How challenging is it to bring more sales to your hotel? Is the market getting tougher? And is the competition playing a big role? The questions never end.
How can you as a hotel sales team member overcome these challenges? How can you ensure maximum sales with optimal effort?
With the hotel sales team being the backbone of any hotel, every hotel owner and General Manager wants its sales people to bring more business, close more deals, meet the target etc. Is it really possible to keep up?
With the constant change in markets, influence of technology, and unpredictable patterns of travel bookers, it is difficult to just follow the traditional sales path. Or rather they are just not good enough.
Here are some tips for you as a core member of the hotel sales team to become more productive and grow both professionally and personally. Interested? Read on.
Key success factors :
- Consultative approach – Understand the pain point of the customer, understand their need and based on that give the solution/educate the buyer. Speak the language of the buyer and conversion can become easier.
- Quality, qualify, qualify – The only way you can make best use of your time and effort is by qualifying the leads. Know your target audience. Do your homework before speaking to clients.
- Join networking forums – Networking is key to business – it is not taught at universities, but nevertheless extremely critical even in the age of technology. It is important for any sales team to be a part of forums to meet people and explore new business opportunities. Few forums like BNI, SKAL, Yceeya are well known.
- Training – Meaningful training programme can help you develop professionally and personally. Download the sales training document to plan better for 2016.
- Follow ups – Some people follow up a few times and give up. But a successful sales team knows the beauty of follow up. They know that persistence (without being annoying) is key to close a deal.
- Motivation – Different people work in different style and are motivated differently. For some money is the motivation, some are self motivated, some needs their ideas to be considered etc. Understand what drives you!
- Referrals – Positive referrals are the best kind of marketing and they are free. It is important for the sales team to build on existing relationships for future sales. And don’t forget to ask for referrals from happy customers.
- Related sales – Loyal customers also generate related sales. It is easier to sell to existing customer than to convert a new one.
- Listen more – Hotel sales teams are notorious for their excitement to explain every detail about their hotel. And they very often forget to listen to the other party and ask questions. To be productive, cultivate listening skills.
- Personal touch – It is not all about work. Raise a topic outside the work, know the personal side, show empathy and you can win a person.
- Manage people well – As Richard Branson says“learn to look after your staff and the rest will follow. The way you treat your employee is the way they will treat your customers”.
- Sales process – Good sales process helps in maximising sales time.
Hope you enjoyed reading this article. Do comment or share if you liked.
How do you keep your hotel sales team productive?