How can leaders better break down data silos to foster a culture of collaboration and data sharing? In a recent webinar with Knowland and Thynk, we explored topics to achieve greater sales and revenue success. During the webinar, we conducted an online poll with the attendees to gain insight into how today’s hoteliers are breaking out of data silos (or are they?)
Patrica Shea, SVP of Revenue at Knowland, and Chris Sisa, Director of Sales at Thynk, were tapped to provide insight into how collaborative data analytics can drive new revenue.
Our first poll questions asked: To what degree does your organization operate in data silos. 51% of attendees indicated they need help engaging with some departments, while 33% indicated that most departments operate independently. Only 14% revealed that their teams are totally connected.
Responses to the question, What is your biggest challenge when it comes to data sharing and collaboration across departments gave us a clear indication that there is much work to be done, with 47% of attendees indicating they have issues with all of the listed challenges, including:
- A lack of clear guidelines or protocols for data access (10%),
- Departmental resistance to sharing data (6%),
- Difficulty integrating data from different systems (19%), and
- Too many data sources (18%)
Strategies for Reducing Data Silos
In today’s fast-paced environment, seamlessly integrating and analyzing data across departments can be the key to unlocking new revenue streams. However, organizations have not traditionally structured themselves to foster data sharing. With that in mind, organizations are evolving operationally to enable the exchange of information and data-sharing strategies.
One of the most encouraging differences Knowland has seen is the continued implementation of a commercial team structure within hotel organizations vs. separate revenue, marketing, and sales functions. For instance, revenue leaders involved in account-based selling can better decide what industries and accounts to target to drive business.
Shea said, “If we’re honest, even before we started using the term Commercial Strategy, the most successful Revenue Managers and Sales Leaders knew they had to work in lockstep. But now the tools and data availability are coming along to help enable what leaders instinctively knew all along.”
Sisa noted that siloed solutions and needing more than one source of truth is a key challenge today. “We see sales, ops, revenue, and marketing working in different solutions which do not necessarily talk to each other or are not easily accessible by other parts of the organization. This becomes especially problematic in a multi-property environment. Sales, revenue, operations, and marketing need to be in lockstep. He also pointed out that the first step is ensuring you work with clean data.
To summarize the key strategies for breaking down silos:
- Lean into commercial strategy, building connections between sales, revenue, and marketing.
- Give above-property leaders access to the same data as on-property leaders to see the trends and understand the strategy.
- Don’t leave management companies out of the data loop – they are an advocate for informed decision-making.
Frameworks for Proactive Sales Planning
The second topic we discussed was how teams can leverage frameworks for proactive sales planning.
The discussion continued with a poll question: What department could benefit most from data collaboration regarding sales data? An overwhelming 92% responded to “all of the above,” which included sales, marketing, revenue, and development.
Unified data can empower your teams to create proactive sales plans, effectively monitor market trends, and adapt strategies in real-time. However, in today’s RFP-driven environment, finding the time to nurture account relationships and build repeat business is challenging. How can you modify your sales approach to leverage organizational data to find new sources of revenue from current and new accounts?
Sisa noted the importance of empowering the sales team to interact with the account by providing access to historical account production, rooms only vs. groups vs. corporate, individual, etc. This should be broken down by production nights and ADR by day of the week. Even taking it down to a granular level, such as pet and parking fees in real-time compared to static reporting, can empower your sales team.
This kind of data also helps prioritize which accounts may need special attention and aids in developing strategies for maximizing future revenues from an account. In the current competitive landscape, accessing these data points rolled up and viewed in totals or by region is a must at a corporate level.
Shea agreed. “When looking at overall account planning, one of the most common challenges we see are sellers relying too much on internal data and not thinking through how the overall market production of an account might impact their strategy for that account.”
When you can layer account data from internal and external sources, you can easily identify an account to focus on for acquisition versus a maintenance account and a growth account.
“Whether it’s an inbound lead or a proactive approach, sellers know where to spend their time when all the information is aligned. Once they identify their must-win targets, it’s exciting to see teams leveraging creative solutions such as tapping into new technologies such as AI. For instance, we work with one organization that is using AI to mine the social media presence of companies and decision-makers to personalize RFP responses and site visits,” Shea said.
Steps to Solidify a Proactive Sales Strategy
To summarize what we have learned for building the framework for proactive sales:
- Understand the account booking history and your probability of a win to know which inbound leads to spend time on.
- See how to penetrate existing accounts to maximize total account revenue, including corporate, group, catering, meetings, etc.
- Look beyond internal data to uncover accounts and markets with booking potential for your property.
- Understand account booking behavior and preferences to build account-based selling strategies that target industries, competitor bookings, or new business in your market.
Knowland has the data your teams need to implement this framework. To learn more, speak to an expert about our sales intelligence platform.
