Big Picture Strategy

This approach gives sales teams and revenue managers the power to future-proof their jobs. This is done by enabling them to move beyond reactive strategies — inbound streams of RFPs that can wax and wane — and embrace data intelligence to put themselves in the driver’s seat and prospect more strategically for customers who are apt to return. That can mean taking a lesson out of the transient segment’s playbook: Win their loyalty to keep them coming back.

This data has become broad and deep, so now it’s more about using this warehouse of data for the benefit of its customers,” said Tim Hart, CEO of Knowland, a provider of sales solutions centered around meetings market data intelligence. “There are two primary purposes: No. 1, competitive benchmarking, to see what business you were and weren’t winning; and No. 2, prospecting, as it gave hotels the ability to identify accounts they could approach and sell to.”

Hart added: “If you spend your time trying to identify the customers that are the best fit, winning that first piece of business, you are establishing the path to a long-term relationship with them.” That can go a long way during unexpected soft times. “We have a lot of sellers in today’s professional environment who have not experienced a downturn,” said Christi Davis, vice president of the Loews Sales Organization, “and the sellers that will prevail when we inevitably find ourselves in that scenario again will be the ones that understand how to proactively identify business opportunities and have the consultative mentality to look at the totality of an account’s opportunity.”

Excerpted from Getting to Know Your Customers, a new white paper from HSMAI and Knowland, available for free download here.


Categories: Sales, Sales Strategies
Insight Type: Articles