The Pedigree of Hotel Salespeople

The pandemic may have hurt the hospitality industry, but it has not dampened the drive and skillsets of hotel salespeople. We have been trained to tackle any sales challenge and lead a company to success.

Hotel salespeople are top of their class. Our experiences and unique skill sets set us apart from other salespeople. This makes us assets to any company.  We wear multiple hats, provide expertise to a wide range of customers, and are quick to pivot and adapt to a new situation. 

Hotels are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By extension, hotel salespeople work around the clock securing opportunities and driving business to their hotels. Guest stays are secured through a variety of means from conferences to group stays, representing 10+ rooms per night. Depending on the size of the group and the length of stay, this type of B2B contract can range from $15K to $1M in revenue to the hotel. The process of securing these types of opportunities is not linear nor is it predictable. Hotel salespeople are by default flexible and ready to tackle a short sale cycle, negotiating right up to a few days prior to guest arrival. In other scenarios, we work with customers for months, even years, negotiating and fine-tuning the details of a large convention or conference. 

Hotel salespeople also negotiate corporate travel rates for large companies whose business requires employee travel. For example, a single company deal can represent an annual commitment for preferred rates at a specific hotel, bringing in anywhere from $25K to $500K a year in revenue. As with group stays, nailing down a preferred hotel rate contract can take days, weeks or even months to secure. It all depends on the customer and their needs.

Also, no two hotels are alike. From a 10-room Bed and Breakfast in a quaint town to a massive 7000 room hotel in Las Vegas. The sales staff can be as mighty as one, to a full team of professionals that manage different parts of the sales cycle. Regardless of size, hotel salespeople are focused on driving business and revenue.

Taking into consideration all these factors, hotel salespeople are without a doubt a special group. We are inherently prepared to attack any challenge head-on with the motivation to succeed. For this article, I will get to the core of who these people are and discuss the essential sales skills we have.

WE ARE NATURALLY COMPETITIVE – HAND TO HAND COMBAT

Hotel salespeople are naturally competitive. It is quite typical for a hotel to have at least five direct competitors within a short walk from one another. In larger cities such as Toronto or New York, the number of competitors grows. Add into the mix the reality that new hotels will pop up, or hotels change hands and change brands, which means that hotel salespeople must be on their toes tracking and evaluating the competition around the clock. Guests and visitors have all the options and the challenge for us is to how differentiate our hotel from the others.

This competition drives us to be innovative in how we deliver the best possible service to our guests. This pressure requires us to be at our absolute best, all the time. With the prevalence of user-generated review platforms, like TripAdvisor, hotel salespeople understand that there is little room for error, which means that each guest and customer encounter is a unique opportunity to get it right. The hotel industry now views TripAdvisor and other online rating tools as industry report cards. Not only are we paying attention to how our own hotels are performing, but we are also paying attention to how our competitors are doing. Securing a stay or a contract for multiple room nights is one part; making sure that hotel stay meets customer expectations is an entirely other matter.

Part of being competitive is being creative. Hotel salespeople rarely take ‘no’ to mean ‘no’. It is rather an invitation for us to try a different approach. We are primed to look for opportunities and solutions, rather than dead ends or stalemates. In the same vein, we do not subscribe to the status quo, rarely sticking to what has been done before, mainly because it has been done before and there is always another or better way. Each customer encounter or contract negotiation teaches us a new thing and we make a point of applying those lessons. That is not to say we are not faced with constraints; on the contrary, we are usually forced to work within tight budgets or short notice.

Our competitive nature also drives hotel salespeople to look for new and exciting opportunities at competitor hotels. It is normal within the sector to work at one hotel and then transition to another within two years. I find that hotel salespeople can seamlessly transition and move from hotel to hotel without rustling feathers. We are competitive and we negotiate hard to secure business, but we do it in a way that does not alienate our competitors. We are a large but tight-knit community and business decorum and professionalism remain key principles in our approach. We need to be aggressive to capture business for our hotel, but we maintain amicable working relationships with our industry colleagues. At times it can feel impossible to balance, but with time it becomes just how we operate.   

