Knowland has teamed up with the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) to publish a whitepaper – GETTING TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS, Why meetings market data intelligence is a hotel’s answer to more successful prospecting – and a smarter long-term strategy for group sales.
Themed around the impact of technological innovation on hotel group sales, the whitepaper offers hotels some insights and strategies into competing in a changing landscape. The hotels that will win more share are the ones that harness technology without losing sight of the basics of personalized selling, which remain true today.
Take inbound leads. So pervasive is technology-driven inbound leads that it has created a two-prong problem. First, hotel sales staff have lost the art of basic personalized, engaged selling due to an overreliance on email responses to eRFPs. Secondly, the unintentional consequences of eRFPs have created weak outbound selling skills, causing sales staff to shy away from prospecting altogether or simply not doing it effectively. Smarter selling involves using the right tools to gather the right intel or insights to understand the prospect’s prior behavior or patterns before ever picking up the phone or penning that email.
In effect, technology has made it easier to sort through inbound leads, but at the same time it also made it easier for these leads to proliferate. Hotels are being inundated with leads all which have to be responded to in most cases, that will never matriculate to a booking. It goes with saying that hotels risk losing the opportunity to optimize their revenues strategies if they do not have access to a system of scoring and prioritizing leads. Furthermore, the abundance of inbound leads may lull hotels into a false sense of security to the point where they don’t give the necessary attention to outbound sales activities.
This concept becomes even more compelling as we enter into uncertain times and a changing landscape. Hotels that secure more group business today will be the leaders in RevPar as demand growth lags supply growth.
Check out the whitepaper at https://info.knowland.com/hsmai-white-paper
