By: Chelsea Madden
As 2020 budgets are getting firmed up, Knowland and our partner, Kennedy Training Network, are getting asked, “How much should we budget for proactive sales training and solutions next year?”
Hotels know group will be their best defense in the suspected downturn next year. And as they take a hard look at their Group sales teams in preparation, they know they need to shore up their proactive sales skills.
This challenge is due to properties hinging their success on the demand boom market conditions and flow of inbound RFP leads centered around Cvent. With market conditions threatening to change, they now find themselves with a Cvent vise grip around their neck that they cannot shake loose and a group sales team that must evolve to stay relevant.
Investing in upskilling sales managers to proactively sell group and giving them solutions like Knowland to do it effectively deserves a line item in your budget. This investment will return a 10x multiple back to the hotel.
[All above property organizations, you must implement a Proactive Group Sales Strategy to all your hotels – you cannot afford not to.]
Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Start to unpack your group metrics. If they are all focused around the Cvent activity measurements, then you will not have a true picture of performance.
- Separate your “farmers” or gatherers from your “hunters.” Put your hunters on your most profitable group segments.
- Give your group sales team access to the right solutions to enable their Proactive Group Sales Strategy, like Knowland. Use the Knowland SmartSearch capability with the most cutting-edge search technology which stacks and ranks accounts and events by “best-fit” to your property. This will give your teams a pipeline of prospects to call into because they have been identified as a good fit based on your property attributes.
- Use our email template to win more business with targeted and informed messages.
The tips don’t stop there. We partnered with Doug Kennedy with Kennedy Training Network to develop a :15 minute video clip which talks about three forces that have created this challenge within our industry, dispels the “urban legend” that hotel sales managers need to respond fast and first to win group business needs and provides proactive selling tips to make your properties more successful and more profitable.