COLD CALLING AND POUNDING THE PAVEMENT

I have previously written about cold calling and pounding the pavement and how I have successfully developed and applied my techniques. These skills are not unique to me; hotel salespeople are inherently comfortable with cold calling. It is an important part of hotel sales and remains this way today.

Hotel salespeople are prospecting while also managing RFPs, managing staff, and negotiations. We are always looking for those new opportunities to fill our pipeline as we unfortunately sometimes lose a customer to another hotel. At the same time, we are there to support our customers and manage their accounts to ensure their return. I experienced this while working at the Hotel Indigo Ottawa. As the Sales Manager, it was up to me to build our client base, by cold calling and pounding the pavement. It was also up to me to work with customers to make sure our hotel could offer a level of service that continuously met their needs. I think this dual role of prospecting while at the same time managing accounts is a key skill that sets hotel salespeople apart. It requires us to be quick on our feet, attentive to details, while at the same time being able to flip from prospecting mode to troubleshooting mode at short notice.

WE ARE NEGOTIATORS

In addition to prospecting a sale, hotel salespeople are also the ones who negotiate and ultimately close the deal. We act as the bridge between the needs of our customers and the services that our hotel can provide. These types of negotiations can take days, weeks or months depending on the size of the event, the event components and what the hotel will need to match the needs of the customer.

While we negotiate with our customers, we are also working internally with our colleagues at the hotel. This includes General Managers and Owners to ensure that they are on board with the proposed event and the proposed approach. If there are concerns from either, our job is to negotiate with them to determine how we can manage those concerns.

I have negotiated several partnerships with sports organizations during my time with Delta Hotels & Resorts and IHG Hotels & Resorts. These negotiations entailed a lot of back-and-forth communications between the sports organizations and the hosting hotel to not only make sure that the venue met the organization’s needs but that the hotel had the means and the infrastructure in place to successfully execute the contract. These contracts delivered several million dollars to hotels within the chain’s portfolios.

Hotel salespeople do not stop working until well after the ink dries on a signed contract. Regardless of what hotel we work at, we are always negotiating.

WE KNOW OUR BUSINESS

In small to medium-sized hotels, salespeople deal with a lot of pressure. There is often only one salesperson that is responsible for securing business and therefore revenue for the hotel. It is this revenue that is drawn upon to run the hotel. When the numbers are down, it is common for the General Manager and the Owner to bring us in to discuss the numbers and strategize on how to improve or how to tackle a particular problem. Being involved in this way and having this lens allows us as hotel salespeople to better target our customers and seek opportunities that will help support the overall health and viability of a hotel.

As a result, we have the skills to complete budgets, create forecasts, and set organizational and individual goals. We also produce annual sales and strategic marketing plans that outline how we will hit our revenue targets for the coming year. We provide information to the hotel Owners and are always available to speak to any item in any document since we were integral in their preparations. While I was working at Hotel Indigo it was common for the Owner or Area General Manager to drop in my office to ask questions about our forecasted revenue for the week. It always kept me on my toes, but most importantly it forced me to be aware of all that was going on in the hotel. I was always aware of our business because I never knew when someone would need this information.

WE HAVE MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE

As hotels are open 24 hours, 7 days a week, hotel salespeople get to wear many hats and be thrust into other jobs. We do this in support of the end goal which is ensuring a great customer stay. One of these hats that we get to wear is management. It is not uncommon for a hotel salesperson to fill in at the front desk and manage the reservations process. Or other times, hotel salespeople are asked to fill in as the General Manager of the hotel during the weekends. We manage the tasks and the staff to ensure a smoothly run hotel until Monday morning rolls around.

