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By: Chelsea Madden
We just returned from our Dallas Roadshow last week and in preparation we sent a survey to the Dallas hotel community to let them help drive the agenda for the day-long event. Here is what they had to say:
- 75% said that additional hotel inventory is making them feel the heat from competition
- 50% said that they get plenty of leads but their conversion rate is low (less than 15%) despite how quickly they respond to them
- 69% said that when they proactively sell group, their process it to go through lost business and old business to rebook or capture
- 69% said that they still have booking holes throughout the year that they don’t know how to address
- 63% said they do not know the best way to find new groups to target (other than a Google search)
This was super informative to Knowland and not surprising because while these responses were from a specific market, it is what we are hearing across the board.
While some might feel they are proactively selling, like the 69% that are going through their lost business, we would call this the “old way” of proactively selling and would actually recommend a different process to follow. And so, we brought in our partner, Doug Kennedy, President of Kennedy Training Network, to share some of his helpful proactive selling tips at the Roadshow and with you here.
Knowland and KTN recommend deploying a Proactive Group Sales Strategy. This means embedding proactive selling into the everyday workflow of group sales teams. It starts by building your pipeline with events and accounts that you know will be a good fit for your property. That “fit” research is done with the Knowland solution, which stacks and ranks millions of actualized events for you. Next we recommend you determine your script – how will you reach out via email or voicemail or even if you get a live person on the phone, what will you say? This preparation goes a long way.
To get you off the blocks, we partnered with Doug to develop a :15 minute video clip rich in practical, proactive selling tips to make you more successful and your properties more profitable.
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