue stream for the brands.

They are trying to tell hotel owners that they are not capable nor are the hotel general managers capable of managing the revenue / rates at the hotel level.

I remember sitting in a meeting for La Quinta were the VP of franchising compared it to the medical field.   He said the General Manager was your family doctor and you didn’t go to your family doctor for heart surgery.   That the hotels who had signed up revenue  management with the brand did X percent better than those that did not. So for $12,000.00 to $17,000.00 you got a few percent better performances than before. but for how long and your not getting a decated revenue manger your one of say 25 hotels he now has in the area.

Not to single out La Quinta all the brands seem to be doing it now.   What they are not telling you is they are also signing up or trying to sign up all of the competing hotel in the area and you are not the only hotel they have signed up.  If you’re a Choice Brand there could be many competing hotel Names within the brand competing for the same business;  and there is only so much business from the global accounts to go around plus they usually have corporate hotels in same area competing  with you as well.

I know your thinking that’s what we pay franchise fee for.  Well not anymore it’s become A pay to play world.   Not only are more and more of the prime business like BP or Shell going though and agency like Carlson Wagenlit to negotiate the with hotels for them.  You now have to pay the brands to get access to the big accounts plus pay the commission on it as well.

A better plan is back to the basics.    Contacting every major business in your area and making them aware of your hotel and what it has to offer them.  Contacting the localChurches, Funeral Homes etc, and just plain stealing it from your competition by completing driving around and then reaching out to those business and turning them into clients.    I’m not telling anything you don’t already know.  The problem is far too many hotels truly have no idea what the sales person is doing each day.  Nor do they have a formal program in place that will tell them what the sales person did on daily basics.

I’ll cove this in more detail on my next post.

Have Billboards gone the way of the AAA Book

Are you still paying for Billboard advertising?  Do you track it properly? I am constantly amazed at the things we do in the hotel business out of habit or desperation.   I often see billboards for hotels that are 10 or more miles from the hotel.  Yet we know that to be effective a billboard needs to be within 3 to 7 miles of the hotel.  Even then if the billboard is not just before the next exit odds are they’ll forget or miss the exit.  I have often seen billboards for hotels that are on the outskirts of a major market, The billboard will be on the opposite side of the highway hard to read and way past the destination market heading out-of-town.  Yet the whole goal or focus of the hotels marketing campaign is reach the guest coming to the destination city.  The only guest the billboard is reaching is  that the guest just drove past your targeted market heading somewhere else.

Maybe you haven’t noticed but things have changed.   Remember when the guest use to show up in your lobby holding their AAA Book?  When is the last time you saw that? or how about they had the brand directory that told them how to get to you. When is the last time someone wanted to know if you had an updated directory?   Now we don’t even put them in the rooms anymore.

Well that’s not the only thing that changed.  How they go over the river and though the woods to grandma house has too.  What? What do you mean? I’ll bet even you have changed how you get somewhere you haven’t been to before.  Do you get out your Rand McNally map? I doubt it.  You might go over the lobby in the computer and map quest it.  But have noticed guest are not doing that much anymore either.  Well what are the doing?   They are getting in the car and turning on the GPS unit typing in the destination address.  So how are they deciding on what hotel to spend the night at  when they decide to stop for the night.  They touch the POI  (Point of Interest) button and select hotel.  If your hotel is not listed you pretty much don’t exist as far as they are concerned.  If they saw your billboard at all it was mostly likely by accident.

I believe you might be better off making sure your are listed on the GPS’s POI and sending the money on things that make your guest want to choose your hotel over the competitions in the first place.  How much are you sending on say just one billboard.  On the cheap $15,000.00 a year, but more likely around $25,000.00 just for one billboard that most likely produces very little.   If we were spending that much on anything else we tack it hard. We would know what age the person who saw it, What time of day it was and maybe even the kind of shoes they were wearing.

But because it has been a fixture in our business and we have always done it we will keep on doing it even though it really doesn’t make sense.  I am not saying some billboards are not a viable part of a business model but more often than not I belive the money could be put to better use.

How much would $25,000.00 more a year being spent on a great breakfast or even better evening snacks or say departure thank you gifts benefit your hotel?  Make it more memorial in the gust mind, make them want to come back.  Improve you ranking within the brand.

You could even take the money being spent on something that does not have much of a return and invest in hiring a competent sales person!

How to steal business from the Competition

How to Steal
From Your Competition!

A sales and marketing survival guide
The business model that teaches managers how to steal and get away with it.

In today’s slower economy, there are three
ways to improve profits:

1. Find
   new things to sell. You can try to expand your markets by acquiring new
   products and services. If you have deep pockets and gambler’s instincts,
   this is the high-risk, high reward model. Exciting and challenging.
2. If
   resources are tight, you can cut expenses to the bone, shrink down until
   better times. Sometimes this works, as you preserve cash. Other times,
   unfortunately, this may merely prolongs the inevitable in a slow and
   painful way.
3. You can stop whining about the state of the economy and recognize that, even in the worst downturns, most companies and individuals are still buying and growing. In order to grow you business when the overall market is shrinking, start stealing from the competition.

