RED ALERT! We have read recently several articles in industry publications that maintain that a hospitality sales person's number one priority should be taking care of existing customers - In response to these articles, we want to urge you to consider the ramifications of this suggested priority.
We would not want new, or inexperienced sales people developing erroneous strategies that could cause long term detriments to productivity.
Consider for a moment what the results of placing the majority of your efforts into existing customers would realize. You would certainly have a loyal customer base. You would have accelerated the rapport building process to a point where hopefully you would have evolved from a customer / sales person basis into a friend / friend basis.
You would be in a position to clearly know and understand your customer's needs and decision making factors. You would also have allowed the customer to thoroughly know you and your hotel's services, amenities and limitations. Most importantly, you will have eliminated your customer's need to utilize a competing property or city.
All of this is excellent and should be considered a critical component of a hospitality sales person task.
If you have an existing customer who has an annual event, you certainly need to maintain your relationship and contact should be frequent in order to assure that this annual event returns to your property or city year after year.
If you have a customer who has periodic meetings, you must insure that the customer remains satisfied and that you never give them a reason to explore competing cities or hotels. This translates in frequent contact whether business or personal.
If you have an existing customer who controls a frequent volume, or corporate contract account, you must do whatever is necessary to stay on top of the account and insure that each of the travelers are serviced and satisfied. This means periodic contact with the actual travelers as well as contact with the travel planner.
There can be no doubt that a critical component of a hospitality sales person's task is to maintain and strengthen the relationships that they have with existing customers.
However, we urge you to consider this prospect. If all you do in 1995 is to maintain your existing accounts, generating the same room nights, the best productivity you can hope for, will be flat with last years'.
If you are ever to increase your productivity, then clearly the lifeblood of the hotel sales industry is the ability to identify and land new accounts. While this is not to say that we should ever ignore our current and satisfied accounts, in fact great measures need to be taken to protect and maintain our existing account base, the fact remains that you must spend time developing new accounts if you are ever to see an increase in production.
Make no mistake, the single biggest common denominator that exists amongst truly great hospitality sales people is their ability to land new accounts.
In the hundreds of hotel sales offices we have studied, we notice that there is one specific pitfall that exist in each of them. We have yet to find an exception to this phenomenon. Every hotel sales office, regardless of size or location, shares this pitfall in common. The difference between successful and marginally successful hotels is that the successful hotels realize that this pitfall exists and address it on a daily basis.
This pitfall is the fact that most sales people are so bogged down with the administrative and servicing ramifications of their jobs that they do not spending the majority of their time selling.
There are only three things a hotel sales person can do with their day... sell, service and administer. We define selling as being in the face of, over the phone with or breaking bread with a client. No other conditions can be met to satisfy the criteria for selling.
Servicing is defined as any time you are meeting with a customer who is already booked, whether they have something currently on the books or will shortly. Administering is simply every time you touch a piece of paper or attend a meeting.
Our studies indicate that the average amount of time spent each day, between 9am and 5pm, in the selling mode, according to our definition, is 14%. Yet, one of the common denominators that exists amongst the truly great hotel sales people is that they are able to spend as much as 75% of their day selling between 9a-5p!
A hotel sales person must quickly understand that there are only three types of business that exist. Those that use you, those that don't use anyone and those that are using your competitors. Clearly, the major objective of any hotel sales person is to maintain those accounts that use you and to make every effort to land those accounts that use the competition.
This is often referred to as passive selling versus active selling. Passive selling is when an account comes to you. Active selling is when you identify a new account, conduct your homework, make a presentation to it and then land it.
There is a huge difference between a suspect and a prospect. A suspect is an account that has business but can never utilize your hotel. A prospect is an account that has business and does fit within the perimeters of your hotel. Identifying new accounts is the process of finding out who can book with you and who fits within your perimeters.
The single biggest common denominator that exist amongst the truly great hotel sales people is that they utilize a flat list in their identification of new accounts solicitation efforts.
