Definitely Doug 8/9/24: Supercharging Hotel Sales & Marketing

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Introduction

This week I will explore technology products designed to improve the productivity and effectiveness of hotel sales and marketing teams, whether on-property or in a central or regional office.

The focus is tools that can work with any sales and catering system (SCS), so it does not matter if you use Amadeus Delphi, Event Temple, iVvy, Oracle Opera Sales & Catering, Thynk, Salesandcatering.com, something else, or even (in many cases) nothing at all. While many SCS solutions include some of the capabilities highlighted here, others do not, or they may not be fully competitive. Every product covered today can be purchased independently of a full SCS and can work with multiple SCSs. Some also integrate with multiple customer relationship management (CRM) and property management systems (PMSs).

These solutions perform specialized tasks that:

• help prioritize sales managers’ activities
• expand online exposure of meeting and event inventory
• provide better analytics
• improve the quality and targeting of marketing materials presented on the web, in marketing campaigns, or customer communications; and
• provide better clarity and certainty for room setup to both meeting planners and venue staff.

A major challenge with digital sales and marketing for groups, meetings, events, and corporate accounts is that the line between marketing (attracting customers) and sales (fielding inquiries and negotiating and closing deals) is often blurred. Some of these tools help to fine-tune messages so you can meet the customer wherever they are in the process, with exactly the right mix of precisely targeted marketing and sales.

Marketing is dominated by the desire to reach potential customers and persuade them that the venue is perfect for their needs, or at least worth taking a closer look. Communications and online presence typically lead with visual images showing similar actual experiences at the venue; the goal is to collect a lead that can be passed off to the sales process.

Sales, on the other hand, has the objective of taking a lead and converting it to closed business, and then upselling additional revenue (catering, audiovisual, etc.). It needs tools that can help do that most effectively. Depending where the customer is in the process, however, this may involve both marketing (persuasion) and sales (negotiating and closing) activities.

Sales and marketing messages must often be intermixed, such as whenever a prospective customer has been attracted to the venue but has not yet been persuaded to buy. Getting this mix right for each customer type and where they are in the funnel is critical. At the upper end of the funnel, the message should be mostly marketing; as you move down the funnel, the balance will shift toward sales, but may still include marketing messages on aspects where the customer still needs persuasion.

I have found dozens of companies that provide relevant products and services in this space for hotels. That is far too many to cover in detail, but I will highlight some of the leading-edge capabilities that hotels may want to consider when evaluating solutions for specific needs. I will also call out some of the more interesting companies with products in each area, but these are by no means exhaustive lists.

I do want to acknowledge and thank the contributions to my research on best practices from key executives at several companies, including Amadeus, Amaze Insights, Firstview, Knowland, MeetingPackage, Otelier, PredictHQ, Tambourine, Thynk, and Visualizer. I chose these companies based on feedback from trusted hoteliers and vendor partners that they offer excellent and well-respected products consistent with today’s topic. Their products should be on anyone’s list to review, as they all have some great ideas. But there are many others, including modules you may already have access to as part of your SCS or another system. Where that is the case, this article can help you evaluate whether they meet your needs fully, or fall short of the state of the art.

Direct Lead Generation

Most hotel websites are designed primarily to sell rooms to transient guests who have already decided that the hotel is worth considering. Marketing is usually secondary to sales; most transient guests who reach a hotel website have already qualified that the hotel meets their needs (even if only from a match of Google keywords), and just want to check rates and/or book. Marketing material is there to help persuade, but the site design and flow are usually optimized around converting the lead to a sale.

Website marketing of hotel services other than guest rooms, including meetings and events, is typically an afterthought. If they are addressed at all, they are typically relegated to a subpage. And the content on most meetings and events subpages tends to be generic, with a single set of content trying to address everything from large conferences to small corporate meetings to weddings to family reunions to traveling school sports teams and many others. In some cases, users can even book smaller events directly, but this is a sales function, and can easily confuse a prospective customer who first needs to be convinced that your venue should even be considered. This is particularly true for market segments such as weddings or small corporate meetings where the customers may have little or no event planning experience.

Venuelocity by Tambourine changes this paradigm by allowing each major market segment to have its own landing page. Targeted keyword purchases in search engines enable these pages to easily be found, for example by searching for “hotel wedding venues in New York City.” The first content a wedding couple or their planner will see when they land on your site can be completely focused on persuading them that the venue is perfect for them (example). That message is not diluted by visuals showing corporate meetings or conferences using the same function rooms, nor is it cluttered with reference materials targeted at professional conference planners.

