Using Technology to Navigate the Shifting Sales Landscape
Part 3: Building Customer Relationships
In part three of this blog series, we will look at the importance of customer relationships and key questions your salespeople should be able to answer before they reach out to rebuild customer connections.
Even before the pandemic, hotels had let relationships slide. Business was so good pipelines could be filled without really trying. Now, hotels have to try. Because do you know who was as disrupted as our industry? Meeting planners. The planner that your hotel thought was “locked” before may not be around anymore. Or they may have shifted loyalty because no one was around to answer the phone when they needed a hotel. Now it’s time to get back to the business of selling and developing relationships.
Below are key questions your sales team should be able to answer before making a phone call:
- For all your top accounts does your hotel still know who is booking the business?
- Has there been consolidation?
- Are there new contacts that need to be cultivated?
- Did business shift from a centralized location booking to local offices?
- What is the cadence of their booking cycle? Booking windows are still shorter than normal. Does the frequency of calls need to change to stay ahead of the shorter booking windows?
Towards the latter part of 2020 when meetings emerged, one thing seen all too frequently was that the legal department oversaw the decision. While that has probably dropped off, did companies bring in new processes in the decision-making? Is this understood by hotels? If not, business might be lost because a box wasn’t ticked.
Knowland delivers the insight you need for productive outreach to meeting planners. We give you a contact to get started. Use Knowland’s account booking history and preferences to build your call story and differentiate your property. Contact the account, build your network, and nurture relationships with key stakeholders. Turn a cold call into a warm one while demonstrating that your property is the right fit by citing the name of events they have held, the square footage used, the types of functions, potential catering needs, number of attendees – and more!
While all of this seems frighteningly manual, it is important to remember someone has to learn all of this AND they have to record it. This goes back to institutional knowledge. Assume everyone might win the lottery and call in rich tomorrow. All account details need to be in the CRM, and it needs to be updated regularly. Having detailed processes for tracking account progress will firm up ephemeral pipelines.
We ensure you get the performance you are looking for by monitoring your team’s engagement with Knowland data. We help you benchmark key usage metrics such as logins, searches, and viewed accounts to see who your top users and sales performers are. Correlations to accounts viewed and accounts won can identify who is winning business and how.
Finally, quickly learn the accounts most likely to book your hotel. Knowland helps you create a prospecting profile that is specifically designed for your hotel by matching its attributes to our historical database of over 18 million actualized events and account booking behaviors and preferences.
To make the most of Knowland’s platform, start by defining what “good business” looks like for your property. Our proprietary algorithm compares accounts against your unique hotel profile. Each account opportunity is rated to show how well it fits your Best Match profile based on booking history and preferences. We work directly with you to design a custom profile based on your property’s specifications. You’ll receive the most up-to-date and relevant information about target accounts from our extensive database to identify top prospects.
See your “best match” at a glance to prioritize faster. Match target accounts by market, class, location type, market category, and brand. The darker the icon, the stronger the match! Just scroll over the category to reveal the match rate for each account.