How? Well, for starters, figure out WHO is staying
Where.  Get good valid contact
information so more dollars available to you, instead of standing by and
watching as your more aggressive competitors do it first.

Face it. The main reason for your shrinking
sales in a slowing economy is that your competitors are building their sales by
cutting into your turf.

The law of survival is that, when there is
less to eat, the more aggressive jungle animals take more from the weaker ones.
The choice is either to get mean, or get lean.

So, want to succeed, no matter what the
economy is doing? Get your mean act together. Here’s our outline to successfully
stealing from the competition. Follow this outline and you will be the one
saying that this is your best year ever:

So, how
you can increase sales at higher margins in a shrinking economy?

Your
Recessionary strategy:

In spite of press reports, not everyone suffers from a worldwide economic
downturn.

• Many
  companies will thrive and will enjoy record sales and earnings.
• Many
  more will see their stock reach new highs.
• Many
  sales people will punch through last year’s “personal best” and
  will continue to live the good life.

 

What makes some companies
successful, while others not? This:

• Knowledge.
• Strategic
  marketing planning.
• Program
  and execution.
• Training.

This isn’t rocket science, but don’t be
afraid to get help if you need it. Then use your industry knowledge to
partner with clients to establish and meet attainable goals. Create entire
sales and marketing programs and train your sales and marketing people to
thrive in hard times.

What you learn is not always new, but we find
that it is often reinterpreted in new ways, which is always profitable. Focus
on the key points for you to thrive while everyone around you is struggling
just to stay afloat.

Four keys
to technology selling success:

1. Redefine
   complex technology. Make it simple so sales people can explain it to mom.
2. Create
   structure for every sales call.
3. Focus
   away from tech-speak and onto key fact-finding to better communicate and
   close more.
4. Guide
   the sales process toward problem solving and away from classic feature
   wars, ending with greater customer benefits and, thus, higher dealer
   margins.

Top 10
ways to teach your staff how to overrun the competition

1. Make
   very sure you have a better trained sales army than they have at the
   competition. We use our own exclusive “Stealth Sales Training (c)
   program.” It doesn’t require us to take everyone out of the field to
   attend class.
• If you don’t have a better trained army,
  competition will destroy you.
• But, if you do, you will destroy them, which is
  always the more preferred choice.
2. Make
   sure you only sell the most terrific products in your market segment.
• If you don’t have the best product in your
  space, strategize to find a better product.
• Or, if that isn’t an option, strategize to move
  you to a more appropriate market space. Either way, you win.
• You do not always have the means to switch
  products mid-cycle, but it’s a rush to find out that changing the market
  focus often works better, faster and cheaper.
3. Listen
   to your customers. You’ve heard it before, but it is still the best way to
   meet needs.
• Sell what they need, not what you have.
• Even when you have what they need, many sales
  people sell from the wrong prospective (It does this. It does that. It
  does this. It does that).
• Teach your staff how to return to
  “empathy” and tell what the customer needs to hear.
• Teach how to really find customer
  problems and then solve them.
4. Find
   better, more aggressive sales people, or train existing ones to be more aggressive.
5. Spend
   more time identifying prospects most likely to need what you have, before
   you make the sales call. This saves time that would usually be wasted and
   concentrates sales talent on more likely sales. We employ a unique
   copyrighted process called “Prospect Profiling, (c)” which
   identifies those prospects most likely to make our sales people
   successful.
6. Shorten
   your sales cycle by simplifying the sales proposal process
7. Customize
   and then standardize your proposal into a generic template that is very
   customer-centric, yet quick and easy to prepare. This frees sales people
   for more time prospecting for opportunities.
8. Teach
   your sales people how to work as a team and share successes (yes, and
   failures) effectively, to improve the “learning from mistakes”
   yield and shorten time-to-market of new training.
9. Improve
   sales management’s ability to fill the prospect sales funnel by combining
   the best of traditional and non-traditional thinking.
10. Practice
    “top down” aggressive management. Specialize in growing sales in
    shrinking markets by keeping the energy level very high at the highest
    levels of management. We never stop teaching how to aggressively improve
    share of the market by the process we call “steal from the
    competition.”

World’s
shortest guide to great web success

Here’s what works for our
clients and what doesn’t. We follow this simple guide so that your web site
will increase your business.

Click here to World’s shortest guide to great web
success page

4 rules
to fast-track improve your marketing results

1. Always
   have a written strategy, even if you often have to change it.
2. Always
   has a marketing mission statement that every department can live with
   (otherwise you are just kidding yourself).
3. For
   every product you sell, identify target markets where your product:
• Provides exceptional value.
• Is clearly superior.
• Captures the imagination.
• Establishes an emotional connection with the       customer.
4. Remember,
   branding is never about the building. It’s always about the relationship

Heritage-Hotel-Consulting-LLC

 

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