This is Market Segmentation 101, and makes it possible to target, attract, and engage prospective customers for each market a hotel wants to serve, and to capture qualified leads to which hotels can respond effectively. They can also capture web analytics specific to that market segment to improve the organization of the landing page and any subpages.

Commercial Lead Sources

While every hotel responds to incoming requests for proposals (RFPs) from online sources such as Cvent, these leads are often poorly qualified and have a low conversion rate. Many opportunities may not fit the hotel’s available space at all, or the space or guest rooms may not be available on the requested dates, or the hotel’s quality and price point may be clearly unsuitable. Understaffed sales offices are challenged to identify and respond to the best opportunities. With limited information, they can easily spend time chasing low-probability opportunities, while missing more promising ones.

While triaging these leads is important, smart sales teams are also out making cold calls on meeting planners and corporations who are likely targets for future business. And while target lists can be created using simple searches like “corporate headquarters near me,” the leads such efforts generate will be unqualified – you have no idea if the account ever books local meetings, or who is responsible if they do. You can spend a lot of time trying to identify and connect with the right person, only to find out that the company never books local meetings at all.

A better approach for most hotels is to buy qualified leads from a company that specializes in developing and documenting them. Knowland provides hotels with the ability to identify accounts that have booked past events at competitive venues. You can filter them based on meeting space and guest room requirements, locations and types of properties booked, meeting types, hotel brands used, months when they book, size of group, length of event, and other factors. These can be matched to the hotel’s facilities and need periods to identify the most promising opportunities. In many cases, contact details are available, and a sales manager has enough information to initiate a warmer and more productive conversation than with a pure cold call.

Knowland has expanded its market coverage considerably in recent years, adding numerous electronic sources to achieve broader reach and more timely updates. And for corporate accounts, meeting leads can often open the door to corporate agreements for transient business as well.

PredictHQ can provide a different type of lead. Rather than focusing on specific meeting planners or accounts, they provide data to track all types of events that may drive business to local establishments, including concerts, sporting events, expos, festivals, school holidays, conferences, and religious gatherings. Because the company serves many types of businesses that are affected by such events (not just hotels), they provide a free demand generation analyzer where you can upload your own historical sales trends and see how they correlate with different types of events. You can then buy information just for the types of events that drive your occupancy, either based on the analyzer results or based on the typical needs of other hotels.

These leads can be used to focus prospecting efforts on groups that might be associated with certain events. But they can also be used to develop marketing campaigns specific to the events, or as inputs to demand forecasts or revenue management systems to achieve higher rates due to demand that may not yet be evident, especially for recently announced events.

Distribution for Meetings and Events

Hotels have expanded many aspects of their transient distribution strategies over recent decades by using central reservation systems (CRSs), channel managers, revenue management systems, and demand sources such as online travel agencies (OTAs). However, it is only in recent years that some of the same techniques have started to be applied to groups, meetings, and events.

There are many parallels. The SCS manages group and event sales much in the way that a PMS manages transient room bookings. There are numerous external demand generators, such as Cvent, Groups360, Hubli, The Knot, and Venue Directory, that serve particular target markets and collect and distribute leads, RFPs, and sometimes bookings to venues. They operate much in the way that OTAs and other specialized booking sites collect and distribute transient booking opportunities to hotels.

In transient markets, CRSs or channel managers provide external demand sources with centralized access to group inventory and rates across multiple hotels. But in the groups and meetings space, until recently there were few or no options for connecting hotel or centralized SCS systems to external channels for real-time availability, inquiries, and bookings. And while online booking may not make sense for large or complex meetings, it has become quite practical, cost-effective, and increasingly common for smaller ones.

Many SCS platforms now support a web booking engine for groups, but these are useful only for groups that have already identified your hotel as a target. The transient market analogy would be having a PMS and a web booking engine, but no channel manager or brand CRS to put your product on the shelf of external sites or to capture externally generated business. As it becomes more and more possible for smaller events to be booked electronically, these gaps are becoming more evident.

At least two products have evolved to start to address this need. Amadeus MeetingBroker, which has long supported meeting and event RFP distribution to venues, now provides connectivity for instant venue group bookings, similar to what a channel manager does for transient bookings.

