3 Simple Steps to grow your Hotel or Venue’s Profits & Market Share

Buyers have changed the way they buy, have you or your team changed the way they sell? If not, your team’s success in winning the right business for your property, will be weakened. The power to achieve the results you want in terms of RevPAR, ADR, Meeting Room & Guestroom Occupancy & ultimately Profitability is driven by you and your team’s ability to lead the client to want to work with you. Team’s must adapt their sales process to be “client centric” and reflect the experience the client needs that’s going to help them to buy.

If your aim is to -

• Grow your share of business against your competitors;
• Grow profitability, by making an impact on Revenue, Rates & the cost of a sale,

Then you need to put these steps in place in the next 70 days to ensure this shift.  The MPI Venue Sales Certificate Programme is designed to help you or your team over come these challenges.

The basis of this certificate programme is the Steps to WIN™ system – which is a formula for how the buyer wants to buy. It’s time to adapt your sales process or risk letting your competition steal your market share. The first 2 steps of this are the basis of MPI’s new Venue Sales Certificate Programme. It starts in October 14 (virtually). You can find out more here: http://www.mpiweb.org/venuesales

Here are the steps...

❶   Stand Out & Sound Different – How to be of Interest to the Client

Craft a compelling, desirable message that makes your target Corporate & Association client excited to talk to you.  Buyers don’t trust traditional sales messages anymore.  An effective sales pitch really should be about opening the conversation, not closing the deal.   Buyers won’t even entertain a conversation with a sales person until they feel a certain level of trust & confidence.  This is the first step, building trust and confidence by your team changing how they approach this market. 

Ciara teaches 15 “Killer Questions” that help the team to figure out what each Planner is buying. The part of the brain that makes a decision only understands how you make it feel, it doesn’t understand price or facts.  Yet most pitches are filled with facts.  Learn how to tap into the emotions of the buyer, so your pitch is filled with what will help the Buyer to buy. 

It’s time to stop being seen as a “Supplier”.   Being a “Partner” is a lot more lucrative.

❷   Build Power Sales Tools to make the Competition Irrelevant –

60% of the decision to buy or not can be made before the client even speaks to your sales team.  These Power Sales Tools help decision makers say YES.  They use them every day to “judge” your hotels suitability.  You’d never ask a chef to prepare a banquet without having the right equipment?  The same applies to the sales team.  Planners tell me that most marketing messages, websites & proposals don’t make them want to respond to the sales effort because they all sound the same. 

How to know if you sound like every other hotel/venue – do any of these typical “marketing phrases” sound familiar

• Ideal venue/The best environment• Successful Event or Meeting
• The largest conference space in X• Leading venue/conference center
• Memorable Experience• Convenient or Great Location
• Exceed Your Expectations• Where business meets pleasure

Everyone is using these marketing phrases so how can your venue stand out?   Your team has to sound “different” to everyone else. I help the team to build those Power Sales Tools and stand out and establish trust quicker with the prospective client. These tools have to be built from the point of view of the client to work and impact your profitability.

❸   Write Proposals that WIN & turn Prospects to Profits -

The quickest way to impact sales is to create an effective proposal, one that will WIN.  

It can take 45 minutes to respond to an RFP or “do up” a proposal.  According to MPI data, there is an 87% decrease in the RFP closing ratio from just five years ago due to RFP Technology and attracting the wrong clients.  What that means for you is that the team can spend 50 hours before booking their first meeting.

There are 3 big mistakes out there in the industry right now when it comes to Proposals.

1.  They are all about the property when they should be all about the client and their issues.
2.  The information is not presented in the right order so the client’s attention moves to the rate.
3.  They are not personalized & don’t demonstrate flexibility for the client.

The better-quality questions you ask; the better-quality answers you get.

This training is delivered 100% online over the course of a few weeks.  No travel costs, no big length of time for sales people to be out of the office. Join live virtual training sessions guided by Ciara Feely.  http://www.mpiweb.org/venuesales