Hotel salespeople are also relied upon to onboard new hires. The hotel industry has a high turnover rate. This means that while we train new people and help them acclimate to the hotel, we also get to exercise our mentoring skills. Training a new staff person about their roles is made more pleasant when we get to share some of our own tricks and experiences. This helps welcome them on board and let them know are a part of the hotel family. I have experienced this as a new employee, as a salesperson on location, and in the corporate office. Salespeople have a lot to teach and share and I have been lucky to have worked with some amazing salespeople who guided me and mentored me in my early years.

I recall in my first few months at Hotel Indigo I was mentored by a National Sales Manager that was interested in moving into a management position. He made a point of coaching me on sales techniques and bringing me along on his sales calls. For someone so new to the industry, he taught me the key elements of a good sale and encouraged me to build on my communication and networking skills.

Since joining the sports department at IHG Hotels & Resorts eight years ago, it has grown from a team of two to a mighty team of seven. I have taken advantage of this growth and used the opportunities when new employees join to mentor them. I have applied my management skills by providing one-on-one training, coaching them through challenges, introducing them to new ways of doing things, and motivating them to take ownership of their work.

WE DO MARKETING TOO

Again, depending on the size of a hotel, salespeople are often involved with marketing efforts. This is because not all hotels can hire marketing specialists, and since hotel salespeople are front and centre with customers, they know a thing or two about what their target customer is looking for. This is a skill that is refined and fine-tuned over time and is by no means an easy skill to develop. However, what I have found is that hotel salespeople are able to market the hotel so well because they have such a vested interest in its success. We need to make our hotel attractive to potential customers because customers translate into revenue. This unique talent to not only drive revenue but also see the bigger picture through a marketing lens is important. So, having marketing experience in addition to sales experience is common in the hotel industry.

During my time at Hotel Indigo, I developed marketing, created sales kits, and held promotions to find new opportunities. One of the more successful marketing strategies for an individual hotel is to offer customers a reduced room rate or a concession during their stay in exchange for a marketing placement in the organization’s newsletter or on their website. This allowed me to target and capture an audience while providing added value to the customer during their stay. I have applied this approach when negotiating larger chain-wide deals at both Delta Hotels & Resorts and IHG Hotels & Resorts.

TIME MANAGEMENT

We are savvy in managing our time. As mentioned above, we wear multiple hats, which requires intense prioritization. We need to make sure that we can meet all the demands of all the jobs we have to tackle in each day. This was normal during my time at Hotel Indigo Ottawa. Some days I could be valet parking cars, checking in guests, running up room service, or responding to guests’ complaints, while catching up on calls or emails with potential customers. I was also crunching the numbers and keeping an eye on the hotel’s sales targets. Without proper time management and prioritization skills, very few of those tasks would have been accomplished successfully.  

NETWORKING GURUS

The hospitality industry is all about connections and meeting new people. The industry is a close-knit one that thrives on knowing as many people as possible. By extension, hotel salespeople are expert networkers. Most of our business opportunities start from relationships we develop with people near our hotels, including hotel Owners, colleagues, tourism offices, city staff, convention centres, 3rd parties, and hotel chain corporate offices. 

I encourage you to check out my article Networking where I discuss the importance of networking in the sales process. I share some tips and tricks that I use that have taken my networking to a new level.   

FINAL THOUGHTS

Hotel salespeople take hospitality very seriously and it permeates everything we do. Each day our goal is to make a guest feel well taken care of.  No two days are ever alike, requiring hotel salespeople to roll with the punches and stay level-headed throughout. 

Face-to-face interactions are a key feature of a workday, and there is an ease with which we leave the desk behind, go out to prospect, hit the pavement, and meet customers.

Finally, hotels play a role in the communities. Hotel staff, including hotel salespeople, often volunteer with local organizations to better the community and the hotel often time participates as a sponsor for a good cause. I continue actively pursuing volunteer opportunities. This connection to the community and the manifestation of teamwork is an important part of the hotel culture that many organizations strive to have.

I am where I am today because I started my career on location at a hotel as a salesperson, where I was surrounded by important learning opportunities. Hopefully, I have done an adequate job of portraying the dynamic and transferrable skillsets that hotel salespeople have.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this article. What unique skills would you add?