MeetingPackage, on the other hand, has evolved into what might be called a CRS for groups, meetings, and events. Historically, central sales offices were only loosely connected to the hotels they served. They often shared account management databases, but otherwise mostly passed leads and RFPs down to the hotels for consideration and sometimes managed follow-up communication from the hotels back to the clients. MeetingPackage’s Global Lead Sharing module is designed for a management company or chain that needs a multi-property view. It can pass leads directly to the hotel’s inventory and rate systems (PMS for guest rooms, SCS for function space, and possibly a revenue management system) or to a standalone solution for hotels that do not have a SCS.

This is the first solution I have seen that offers real-time connectivity for hotel groups that have a mixed estate of SCS and/or PMS systems, enabling them to fully represent all hotels from a single office and to manage them in the major external channels. Hotels still respond to RFPs or allow instant bookings as before, but the central office now has full visibility throughout the process, enabling more comprehensive tracking and metrics.

Analytics, Account Measurement, and Forecasting

The fragmented systems environment of many hotel groups leads to major challenges in measuring sales account performance. Many hotel groups (especially multi-brand management companies) operate hotels with a mixture of PMSs, and often multiple SCSs as well. Even with a single hotel, SCS systems typically capture group, meeting, and event revenue but may not capture transient revenue from the same accounts. They also often miss ancillary spending by group delegates that is billed to guests individually (and therefore buried in individual PMS folios). The problem is worse when trying to measure account performance at the brand or management company level, unless all hotels are on the same PMS and SCS.

While Thynk is a modular hospitality commercial platform and most commonly provides its full multi-property SCS solution, its analytics product can be acquired in conjunction with its core commercial platform (Thynk Central Sales Office), without buying their SCS. It can ingest data from multiple PMSs and SCSs as well as from corporate data warehouses. It is the closest product I have seen to providing full, multiproperty measurement of account performance that includes both guest rooms, meeting rooms, catering, and meeting services billed to groups, and guest room and ancillary spending billed to individuals. It can also capture (to at least some extent) ancillary spending at restaurants or bars by guests staying elsewhere, booking rooms outside the room block, or in-house guests paying at outlets by cash or credit card rather than room charge.

Otelier’s Intellisight product works similarly, but for account production data it is currently limited to PMS connectivity and not SCS. While it can report account performance and sales conversion across a diverse portfolio of hotels, totals will not reflect any revenue that is recorded only in the SCS. However, in most cases, SCS data is transmitted to the PMS via existing interfaces, and where this is the case, the coverage should be comparable.

Otelier also provides demand indicators for function space designed to roughly parallel the transient concept of booking pace. By weighting definite and tentative bookings and inquiries, it produces demand indexes that can help hotels more easily discover demand patterns (seasons, day-of-week, etc.) that can then be used to raise prices or packaging requirements when demand is high or reduce them when it is low. This supports proactive pricing (adjusting to likely demand that is not yet on the books) as opposed to reactive pricing (which adjusts only after the demand is certain). This has long been what revenue management tools do on the transient side; it can be very useful especially for hotels whose revenue management systems do not cover groups and meetings.

Amaze Insights takes an overlapping but distinct angle, consolidating metrics on sales activities, pace, lead times, market segments, function space utilization, revenue per occupied group room, and other indicators across multiple hotels using different SCSs. It supports reporting for an entire portfolio of hotels or for any subsegment, giving management companies the ability to provide very detailed analysis of group and meeting performance both regionally and in total, and for each of the various ownership groups they serve. They also provide analytics on data quality that can highlight which hotels are (or are not) properly entering booking data in their SCS, so that management can address issues that can lead to incomplete or misleading data.

Communications between Sales Teams and Clients

Most SCSs are designed to support transaction processing for sales activities: maintaining contacts; gathering requirements or recording RFPs; creating and pricing proposals; detailing requirements for setup, catering, and audiovisual; monitoring confirmation status, credit lines, and payment status; and the like.  

While SCSs do an excellent job of supporting sales transactions, they are principally designed around the needs of the venue staff, not the prospective client. For the most part they do not market your hotel, function space, or conference services to prospects who have not yet discovered them. They capture leads but do not typically generate them, and to the extent they support communications to customers, these are often delivered as text-heavy PDFs that provide very detailed information. However, they typically include little or no immersive content that is designed to persuade the customer that a venue is perfect for their event.

Numerous companies have stepped in to fill these gaps.

Immersive tours have been around for a decade or so but have greatly improved in quality and come down in cost. 360-degree cameras and drones make it simple to capture almost any relevant aspect of a property, often with navigation starting from an aerial or exterior overview and progressing to interior and exterior tours, meeting rooms, restaurants, other facilities, and guest rooms. A good example is this one from FirstView, which is appropriate for a sprawling high-end resort.

