Hotel Sales Teams: Two Sales Tasks You Can Do This Week To Get Ready For The Rebound - By Doug Kennedy

About Doug Kennedy

Doug Kennedy is President of the Kennedy Training Network, Inc. a leading provider of hotel sales, guest service, reservations, and front desk training programs and telephone mystery shopping services for the lodging and hospitality industry

Since 1996, Doug’s monthly training articles have been published worldwide, making him one of the most widely read hospitality industry authorities

For most hotels in North America, the sales team is entering week three of the Covid19 disruption. The first week or so was just crazy, as salespeople from all market segments endured a frantic wave of cancelations and postponements.  Just as that wave was starting to pass, most sales leaders had to make the difficult move of furloughing or laying off sales staff to pare down the payroll costs

Rather than signing off work early, here are two sales-related tasks you can do right now to get ready for the rebound, with more to come soon in my future blogs published here.

1) Reach out personally to your key client contacts.Instead, use your time to connect personally one-to-one.  For your very top tier, long-term clients, consider a phone call during their local business hours. State upfront that you are just calling to check on them personally. For most clients, a personal email is the best medium. While it’s okay to start with a template for an opening and ending, be sure to include something in the first few sentences that shows the receiver it’s genuine, not generic.

2) Master the use of your sales CRM.  When travel fully reopens, the competition is going to be greater than ever for the leads that resurface first.  

Instead, they use a mixed bag of inefficient tools such as flagged emails, calendar appointments, post-it notes and handwritten notes scribbled on print-outs of RFP’s.  This is a great time to become hyper-organized so you can be efficient later when the pent-up demand breaks through the barrier.

Register for the online tutorials that most sales CRMs offer, or to schedule a screen-share meeting with a coworker or friend to share tips and tactics.  Clean-up your CRM “task lists” and eliminate the past-due ones that have been haunting you for too long now. Get with your system administrator and redo the “auto-tasks” that occur when business goes definite, so they match what you truly need, and don’t clog-up your future lists with red flags.