Hotel Sales And Marketing

At Event Temple, it’s our goal to help you increase your Hotel Sales And Marketing. To help you succeed, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to help you. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or brand new to working in the hospitality industry, you’ll find a lot of actionable resources you can use to grow RevPAR, your sales career and more, right here!

Whether you’re a seasoned pro, or you're just starting out in the industry, we hope you'll discover some new tips, tools and strategies in the following guide.

To help make finding what you need easier, we've split the guide into six main sections.

In the age of OTAs (online travel agencies) like Booking.com and Expedia, and mega brands like Marriott and Hilton, it’s easy to think that all you need to do is build the hotel and the marketing is done for you.

Your Booking and Expedia listings will generate leads and the rest of your available rooms will be filled in with business sent to you from your hotel brand’s corporate team. But of course, like anything in life, what was once a wide open opportunity quickly becomes saturated with competition and suddenly you aren’t doing as well as you’d like to.

Whether you work at a hotel, manage one, work in hospitality sales or are a hotel owner or investor, it’s important to know that your success is in your hands.

That’s what this guide is all about.It’s hard to succeed in life by passively waiting for great results to come your way and hotels are no different. To beat the competition in your market, you need to do more than wait and hope. The good news is that a well executed plan can generate above-average results for your hotel. You just need to commit to the process and follow through consistently.

Generally that means identifying key targets (called market segments) to go after and then generating a proactive plan that includes research, prospecting, relationship building, service delivery, relationship management and tracking. Implementing a hotel sales and marketing strategy can be as simple or as complex as you make it.

The main goal of this guide is to provide value to everyone reading it, regardless of whether you are an advanced hotel Director Of Sales or a beginner who’s thinking about potentially working in the field. Our hope with this guide is that we will give the beginners enough information about the basics, intermediate salespeople some tips to increase performance and pros some insights to supercharge their results.
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We’ll cover every aspect of hotel sales from groups, events, catering, software and more. So, let’s dive in

Learning about Hotel Sales and the tools used is all well and good, but how do you generate prospects?

At Event Temple, we call inquiries, prospects and potential business all: “hotel sales leads”. There are really three main ways to generate leads.

The first is through Sales, the second is through Marketing and the third is through building relationships with your existing Hotel Guests.

A Sales Lead is really someone whom you have prospected. Prospecting means making a list of potential customers and then proactively making contact with them to see if they have any interest in staying at your hotel, or referring your property to someone at their company. Of course, in a perfect world, prospecting would be as easy as dropping in to visit a new business in person, or sending out a few emails.

In reality though, prospecting requires a deeper sales strategy based on a few key factors including your Comp Set (the competitors in your area) and the Market Segments you are going after. Additionally, your Sales team will need to work closely with your Revenue Management team in designing your proactive prospecting strategy to ensure you get the right mix of business. You’ll need to balance the right market segments with the right types of business (leisure, transient/corporate, groups/events). Prospecting is a loaded topic, but we will provide additional education on our Blog and Mailing List at Event Temple.

A Marketing Lead is someone generated through your Hotel Digital Marketing initiatives. This can include email marketing, social media, paid-per-click advertising, OTA advertising, your website, landing pages or any other form of online marketing. The easiest distinction here is that a Sales Lead is pro-actively generated through your sales team’s prospecting and relationship-building activities. A Marketing Lead is passively generated through an online marketing initiative or campaign.

The last way to generate leads for your hotel is through building relationships with your existing hotel guests. We recommend going into the bar or lobby and getting to know the guests. Ask them what brings them to your hotel and if they are there on business or for a big project, probe deeper. Be authentic and real and do whatever you can do to make their stay more enjoyable.

Mine your PMS for corporate emails and reach out to them if you weren’t able to meet them in the lobby - ideally while they are still at the property or within a day or so of leaving. Let them know you appreciate and value their business and you’d be surprised how many sales opportunities are already staying at your property. Think of it as creating a mini referral network where you’ll convince existing guests to come back more often and hopefully bring their friends, family and co-workers too. They’ll also provide you with important insights about what is going on in your market. In our experience, the very best salespeople start here, with their existing guests.

Getting the leads is one thing, but if you don’t follow up with them properly, you are likely to lose their business. That’s why we always teach our hoteliers that “getting the lead” is only the beginning. Hotel Lead Management is one of the most important success factors to look at when evaluating the performance of your Hotel Sales Plan.

First, you don’t want to have a “leaky bucket”, which is when you have a sales pipeline filled with leads but no follow up. Instead, we recommend using a systematic approach where you map out each step in your sales process for various types of business. Corporate Travellers, Groups and Events are good places to start.

