Modern tools such as venue management systems and hotel sales CRMs have revolutionized the way sales professionals conduct business; in short, they provide a complete overview of your hotel’s relationship with its customers and potential prospects.
Not only does this allow you to identify key prospects, but also helps in forecasting revenue and provides improved visibility over your booking opportunities.
With CRM adoption up by 15.6% in 2018, the $48.2 billion market is the largest enterprise software in the world – a testament to how it helps improve business productivity.
But extracting maximum ROI from your hotel sales CRM means much more than uploading your contact database. In order for your CRM to boost your organizational productivity and growth, you need to utilize the system effectively.
Here are three ways to ensure that you get the most out of your hotel sales CRM:
Ensure Maximum User Adoption
A CRM software system is a completely new way of conducting business development and sales – it’s understandable that it takes time for employees to master the various features.
Here’s what you should ask yourself: Are all your sales, and relevant operations and event staff on the CRM and using it periodically (for sales staff daily)?
As a hotel sales manager, it is your duty to ensure that users, particularly your salespeople, adapt well to the new CRM. This is why experts continue to push the ‘training, training and more training’ agenda when it comes to CRM adaptation; remember, a trained salesforce is much better positioned to utilize the maximum potential of an industry-specific CRM.
Same goes for other-than-sales operations, as a customer relationship management software benefits the entire organization despite its popularity as a sales-centric software.
From your event staff to your operations, every department can draw useful insights from the CRM system. This is why it is important for them to familiarize themselves with the interface in order to design workflows, tweak consumer journeys and update information.
Track Your Core Metrics
Your hotel CRM is not a magic solution to end all your problems; instead, it is a platform that allows your salespeople to be more productive and efficient.
In order to extract the most out of your CRM, your core metrics must be reported and tracked daily so you are on top of any development and change.
Ask yourself this: Are your core revenue data, sales metrics, and KPI for group sales and venue bookings being reported within the CRM? And is your organization following and tracking these numbers?
Tracking and reporting metrics in your CRM allows you to have a comprehensive overview of your revenue. This can also help you identify potential weak points that may be hindering your hotel from growth and success.
Additionally, the core sales metrics and KPIs that are present in your CRMs dashboard/reports should be tracked and adopted all over the company. This will allow you to standardize performance metrics and understand how your hotel is currently performing.
Integrate Underlying Processes
To extract maximum ROI from your hotel CRM, it needs to integrate with the underlying processes that dictate your sales cycle. For instance, your sales representatives need to have precise consumer data for each of the different stages of the cycle so they can tailor their approach.
Without defined and articulated processes, the insights and metrics from your CRM system will not reflect the actual situation – in fact, it can lead to inaccurate decision making.
Continuing the aforementioned example, a loosely defined sales cycle may lead to a sales representative calling a lead to talk about the details of a group sales whereas the consumer may only be in the qualification stage.
The question worth asking is: What core sales and operations processes are you running off your hotel CRM? Does this include event management and tracking, event scheduling, and pipeline and opportunity/lead tracking and management?
The inclusion of such core processes is imperative for your CRM to depict a fair picture of your consumer relationships and help you answer complex questions in a glance.
Your hotel sales CRM should be more than just a glorified database; it should be a system that helps your hotel organize your sales processes and allow a measure of predictability when forecasting revenues or looking at booking opportunities.
Extracting the most out of your database requires the end-user to understand the system completely and keep a track of the various metrics and KPIs. Finally, important underlying processes should be properly defined, so that every user derives insights in a cohesive, standardized manner.
