Sales clinic: GM has the ultimate responsibility for the sales effort

It really doesn’t matter how large or small a property may be, or the type or size of a hotel. The one person who needs to accept the overall responsibility for profitable sales is the property’s general manager. All too often, we see entirely too much delegated to the director of sales or the director of marketing. No question about it, there should be the burden of the job being accomplished by those heads and their staffs. Of all the operating departments in a property, sales is the one that generates the business to bring in the revenue. A GM should be vitally interested in knowing what is going on in that area.

One big question a general manager should be interested in is: “How productive is our sales team, and how could we make salespeople more productive?” The GM should provide a variety of research upon which sales staffers can create strategies to obtain more business from various market segments.

I have written before about the business of market segment analysis based on information gathered at the property about the various market segments and the amount of business generated by each segment. This analysis should be followed by additional analysis to determine which market segment needs to have its business increased to create more profitable sales. After this information is acquired, strategies are then determined on how to do this.

What also needs to be examined is what competitors are doing in regard to those same market segments. As an example, if it is the corporate group market that appears to be the most profitable and a property has been getting 10 percent of its total business from that segment, then perhaps this is the segment that needs to be increased by another 10 percent to make it 20 percent of total business in the coming year. But how much of this market segment business is also staying at properties that are competitors?

This information is difficult to get, unless another source can do this for you. Having been in the business for more than 10 years, TravelClick (www.travelclick.com) has specialized in generating a wide variety of data to member hotel properties, such as providing comparative figures of revenue-generating sources among a competitive set of hotels. This helps provide information to a sales department to aid in determining how much more business for a market segment might be out there. A GM also would want the sales department to find out why the competitor is getting more business and how the hotel is doing it.

According to Tim Hart, TravelClick’s EVP of information intelligence, GMs can find a wide variety of additional research information available from TravelClick, including a quarterly report that focuses on demand performance of booking channels, segments of hotels and loyalty programs. For more information, contact Hart at: lholmes@travelclick.com.