Sales strategies need urgent attention

IMC's 'The Clinic' service can diagnose sales force ailments.

That’s the consensus from consultants and sales and marketing experts who claim hotel sales teams need immediate training to help them perform during the current economic conditions

Gone are the days when hotel sales executives operating in the lucrative GCC market were order takers and the managers of strong demand — they now have to go back to basics and learn how to solicit and maintain new business.

Industry analysts, consultants and experts — call them what you will — all concur that many sales teams are in desperate need of some good old-fashioned sales training as they learn to face the challenge of the current economic climate.

As Seven Tides managing director Michael Scully states, many hotels “don’t have a decent sales force because up until now, they haven’t needed one”.

Until Q4 2008, the Gulf and Dubai in particular, had been a “cash cow” for many hotel operators who have been “lucky in the market”, he said.

But now is the time for operators to “prove they are investing more in sales”, Scully added, as owners, such as those Seven Tides, a Dubai-based holding company, represents, were ultimately looking for operators with effective sales forces.

Sales and marketing guru, Mona Faraj, the managing partner of Insights Management Consultancy (IMC), who boasts 15 years in the industry and has seen many boom and bust cycles, stressed that around 80% of the current hotel sales force in the region had entered the cycle at its peak and had never learned how to solicit for business and then keep that new client.

“All they were doing were managing demand and spread sheets — they were not managing sales strategies and because of the results they were obtaining, they hadn’t considered training,” she said. “There has not been a long-term strategy regarding sales team training and after experiencing five years of luxury, hotels are struggling.”

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“Yes, there is a downturn, but in reality it’s a correction; products were not priced logically so we are just going back to where we should be,” she said.

“We are going through changes, but let’s take it as a fundamental change in how we look at our sales and marketing departments and go back to basics.”

She said that regardless of whether hotels conducted internal sales and marketing training or brought in an expert to help out, training had to be developed “with the values and philosophies of the company in mind”.

“We cannot train someone in Marriott the same as someone at Rotana,” she said. “However, the basics are the same.”

Faraj said that IMC offered many relevant services from brand and distribution marketing to setting up sales and marketing offices from scratch as she has for One2One hotel in Abu Dhabi.

However, with sales force effectiveness in mind, hotels are advised to opt for ‘The Clinic’ concept whereby IMC analyses hotel sales and marketing strategies, diagnoses problems and puts forwards solutions/remedies.

Hotelier Middle East columnist Guy Wilkinson, partner and general manager of consultancy firm Viability, believes that following a “panic knee-jerk reaction to the recession” whereby hoteliers dropped room rates in a bid to “buy occupancy”, hotel marketers have realised the need to switch from a reactive to proactive mentality. 

“This has meant an end to waiting for the phone to ring and the arrogant ‘take it or leave it’ pricing policy that had begun to lose friends for local hoteliers among the tour operator fraternity during the boom,” he said.

“Now that we’re a few months into the new market conditions, hotel sales and marketing teams are beginning to see that they can be more intelligent in their approach to prospects — by adding value.”

Wilkinson added that “going back to the text books” and implementing “cutting-edge techniques from other markets that only a ‘guru’ would know”, could be useful during the current climate.