The hospitality industry is a vast business arena with many responsible departments. Sales are one of the most important ones. At the end of the day, what we are running here is a business. If you are an aspiring sales manager, an upcoming sales executive, or a current sales director, there‘s always room for learning and improvement.
Sales teams and their leaders are often struggling to find ways to make their properties stand out from the competition – incentives, free giveaways, mailing campaigns, and even cold calling, unfortunately, no longer work as effectively as they used to. To compete, hotels must step up their digital game.
This is where a holistic sales strategy comes into play. Your hotel’s sales strategies should reflect your commitment to the guest experience, while emphasising the importance of securing as many room bookings as possible for every available room night. Whether it’s the peak season or the offseason, you’ll want to develop hotel room selling techniques that are designed to increase profitability, and digital tools with cloud computing technology are here to help you.
Let this 4-part journey show you how digital transformation and cloud-based technology can help you take corporate sales to new heights through a couple of simple yet effective strategies.
Part 1: Showcasing the Best of Your Hotel
Rule #1, before you can sell, you need to market. No one has ever had a successful hotel sales department without a strong, clear and compelling marketing plan – and when it comes to modern hotel marketing, there’s no greater medium for successful marketing campaigns than digital. From a seamless website to engaging social media channels, targeted digital Ads and informative Online Travel Agency (OTA) listings. Digital is here to stay and an absolute must.
Need an example? Consider Airbnb. You can argue that they’re just an aggregator of property listing, but no other company has used the power digital to their full advantage in the hospitality space like Airbnb. They’ve recognized the importance of having a strong digital presence by showcasing all of their properties and rooms in an online experiential way. They promote the full experience that their properties offer, and allow potential guests to experience the places visually before physically arriving.
But crafting an effective digital presence initially doesn’t require venture capital backing like Airbnb. In fact, there’s plenty of management softwares out there to help get your hotel’s digital footprint well placed. Good hotel management software could include such functions as a booking engine for customers to book their reservations themselves which leads to more direct bookings. This is why it more than important to have a good impression of your hotel because, with digital tools, your guests will be booking it in no time.
- One tool I’ve found invaluable is Yext. Imagine having one central platform where you upload and update all the information and available imagery for your property and it distributes the info across all major public channels – Google, Facebook, Instagram, Bing, Foursquare, TripAdvisor etc. all managed on one central platform so your potential guests get the same, accurate information every time.When a tool like Yext is active, bookings will run quickly and smoothly while allowing you to focus on just one channel to regularly update. So the only thing you need to do to ensure higher sales is to showcase your hotel in the best way possible!
Part 2: Conducting Exceptional Market Research & Knowing Your Audience
Market research, customer insight — they both mean tapping into a business’s greatest resource: Its customer base. But it can also mean identifying new opportunities, brand improvement, knowing your competitors, and more.
Successful salespeople and marketers use market research to keep up with trends, make better business decisions, and maintain their company’s competitive edge. This ultimately leads to increased sales over time.
Become a partner and a friend to your customer and always deliver value. Knowing your audience is also very important. The expectation for you or your team should be to demonstrate a genuine interest in your customers’ businesses. Build a relationship, plain and simple. Know your customer and understand the needs and nuances. And then share that knowledge with your guest service/internal teams. Remember, this is a ‘service’ industry.
As a Sales Manager, you are responsible for developing and fostering business through pro-active direct sales, marketing, telemarketing, direct mail, appointment calls and tours of the hotel. You also develop strategic action plans to drive measurable, incremental sales revenue for your hotel. But if you’re operating solo or with limited resources, how on earth are you supposed to achieve all of this?
- Digital transformation in your workplace can help with this immensely. Revinate is a premium software used by big companies all around the world.Not only it can give you strong marketing tools with a personal touch but also a vast functionality through which you will know your guest’s satisfaction, understand how they book, and more
Part 3: Empower Your Social Media Game
In today’s tech-savvy world, social media plays a powerful role to boost almost all businesses, whether it‘s a pastry shop or a big hotel.
With the help of social media channels, you can reach a lot of potential customers and spread your brand name within communities. Those who want to stay on top will use social networks to their advantage as a powerful marketing tool, while those who don’t use social networks to their maximum potential are getting left behind.
A powerful social media marketing and managing cycle gives customers a greater willingness to spend and helps increase hotel revenue.
Yet again, cloud-based technology can adapt to your needs and can help empower your social media game to increase sales.
- With software such as Buffer you will combine several social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) into one platform — from content scheduling to monitoring and reporting as well as in-depth analysis, buffer is the perfect tool to manage social.It is one of the few social media management tools that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, with a free account option for linking up to three (3) accounts and just AU$15 a month to manage up to eight (8) accounts. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them which will eventually boost your bookings and sales.
Conclusion
While sales-based businesses should always carefully consider their plans, processes, and aims before undergoing a full cloud transformation, it is possible to start enjoying some of the benefits of the cloud quickly and easily, without uprooting your entire way of working.
A good starting point is by checking out SaaS applications and getting a better understanding of how the cloud can fit into your sales team. Start the digital transformation today to win the future.
Need more guidance? Let’s have a chat.
