Eric Oppegaard
Before we dive in, be sure to visit our ultimate guide to grow events and group business for an all-encompassing rundown of events, sales and catering tips, data points and best practices.
The hospitality industry no longer has the luxury of a surplus of inbound group business leads knocking on their door. As a result, a property’s success now hinges on their ability to prospect, uncover leads, and find new revenue sources more effectively than their competition. We believe that properties that have invested in a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, such as Amadeus Sales & Catering – Delphi for group business, will quickly realize a competitive advantage from tracking a treasure trove of customer data.
However, just having the data is only half of the battle. Sales teams must also analyze and act on the insights their CRM collects. That is why we have put together a recommendation checklist to help you and your sales team brush up on your data-driven prospecting skills. We encourage you to take these recommendations and to use them to help create new opportunities to bring revenue back through the door.
The Hotelier’s Event and Group Business Prospecting Checklist:
- Create historical list views to anticipate future booking trends
- Leverage your guestroom control log (GRC) to extend shoulder business around vacancies
- Analyze your GRC to incentivize local negotiated rate business that is no longer showing up
- Mine your lost business or turndown report for new prospects
- Analyze your top accounts to find growth customers and to reinvigorate past accounts
- Use activity reports to spread best practices and realign sales team goals
- Leverage competitor data to focus your prospecting efforts
Create list views to anticipate future booking trends
Within your “Bookings” tab, create a historical list view to show bookings from ~10-11 months ago. This list will provide insight into who booked with you this time last year. Identify trends about what types of groups that are likely to book with you in the upcoming months and use that information to focus your outreach efforts.
Leverage your guestroom control log (GRC) to extend shoulder business around vacancies
Use your GRC to identify gaps in group business due to cancellations, then identify the existing business still scheduled on the shoulders of the vacancy. Reach out to these groups and explore opportunities to incentivize extending their stay and take advantage of your extra inventory.
Analyze your GRC to incentivize local negotiated rate business that is no longer showing up
Use your GRC report to identify business travel or local negotiated rate business that is no longer utilizing their negotiated rates or volume discounts. Understand their challenges and use this opportunity to match rates or use other incentives to win their business back.
Mine your lost business or turndown report for new prospects
Pull your lost business or turn down report for the last 36 months and create leads out of each piece of business that you had to turn down or that ended up booking elsewhere. Prioritize business that didn’t convert because you were already booked or because your rates were too high previously.
Analyze your top accounts to find growth customers and to reinvigorate former top accounts
Pull your top accounts from the last 36 months as well as the past six months. You may find surprising trends in who your top accounts have recently become. Reach out to old accounts who have fallen out of your top list and try to win them back. In addition, explore your new top accounts and look for opportunities to expand their business.
Use activity reports to spread best practices and realign sales team goals
Identify your top-performing sales team members and understand the activities they are performing to drive results. Look for patterns among top performers and consider changing your KPIs to better align with today’s sales environment. For example, it may be beneficial to increase activities associated with prospecting calls or to realign incentives to encourage top of the funnel lead generation.
Leverage Partner Integrations to Learn from Your Competitive Set
Take advantage of the partner integrations within Amadeus Sales & Catering as they can provide valuable layers of additional information. For example, our partnership with Knowland Group allows you to view the event activity at other hotels in your city. Use this information to understand what types of businesses are still booking in your area. In addition, our Demand360® business intelligence solution provides insight into the booking trends and business mix of your competitive set. Use this data to identify trends and adjust your prospecting strategy accordingly.
Investing in a CRM has direct benefits from a prospecting and business growth perspective. But tracking this data along with event operations creates a data foundation that your property can leverage far beyond just prospecting. Amadeus Sales & Catering provides a natural platform for hoteliers to deepen customer relationships, improve reporting on business trends, and deliver streamlined events.
Learning more about leveraging data-driven prospecting live
If you find this prospecting checklist useful and want even more insight on how to leverage your CRM to improve your prospecting, then we encourage you to watch the replay of our training session. In this 45-minute webinar, we cover each of these strategies with a product demonstration of Amadeus Sales & Catering so you can take your sales team from ‘order-takers’ to ‘order-makers’ and apply a data-driven prospecting approach at your property.
