Sales strategies need urgent attention
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.”
But Faraj said it was “never too late” to invest in sales force training, with particular emphasis on negotiating skills and managing accounts.
“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.
“However, the best marketing consultant will avoid a didactic approach and instead work with the hotel’s existing sales and marketing team to reflect back to them what they already know,” he said.
“It is often simply a matter of internal hierarchies, getting in the way of efficiency and inspiration so an outsider can often break through such barriers easier than an employee of the hotel itself. This is especially true of unbranded hotels that lack the kind of head office support enjoyed by the chains,” asserted Wilkinson.
WHAT THE HOTELS SAID:
Essam Abouda, vice president operations, Hilton Hotels, Arabian Peninsula & Indian Ocean
Abouda said the sales team had achieved “extraordinary results in 2009” despite the current environment and that over the past two years, each member of the sales team had participated in the company’s “excellent internal training programme” entitled ‘Customer Focused Selling’ (CFS). This, he claimed, had helped Hilton to “cope with the pressures of sales during a downturn”.
The company recently introduced the ‘CFS Leisure’ training programme tailored to target the leisure traveller.
Abdo Kayali, director of sales & marketing, Mövenpick Bur Dubai
Kayali conceded that the “greatest challenge” he faced at present was “retraining a few team members whose role in the past was to be an ‘order taker’ — because this is what the market demanded — into a proactive sales person”.
With this in mind he said a “combination of training and shadowing/partnering junior team members with experienced and talented managers” was essential. Kayali also revealed that the hotel had changed how the business was divided between the team members — from geographical segmentations to business sectors — to allow for “more ownership, faster decision-making and a better overall knowledge of our clients”.
Kayali said employing an outsider to come in and troubleshoot was “always beneficial” providing a “fresh pair of eyes” to analyse the sales strategy.
“Instead of using a consultant we have team members from regional office come in and spend a few days observing our methods,” he explained.
Jeff Strachan, area director sales and marketing, Middle East and Africa, Marriott Hotels International Limited
Strachan does not agree that sales and marketing teams have had it easy.
“Sure there were some cities in the Middle East and Africa that saw amazing compression and demand, however, that only changes the battle ground from volume driving occupancy to driving rate; it doesn’t change the fact that you still need to deploy talented sales people who are well trained on the type of business to source and how to sell the right rate, at the right time to the right customer,” he said.
“It is vital that a hotel understands its target market, positions its product and service offering appropriately and delivers and deploys to that positioning consistently. For this process we often involve an external consultant.”