How to reduce administration for hotel sales

All hotel organizations should evaluate how much time they spend on manual administration work and what parts in the process they can reduce or even eliminate in order to increase efficiency. For sales you want to interact with your customers or prospects as much as possible, not spend time wasting on things such as gathering information on your customers, go back and forth figuring out a good time to meet with a customer/prospect and spend time logging calls, emails, tasks and deals in your CRM.

One of the answers to eliminate waste of administration is automation. It’s not shocking that one of the top hospitality industry trend for 2021 is automation and technology. To create automation in your sales process is vital to be one step ahead in the competition of the customers. Use software and other tools to get rid of time-consuming sales tasks. 

However, be careful to automate all steps in the sales process. It can be dangerous and the prospect and customers should not feel like they are interacting with a robot. You still need that personal touch to build sustainable relationships . 

Sales automation in your CRM

Your CRM is a key to success for sales automation and in the section below you will find some common tasks for salespeople in hotels your B2B CRM should help to automate. 

Email synchronization with CRM

To log email conversations with your customers is time consuming and something that should be automated. To have all your email conversations well organized to your contacts in your CRM is a benefit for your sales organisation.  

Email templates 

Use email templates in emails that usually don’t vary that much. For instance to answer frequently asked questions, in your prospecting, meeting confirmations and follow-up emails. However, to increase your response rate it’s  important to personalize a part of your email even if it’s a template. You can quickly edit and customize the email template before sending. Adding a video to summarize the offer or last meeting also add value.

Meeting scheduling

A meeting scheduling tool keeps you away from going back and forth figuring out a good time to meet with your customer/prospect. Include a link with your calendar so the recipient can pick a time that suits their schedule. You can easily customize your calendar with availability and time slots. If it’s not in your CRM there are a lot of standalone tools to choose from. 

Preparation before a meeting

Pending on the type of meeting there are a variety of preparations that need to be done. Usually a lot of admin work such as pulling out production reports, history conversations and deals. Make sure you have everything essay accessible, well organized and available within one click in your CRM.

Preparation can also involve internal meetings such as pipeline or monthly one-to-one meetings.

Deal automation 

When you receive an inquiry there's a number of administrative tasks. Create the deal in your PMS, create the deal in your CRM, respond through phone-call/email/chat/sms, log the conversation in your CRM, create a task to follow up, follow up and get to the voicemail, log in CRM, follow-up email... I’m getting tired just reading that. 

Make sure you have a tool that automatically transfers inquiries from your PMS into the CRM, recording your emails and calls and where you easily can manage your activities attached to the deals.

Sales Calls

Sales calls are for many still an important part of the sales process. Today you have platforms that record and take notes from the call so you don’t need to invest time to log notes by yourself. These conversation intelligence tools can also pull out key pieces of your conversations such as topics you covered and which competitors they consider as an option. On top of that you get analytics on duration of calls, how many calls, how many minutes of the conversation you talk vs the prospect.

Alerts and follow-up

Get alerts when it’s time to take action and follow-up. Example of alerts;

• Time to renew contract
• If a deal have been in the pipeline to many days without any activity
• If a contract don’t produce as promised/forecasted
• New customer produce volume and not are contracted
• Time to bring back meeting

Reporting

Creating different reports is often time consuming with a lot of screenshots, excel and data from different systems. You should have a system that can give you the reports with just one click. Examples of reporting could be monthly top producers, sales performance and revenue reports.

Integration from PMS to CRM

As mentioned a lot of sales automation involves the CRM which should be the main tool for a sales manager in the hotel. A vital part of your CRM is data from your PMS which means an integration between the two systems is important to reduce and eliminate administration work. Read more about important aspects to consider when to invest in a B2B CRM for hotels.