Hotel Group Sales Strategies essentially
revolve around three activities, attracting more leads to the top of the funnel,
qualifying the leads to identify the best potentials and converting more of
those potentials into actual sales. While every sales manager worth his role is
aware of this, many sales teams are bogged down by daily activity to actually
put this into practice. This is where a sales systems like Insta Event Management come to
their assistance. Let’s take a look at a few ways a good sales system can help
sales managers increase leads and improve conversion.
Improve Conversion
We will first look at the last aspect of
the strategy presented here, which is how to increase conversion once
potentials have been identified. While many factors like price, location,
quality of product in market, etc. which are outside the control of sales teams
affect the rate of conversion, there are some things that a sales team controls
that can significantly improve conversion too.
Time to Market
Time to market is the time elapsed between
the time a sales manager received an inquiry and the time when the proposal
reaches the customer. Hotel sales is a more complex animal than quoting a
single price and there are many steps involved before a proposal can be
generated for a client. And this is the reason many hotels take several hours
or even days to respond to inquiries. A good sales system like Insta Event Management can cut down this time into mere minutes. Let’s take a look at Insta Event Management as an example and see how this can be done.
Quick Pricing Decisions
At many hotels, time to reach a pricing
decision or reach the decision maker often holds up proposals and reduces
conversion. Insta Event Management has a rules based pricing engine that can do something
as simple as suggest a daily price for guest rooms, banquet space, Food and
Beverage and other add-ons or can get more complex and let revenue managers
enter complex pricing criteria based on many parameters across multiple
properties or geographies. Either way, the sales manager enters the
requirements and they are presented with an instant price to give the customer
if on the phone or send out if requesting through email or other online
methods.
Quick and Easy Proposals
Hotel sales managers surveyed by Insta Event Management said that a typical proposal takes them about 1 hour to complete
and more complex proposals can take several hours. A good sales system like Insta Event Management solves this through the intelligent use of templates that are
merged with the requirements and pricing from the previous step and proposals
can be generated with little to no effort from sales managers.
Insta Event Management Advantage: Average time from receiving an inquiry to sending out a proposal on
Insta Event Management is 3 minutes. To learn more, book a demo with us here
Relevance & Quality of Proposals
The quality and relevance of a proposal can
have a significant impact on conversion rates. A proposal should be considered
the same as a booking site and many aspects of website conversion can apply
here as well. For example reducing friction and fear, having clear calls to
action, and other user experience design applies to a proposal as much as it
applies to a website. Let’s consider some of these and see how a good sales
system can convert more.
Reduce Friction & Fear
As hard as hotel sales managers try, it’s a
daunting task to keep proposals really relevant to the customer when there is
so much to do. For example, including pictures, videos, and walk throughs of a conference
room that the client is being offered reduces fear of the unknown. However
it is often too much work because it requires the sales person to look at the
pictures and videos and select them for each individual proposal. The result is
more proposals with generic content that shows pictures of all rooms. Systems
like Insta Event Management can automatically select the room being offered and show
content related to that, making relevance automatic.
Clear Calls to Action
A clear call to action is often associated
with increased conversion in e-commerce. Systems like Insta Event Management provide clear
calls to action in web proposals, making it easy for the customer to request a
contract, pay a deposit, or ask a question, significantly impacting conversion
rates.
Identify Right Potentials
A recent survey by a well-known hotel
association found that in some markets, the number of RFPs have gone up by more
than 300%. A lot of this is because of websites that allow meeting planners to
easily send RFPs to multiple suppliers with one click. Great for the planner,
but the downside is too many RFP requests for the hotelier and lower conversion
per response.
The solution obviously is to respond to the
ones that are most profitable and most likely to convert, but without looking
at each of them, it’s hard to prioritize. This is another area where a good
sales software like Insta Event Management can help by prioritizing RFPs from various
websites, allowing sales to work on the best potentials first. Another
efficiency improvement possible is to auto-assign to individual sales managers
based on criteria like geography or segment.
Increase Lead Pipeline
The real reason I decided to take up the
pipeline last is because managing leads, generating proposals and post-sale
communication takes up most of a sales manager’s time leaving them little time
to create new pipeline for sales. In fact, an industry survey found that sales
managers spend only 15% of their time actually prospecting and selling. A sales
system like Insta Event Management not only increases conversion, but makes it many times
more efficient to respond to leads, leaving sales managers with as much as 400%
more time for actual sales activities and prospecting.
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