The hospitality industry has all but normalized with conferences, meetings, and private events returning to hotel properties. What hasn’t normalized for many hotels is the size of the sales team. It’s well known that hotel sales teams were reduced in size during the pandemic. But as business returned, more staff wasn’t necessarily added to handle the influx of RFPs and prospecting activities critical for success.
If you didn’t have time to prospect last year because there were so many inbound RFPs, this is the year to get targeted prospecting on your schedule. At some point, the regular flow of RFPs will slow down, and it will be more critical to have ways to fill need periods.
You can increase hotel revenue by finding a solid balance between inbound leads and targeting good-fit accounts. Use these six tips for increasing your hotel’s revenue.
Six Keys to Increase Hotel Revenue in 2024
Here are six tips for improving the productivity of time-constrained sales teams to streamline decision-making, prioritize sales efforts, and help you bring in more revenue, even with a small sales team.
1. Know the accounts that fit your hotel profile
An account-based hotel sales approach is the perfect way to focus on prospecting accounts with the highest likelihood of booking with your property based on the account’s booking history, the markets they prefer, and where the organization is located. You can also identify their chain scale preferences to see if your property would fit well with their events. Generate this list and consider the best way to reach out to them.
2. Prioritize your hotel sales prospecting efforts
When RFPs are rolling in every day, you might feel like there’s no need to prospect for new accounts. Time constraints don’t help, either. But the truth is, your group revenue stream can’t rely on RFPs and former customers alone. Competing properties will approach your leads and may send a proposal faster. You must be prepared for this by continuously developing relationships with key target accounts.
Block time on the calendar, set goals for prospecting outreach, and truly dedicate time each week to developing relationships with good-fit accounts. It may take time to increase your bottom line, but you will have accounts to call on when it comes time to fill need periods.
Learn more in our blog: Mastering Hotel Group Sales: Strategies to Win the Game
3. Evaluate your sub-markets for revenue opportunities
Larger markets have sub-markets. The city of Houston, for example, offers many different regions within the metro area where groups like to hold events – several central Houston areas are popular, along with some of the larger suburbs still considered part of the Houston area, including Sugar Land, Galveston, and The Woodlands. Each of these sub-markets presents unique features that can appeal to various groups.
You can hone in on accounts more likely to prefer your sub-market area based on their past events. Use hotel business intelligence tools to:
- Clearly understand your submarket’s most popular industries. Focusing there first gives you the greatest opportunity to close new business quickly.
- Personalize outreach to potential accounts based on your sub-market features. By looking at their past preferences, you’ll have insight into what may appeal to them most:
- Golf
- The beach
- Access to museums or other venues
- Restaurants within walking distance
Learn more about sub-market data available through Knowland.
4. When in doubt, space goes to the deal with the highest total account value
Hotel sales teams can improve productivity by spending time on deals with the highest total revenue potential. Even though two individual opportunities may appear comparable in the short term, if you look at the wholistic account view of all the potential bookings from that account, you may find that one is substantially more valuable than the other – so you prioritize that deal at the top of your to-do list!
When two new accounts would like to meet at your property over the same timeframe, use hotel business intelligence data to determine if there is greater potential with one versus the other. Then you can decide whom you will give the meeting space to. For the other account, don’t give up! See if they can move their dates. Even if they can’t, keep them on your radar for future events they may hold so your property can be a primary candidate for the venue.
5. Expedite decision-making with data-based insights
Does your sales team hold daily or weekly business reviews? Do they seem like they need help staying organized? Team members may need help deciding which accounts to target or which contract to accept. Use historical booking data to evaluate essential details that give you an understanding of the total account value and year-over-year trends for the accounts you discuss. Have these details at hand to help your daily business reviews go smoothly and get the decisions you need to advance your sales pipeline.
Read more about data-based hotel sales in our blog: The Data-Driven Hotel Sales Team
6. Be ready to negotiate based on the account value
It’s not out of the question for a new account to ask for discounted services for their upcoming sales meeting while dangling more extensive meetings in the future. The meeting planner may even suggest that they will give you a more lucrative annual meeting at your property if a smaller first booking goes well. Using historical data insights, you can quickly determine the total revenue value of the account across multiple bookings. This will help you decide if it makes sense to offer a discount for the sake of future business.
Increase Hotel Revenue Using Historical Group Event Data
These are only a few examples of how hoteliers can increase productivity and streamline sales decisions for optimal revenue and profitability. By leveraging Knowland’s Market Segmentation Analysis tool, hotels can:
- Strategically expand group business by using data to determine the top market drivers of actual group activity by account, market, brand, and hotel comp set
- Compare specific hotel comp set data and booking share.
- Adjust your sales strategy based on the changing group market conditions and competitive intelligence so you can stay ahead of the competition.
If your property is being outperformed by competitors, you can use this data to take action. Start shifting share to your property by specifically targeting those market segments booking in your competitive set.
Read more about the Market Segmentation Analysis tool available only through Knowland.
Ready to Use Data to Increase Hotel Revenue?
Would you like to see how you can use Knowland’s data insights to increase revenue for your hotel? Schedule time with our team. Ask them how to get alerts sent directly to you with insights into:
- The most active industries. Each month, you can receive a list of the three most active industries in your sub-market for the previous month, plus an Excel attachment with up to 25 top accounts from those industries.
- Recent account activity. Receive an email when your targeted accounts show activity that matches your personalized filters.
We’ll also discuss your market and sub-market activity and demonstrate how Knowland gives you information you can’t find anywhere else to drive revenue.