What is a flat list? It is a perpetuating list of between 30 - 50 new accounts. It is called a perpetuating list in that every time you contact a name off of the list it needs to be replaced with yet another new name sometime that same week. The list should be self contained. It is not the MPI, CSAE, etc. directory. It is not simply a collection of "post-its" or business cards. It is a list of names, affiliations and phone numbers that should never leave your desktop. The most critical dimension to a flat list is that you should set aside a least one hour every day to work on it.
Consider this for a moment. If you set aside one hour every day to do nothing but contact names off of your flat list is it reasonable to believe that you could get through to five new accounts every day? While you may have to contact ten names to actually speak with five new accounts and many of the accounts you ultimately get through to will call you back after the hour time frame you spent calling them, we believe it is in fact conservative to make five new contacts every day.
If you are able to speak with five new accounts in a day this translates into 25 new contacts per week, 100 new contact per month and 1,200 new contacts per year. As a result of utilizing this method of an hour a day on your flat list, it is clear that you have the ability to contact an enormous amount of new accounts in a year's period.
Don't take our word for it. There is overwhelming evidence that this is the method that great hotel sales people implement into their routines every day. Logically, if it works for them, it should work for you also.
Sources for your flat list include the following:
Current in house customers
Existing customers
Reservations
Local civic organizations
Industry related organizations
Your competitors
Local newspapers and periodicals
Top producing travel agents
Local city government, county seats
Local churches, universities, hospitals
Local real estate re-location offices
Non-traditional sources, ie. funeral homes, pest control operators, etc.
Local Parks & Rec departments
Local Office of Economic Development
Local Chamber of Commerce
Local airline & car rental Area Reps
While no doubt there are dozens of other sources for a flat list, the key is that you must employe a strict discipline to identify these new sources of business, write them down on your flat list and then spend a hour a day soliciting them.
The cycle of booking new business is to identify it, do your homework, contact, go visit, bring them on-site and then book it. It is critical that hotel sales people spend time identifying new accounts and then developing their presentations. Considering that the alternative to this process is to spend your day servicing or administering existing accounts it only makes sense that you spend your time wisely developing new ones.
If a sales person is to subscribe to the strategy of maintaining existing accounts as their number one priority, it is unlikely that they will ever have time to develop new ones. Remember, your existing accounts were new once and now that you have spent time with them they know what you have to offer, what your services are, what your pricing is and what types of servicing they will receive.
As a result of this process, a sales person should not have to spend as much time with their current accounts any more. You know them, they know you! You shouldn't have to spend as much time with them, thus leaving you time to develop new accounts.
If you are having lunch, making outside calls, making trace calls or making appointments at trade shows with the same customers month in and month out you are probably doing so because it is safe and comfortable with no threat of rejection. After all, these customers have become your pals.
However, this cannot be your priority! Consider this prospect. What will you do if, despite your outstanding relationships with your existing customers they stop using your city or property? What if they close down your local plant or office? What if the members decide to go to another location for a change? What if there is a sharp drop in the business economy thus eliminating the need for meetings and in-bound travelers? If you have not spent time developing new accounts, you could be in big trouble. Further, if a sales person ever goes too long without concentrating on new accounts, the results of this lag time are usually not felt for several months by which time it is far too late to recover.
Please do not misunderstand us. The ability to maintain your existing accounts is critical however, a smart sales person also balances this strategy with a strong identification of new accounts procedure. It would be a false direction to spend all of your time with existing customers as some of these recent articles suggest. You may end up with some significant holes in you production if you do not utilize time to develop new customers.
Steinhart & Associates:
Operating since 1987, Steinhart & Associates is recognized as one of the premiere hospitality sales and marketing consulting firms in the United States satisfying a highly specialized niche by concentrating on three specific areas of demand. Tel (650) 854-4568 Fax (650) 854-7629 Email: SteinAssoc@aol.com
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