Reevaluating Your Sales Strategy

Take the time to pause and reevaluate your overarching sales strategy. Successfully navigating recovery will require you to contextualize your previous strategy with the information you’ve garnered from market indicators, repositioning your sales team, and the conditions of your local community. It’s important to understand that the right strategy for your property going forward is unlikely to come from the models you previously used for reference. Instead, using the latest comparative data and forward-looking forecasts will better equip your decision making for what’s ahead. We suggest the following three areas to focus on as you build and execute a recovery strategy.

Think local: Our research indicates local markets will recover first. Now is the time to strengthen community relationships and to explore creative partnership opportunities such as space sharing or creating new experiences with local vendors.

Create new KPIs: Keep team members motivated by developing KPIs that reflect the new actions that the sales team needs to navigate the crisis. Whether it’s check-in calls, retained bookings, or community partnerships — celebrate new types of wins and capture how sales teams are impacting their coworkers, communities, and longer-term prospects of the property.

Create new buyer personas: Your business mix is going to change. In some cases, your business will be more local and community-partnership-based. In other cases, it will be familiar groups that are looking for something novel, such as bringing an event virtual. On an even more fundamental level, customers across every segment will place a premium on cleanliness and safety. With the dawn of “Generation Clean,” your property’s ability to meet cleaning standards is now inextricably embedded in customer expectations. Regardless of the segment you have traditionally served, you now have a buyer with newly evolved needs. Create personas for them, understand what they need and will expect, and clearly define how your property is uniquely positioned to serve them.

Excerpted from Planning for Hospitality Recovery – Sales, a new resource guide available from HSMAI and Amadeus. For additional information, insights, and tools, visit HSMAI’s Global Coronavirus Recovery Resources page.


Categories: Sales
Insight Type: Articles