We also recommend setting up tracking for your various referral sources where they are likely to find you online. This includes all of the major advertising you are doing such as Cvent, Hotel Planner, but also Prospecting. We recommend tracking Market Segments.Finally, good lead management involves tracking which salesperson owns the lead and what their next step with that Deal is.

We recommend that hoteliers always have a next step. Mapping out all of your Referral Sources, Market Segments, Sales Pipeline Steps and Follow Up Steps into a visual process is an integral part of any Hotel Sales Plan.The right software tools do this right in the program, but it can be done manually in Google Docs or Excel as well.

Whatever you choose to use, we recommend you spend a day or two planning your strategy and making your Sales Activities clear. Then, when reporting on the success of your Lead Management, you can measure your team’s actual performance against your plan and fix any mistakes or shortcomings.

Plan first, then act.

Pretend for a moment that you have a hotel with 100 rooms, selling for $100 a night each. You have 365 nights a year to sell those rooms. That’s a total opportunity of $3,650,000 if you sell every room for $100 a night. But of course, some nights will be more popular than others. As well, some seasons will be more popular with certain traveller types than others. Events, Time of Year, Business Type and Day Of The Week will all impact your revenue. The process of weighing these factors against each other to decide which business to accept and which business to reject is called Revenue Management.

We recommend that everyone in hotel sales and marketing learns at least the basics of Revenue Management at some point on, early in their career if possible. That’s because Revenue Managers can cause salespeople a lot of frustration and vice versa without the correct background knowledge. Once you understand that your job in Sales is completely aligned with the Revenue Managers goal, you can both work together to create a plan to optimize revenue based on deep data insights.

Average daily rate is calculated by dividing the price of the room by the number of rooms sold on a given day. ADR is typically calculated alongside occupancy rate. Occupancy rate is the ratio of occupied rooms versus total available rooms.

When the ADR and occupancy rate are combined, it will give you ‘revenue per available room’ or RevPAR. When you multiply your ADR with your occupancy rate, you will get your RevPar.

SMERF stands for Social, Military, Educational, Religious and Fraternal groups. It is used to describe hotel market segments. There are other market segments too such as Entertainment and Sports.

A negotiated rate is an agreement by a Contact, Company or Organization to book a certain number of room nights in a given time period, in exchange for a discounted rate at your hotel. Though seldom enforceable, these negotiated rates are often agreed to contractually between the hotel and the Contact/Account. These are often called “Negotiated Rates”, “Corporate Rate Agreements”, “Local Negotiated Rates” or “LNR”.

In Hotel Sales, a budget is essentially a sales forecast. For each month, you budget what the expected revenue and occupancy will be for various business types. For example, you might plan to generate $200,000 from Group Business in June, $250,000 in July, etc. Some budgets are very simple and only assign revenue amounts per each forward-looking month, while other budgets are quite complex and include market segments, revenue targets and more. Normally budgets are set through collaboration between the hotel’s sales and revenue management teams.

Once a budget is set, hotels use Pace Reports to monitor their performance against their goals.

The main numbers used in a Pace Report are:
-Actual performance against budget
-Actual performance vs same time last year

Performance is typically measured by RevPAR, ADR and Occupancy but is also tracked by revenue.Pace reports can be used for groups, catering, events, corporate rate agreements and more.
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When someone inquires with your hotel about group business or an event at your property, it is standard to respond by sending them a Hotel Proposal. Normally, a prospect will request a proposal from several hotels to get a better idea of best value for their money.

The proposal includes a formal quote with a cost breakdown as well as any notes and details that are relevant to their group or event. We have found that proposals that are sent quickly, look beautiful, are informative and are easy to sign digitally are normally the proposals that convert the highest number of leads to bookings.

To successfully negotiate more corporate rate agreements and to book more groups and events you’ll need to create a comprehensive sales strategy. Our goal at Event Temple is to provide education that empowers hoteliers like you to create more effective strategies that you can leverage to gain better results more quickly and outperform your competitors.

Building a successful strategy comes from answering a few key questions about your unique situation. From there, you can build an actionable plan that addresses your property's sales goals. For each action item in your sales strategy, ensure they are within your control to execute and clearly measurable.

Answering all of the questions outlined in this guide is imperative in developing a sales strategy. If it seems daunting don’t worry, we'll cover more details, tips and tricks in our blog, ebooks, webinars and more! We also provide free resources like proposal templates, BEO templates and others.