SALES: What are you missing out on? - Keiran Spencer, revstar group

How to maximise sales opportunities across all key touch points in your accommodation business.

by Keiran Spencer, Director and Partner – revstar group

Sales opportunities exist across many operating departments and it’s essential to ensure you have a sales mindset embedded in your business culture that supports customer loyalty and new business development.

Never has it been a more important time to revisit the fundamentals of sales across your business and ensure the fabric that binds each department together seamlessly through a likeminded focus on customer loyalty and repeat business is embedded.

Off the back of the COVID pandemic, our industry has been through considerable struggle with many long serving and loyal employees moving on to other industries, across most levels. The skills and knowledge gap that accommodation businesses have been left to fill has been a huge challenge, and will continue to be. As manning levels start to stabilise, we should reflect on how we’re integrating sales training as a long-term strategy to drive business growth, and there is an understanding of how each department is co-dependent in the push for long term success.

It’s important to break down the supporting roles that each department plays to support the sales function and it all begins with how to identify opportunities. For the most part staff training can be limited to the role and department which the individual operates within however this can be limiting to businesses. It’s important to illustrate to staff through training and onboarding how the sales cycle works.

Building a culture of curiosity across all key touch points in your business is an essential part of developing questions that can often uncover information that will translate to repeat business for your hotel. This is where teams can assist each other with capturing the right information that converts what may have only been a one-off piece of business into a loyal and repeat customer.

On a commercial scale, your marketing department is responsible for generating demand, revenue management optimise demand and the reservations department is ultimately responsible for converting demand.

The front line of accommodation businesses which is where the servicing of demand takes place often proves to be where conversations are taking place that can ultimately feed the sales funnel and put sales teams in a better position to capture demand and covert it in to long term relationships.

Creating sales awareness is the best starting point, and by saying that we need to focus on helping our teams develop a level of commercial acumen, business sense and understanding that will put them in a better place to identify sales opportunities.

Front line guest service teams and reservations staff are often at the most advantageous touchpoints for obtaining information and data that can truly make a difference to business performance by simply asking the right questions. This realisation can be empowering for staff and help build a culture of accountability, personal and professional development.

An improvement in the quality of data is a natural secondary benefit of accurately recording the information the teams are capturing through qualified discussions with guests, which therefore helps amplify the information sales teams can access, and then put in to play proactive sales efforts.

Remembering, the conversation starts before the guest even arrives, and this is done by knowing the right questions (and answers) that your target guests are using to filter your accommodation business as a legitimate option when conducting their pre-stay online research.

The best online marketing strategies for accommodation businesses are those that start the conversation early through keywords and content that is targeted specifically at what drives the needs of your target market, and ultimately gets them through the front door for you to nurture and build long term relationships.

www.revstargroup.com