Despite inflation and instability in the global economy, the hospitality industry has been going strong, and in 2019 alone, it has generated revenues of $172,801 million. This is an increase of 6% for the hotel industry in just the past decade. Yet, with uncertain times ahead, hoteliers, now more than ever, are streamlining and defining their hotel sales process to maximize group sales and event bookings.
This has led to an increased trend of sales directors and managers creating formally defined and customized hybrid sales cycles. These processes are more apt at integrating multiple business functions – and tools – to generate greater revenues.
Here’s why your hotel business needs to transition to a more holistic sales approach.
Why Is It Important To Have A Defined Sales Process?
A formal sales process is great for your bottom line and can increase revenues by up to 18%. But how exactly does regulating your sales cycle do that?
Well, in a nutshell, when done right, streamlining your sales cycle can help improve your sales team’s efficiency.
Whether your team is comprised entirely of experienced individuals or you believe in hiring and working with fresh talent, providing them with a structured step by step guide can help keep track of progress.
(Optional - Your venue management software system can be easily used to not just customize and tailor your funnel specifically to cater to individual and group sales, it can also help you share all the data with your team members.)
Additionally, it helps other departments that work in collaboration with your sales team, say marketing or customer services, understand the stage of the cycle they relate to. This helps create transparent communication between these divisions so they too can optimize to push sales more efficiently.
Basically, not only does a formally defined sales process help with the on-boarding of new team members faster, it helps them, and you, keep track of their productivity to avoid any missteps and inefficiency.
And of course, high sales, automatically translate to higher revenues – the ultimate goal. You can further increase the efficiency of your formal sales cycle by using CRM tools.
Benefits Of Integrating Your Sales Process With Your Hotel CRM
Customer Relationship Management is at the core of every venue management system, as it allows you to utilize customer data to make targeted sales.
Integrating it into your sales cycle can effectively modernize the process; providing all the required data in one place. And with all the inexpensive – or even free – CRM tools available on the market, it is an affordable way of streamlining the different functions of your hotel business.
So, how can your hotel CRM upgrade your average sales process?
Here are nine ways you can benefit from underpinning your sales funnel to your CRM’s pipeline management feature:
Leads To Standardization
Without a CRM-based hotel sales process, managers and sales heads would have to resort to defining the process in outdated ways. This will give salespersons the liberty to tweak the cycle with each booking.
Basically, despite defining the hotel sales process, without a CRM, there is no way of enforcing standardization and ensuring that all reps follow it.
Hotel CRMs create repeat processes of the interactions between buyers and your sales team so that there is already a set, traceable pattern for new employees to follow.
Automates Data Entry
Conventionally, after progressing from pen and paper, sales teams started using spreadsheets to keep records of leads and opportunities. And while this system of data management is far more reliable than paper based registers, manual data entry on spreadsheets is both a hassle, and has an error rate of 1%.
While this may seem like a benign issue, this has led to almost 90% of all spreadsheets to be error-prone.
With an efficient venue management system integrated with a CRM, reps have to spend less time on data entry, thanks to automation, and can utilize more time on pursuing prospects.
Accurate Quota Tracking
Efficiently keeping track of how your reps are performing is essential to forecasting how your bookings will do and which reps are underperforming.
However, without a proper tracking and management system, it is easy for such data to get lost.
CRM helps automate the hotel sales process; which, in turn, allows for real-time updates of quota attainments by reps, helping build a more transparent cycle.
With more hoteliers and managers trying to streamline sales to ensure more efficient venue bookings and group sales, the trend of defining the sales process has definitely increased. CRM integrated venue management and automated bookings tools can help your sales team achieve their targets, while helping your establishment stand out as the hotel of choice for different types of groups of events.
Are you ready to upgrade your sales process to optimize your ROI? If so, get in touch to learn more about how Event Temple can help in improving your hotel sales process.
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