How Select Service and Boutique Hotels Can Source Group Business Today
To support hotels during COVID-19, Knowland introduced a solution to help small hotels prospect group business despite today’s constrained market and a lack of inbound RFPs.
Did you know there is a better way to sell group business? There is, and the team here at Knowland understands the challenges you and your sales teams are facing today! To help select service and boutique hotels stay ahead of the competition we are offering limited access to our prospecting solution in order to help you increase meeting revenue in today’s highly constrained market.
Hotels need group business to achieve profitability
We know that in order to move your property along the path to profitability, you will likely be fairly dependent on group business. That’s why we launched Knowland Prospector® to help improve the effectiveness of sales staff, no matter how small, by providing an opportunity to source and win small group business.
Click here to learn more about Knowland Prospector.
While we look to the future with hope in our hearts, the inertia of uncertainty can have a devastating impact on those hotels who wait. If you are waiting for things to look up before re-engaging in sales prospecting, it is likely that your competition is already gaining ground by grabbing new business opportunities.
We know from our historical data that past events such as the SARS outbreak or 9/11, while initially slowing down group meetings and events, the industry bounced back locally, then regionally and finally nationally.
The importance of prospecting in the absence of inbound RFPs
We believe that prospecting will be the tool that will provides smaller hotels with an advantage to compete and win meeting business they may have overlooked in the past. Here’s why:
- Knowland’s Prospector delivers more prospects to optimize sales productivity. By putting your staff to work with proactive selling you can more quickly turn them into hunters, not farmers. This is evidenced by the fact that many sales activities have relied on RFPs in the past to drive sales. Times have changed! We need to step back and take a hard look at today’s sales strategies and stop waiting around for inbound prospects.
- You need to learn which prospects are resilient in recovery. That means searching for those customers that are within your local drive market. What if you could filter by event size according to local market guidelines? What if you could see prospects with booking history from previous recessions or downturns? Well, you can with Prospector.
- Target prospects with behaviors that fit your hotel profile as well as today’s gathering restrictions. If you have the advantage of understanding accounts that are booking in your competitive set, you can analyze and target the prospects that book with similar brands and/or chain sales. Additionally, Prospector helps you identify prospects with meeting sizes that fit your local gathering guidelines as well as your hotel’s meeting space.
While the news makes it seem like there is no meeting business today, our data shows that there has been over 600% growth in meetings over the last 60 days. Are you getting your share of these meetings? Now is not the time to sit on your hands. Now is the time to act. This limited time offer will be available to qualifying hotels in select markets.