Many companies are now producing 360-degree tours and other immersive experiences; a few of the more common ones include FirstView, Omnisight Interactive, Visiting Media, and Visualizer. An important consideration in evaluating such solutions is the ability to reuse the same content in multiple channels, including the brand website, mobile app, third-party booking sites, virtual site visits, and sales proposal tools.

Visualizer’s approach is distinct in that it is designed principally for sales staff (particularly those at central offices) to work interactively with prospective customers, although the assets can also be linked from public websites. The company can build out every property supported by a sales office, including an interactive tour, floor plans, and capacity charts. Because these elements are tightly interlinked, the sales staff can help select one or more properties, and show all the relevant information visually, easily jumping back between 360-degree photos, floor plans, and capacity charts. You can see this by exploring any of the properties listed here. Visualizer, which currently operates only in Europe, also recently released an AI tool that allows the sales manager to edit the photography to do things like remove tables, change lighting, or add people to enable the client to visualize the room in a different configuration.

Firstview has combined 360-degree tours with meeting room diagramming by creating digital twins of each meeting space, allowing the hotel staff, event organizer, or a combination of the two to arrange tables, chairs, stages, audiovisual equipment, other items, and even people within the digital twin, providing an exact view of how the room will look, complete with columns, air walls (open or closed), ceiling fixtures, doors, and other items. It produces images that are surprisingly close to a photograph of the actual room setup (see example here). It can provide an event organizer with much better confidence that the setup will meet their needs. And it also provides a complete guide for event setup staff to help ensure that it is delivered exactly as requested.

Others that claim similar diagramming capabilities include Amadeus (Delphi Diagramming), Cast-Soft (Vivien), Cvent, EventDraw, and Prismm. Key features to consider, depending on your needs, include digital twins that capture all walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows, attached furnishings, and even details like signs and power outlets; the ability to share and collaborate between the venue and the organizer; ease of use; flexibility; support for partitioned rooms and outdoor spaces; and the photorealism of rendered images. Sales staff and event planners should be able to add or change the setup, table and chair spacing, stage and furnishings, audiovisual materials, and other aspects through an intuitive user interface.

Upmail Solutions addresses the need to integrate marketing and sales content in customer communications, and to personalize it based on the type of customer, event, function space being booked, and other services. The company provides a managed content library where images, videos, documents, and other material can be stored, and enables users to easily create templates targeted at specific market segments and communication types. These may include communications for generating inquiries, for responding to initial lead inquiries (pure marketing), for RFP responses or sales proposals, or for final sales contracts that itemize every detail and just need a signature. The templates can be easily modified on the fly, to insert a different photo or to modify other details.

Upmail integrates with various email systems as well as SCS and CRM systems to make the communication process simple and trackable. In many cases these integrations allow the sales staff to control communications directly from their email client or SCS, without the need to log in to a separate system. It also supports both brand-level and hotel-specific templates and can track the effectiveness of alternative templates. Details for events can be drawn directly from SCSs, eliminating the need for manual updates when changes are made. The same template can also be used for targeted promotions to be sent to multiple contacts; new campaigns can be created on the fly with minimal effort.

Venuelocity by Tambourine recently launched a similar capability that is delivered as a link to what I would describe as a customized website for one. The recipient opens a URL that pulls up a customized, dynamically generated web page that can include the same type of marketing and sales content as an email. It can be used at any point in the sales funnel after the initial lead capture, can provide targeted, templated content intermixed with data specific to a proposal. It has the advantage that it is a single source of truth that is always up-to-date (unlike the email from yesterday that was superseded by today’s amended version).

Conclusion

The tasks of hotel sales and marketing teams are many and complex, and include generating awareness, capturing leads, communicating effectively with targeted messages at each stage of the sales funnel, customizing events, documenting details for contracts, and communicating with delivery staff. Submarkets are distinctly different, and each has its own needs, journeys, and processes. Production data is often spread across disparate systems at multiple hotels and can be hard to collect and analyze. Many accounts have both event-related and transient demand aspects.

Most of the core hotel systems used to manage this process are designed to support the hotel staff in processing transactions. They are less effective in locating, attracting, persuading, and guiding customers. Each of the types of tools covered today are designed to make it easier to fulfill those tasks effectively, and make your venue more approachable, desirable, and easy to deal with.

As always, feedback to my articles is welcome. Since the host site does not support discussions, I will post a link to this article on my own LinkedIn page once it has been published, and I invite you to comment, like, or share from there!

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