B2B and MICE Post Covid-19 Reactivation Pack
A GUIDE TO REACTIVATE YOUR
HOTEL B2B & MICE REVENUES
Planning the recovery of your hotel revenue post Covid-19
We’ve put together this guide from industry experts, offering recommendations, tips and links to precious resources for your hotel sales teams.
We’ll be covering the following stages:
- Strategy and planning
- Contacts database preparation
- Communications
- Measurement
Has a decade of experience working with Hotel B2B Sales teams, founder and CEO of UpMail and active member of the HSMAI Sales Advisory Board
Has 15 years experience leading hotel sales teams for Marriott International in the UK & China, and is Commercial Director at UpMail
The initial revenue opportunities will come from the domestic and local markets,
so it’s up to the hotels to take action and make a difference.
For Hotel Sales Teams
Their success will be linked to how efficient their customer communications are, being able to deliver personable and valuable content to an unusually large audience in a short period of time. With budgets scaled right back impacting team size, everyone will need to do more with less.
This guide is layed out with considerations and recommendations to support your hotel sales team and enable you to digitalise your sales processes.
Stage 1: Strategy and Planning
We’re now taking you on a journey to start preparing the reactivation of your B2B and MICE revenues.
- Take time to reflect – what was working well in the past and what wasn’t. Use this time to reflect and act upon the areas of improvement as a business and for your individuals too.
- Share ideas as a team – create a sales sharing hub where everyone in the hotel is encouraged to contribute with revenue generating ideas. Who knows you may just discover new sales and marketing talent too.
- Agree on a recovery strategy – Taking time as a leadership team to reflect and agree upon a strategy that will give your hotel the biggest opportunity to recover once consumer confidence has returned. Making a decision early on will rally your teams and present a new purpose.
- Get Proactive and engage your team – Align priorities and set clear goals for the team, for now or for when they return. They will want to be kept busy and feel that they are contributing.
Managing Director at Magowan Consulting, with over 30 years of experience in leadership role at Marriott International.
Recommendations of reading to get ready
- HRS: Buyers see opportunity to negotiate lower hotel rates – Business Travel News Europe (6th May 2020)
- Shifting Sales Priorities is Key to Resurrecting Revenue Streams – Kristi White, Knowland Group – Hotelier Magazine (4th May 2020)
- HSMAI Curate: How to be a Hospitality Sales Leader During Covid-19 – Christopher Durso, Vice President of Content Development, HSMAI
- How Venues Are Preparing With Social Distancing Measures – Event Manager Blog (23rd April 2020)
- Interview with Kelly McGuire, PhD, former SVP of Revenue Management at MGM Resort about what revenue managers should be doing now in anticipation of recovery from the negative effects of COVID-19.
- Are you Post COVID-19 ready? – Pradip Bhandari, Director Of Sales & Marketing at InterContinental Hotels Group (13th April 2020)
- Hotels Should Expect Business Travel to Rebound First: The Long View This Week – Cameron Sperance, Skift (10th April 2020)
- How to Adapt to the New Sales Environment: A 2-Step Approach to Navigating COVID-19 – Aurelien Mottier, Sales Hacker (31st March 2020)
- How to keep your team motivated and productive in self-isolation – Nikki Thorpe, Institute of Hospitality
Monitor when the market will bounce back
To stay abreast on the situation of the hospitality market and make sure you get your sales team to ready for the right time, here are resources to review.
Websites and organisations to follow
- STR constantly publish industry stats and reports: STR dedicated Covid-19 news page or follow STR on LinkedIn (or directly follow Robin Rossmann, their MD).
- Follow Travel’s Reopening: A Global Timeline – Skift
- Follow Shiji Distribution on LinkedIn, as they are based in China and are publishing interesting stats on the Chinese market. This is their insight page they updated every two weeks.
- Avvio Covid-19 Impact page – They share data specifically on UK and Irish domestic markets.
- What you need to know: Coronavirus and travel bans – BCD Travel, Travel ban update for each country
Relevant Webinars to register or watch
There are a huge number of webinar available currently, but it’s challenging to know which ones to dedicate some time. We’re curating a list of relevant webinars that we’ll constantly update.
- Knowland Group live webinars and recordings with actions and insights on how hotels can manage during and beyond COVID-19.
Recording of previous webinars
- Hotel Sales Strategies: How to Get Business Right Now – with Rupesh Patel and Tammy Gillis
- Knowland Group multi-part series looking at how things have changed and how we can move forward from both the hotelier and the meeting planner perspectives is a must (recordings from 28th April to 12th May 2020).
- Communications in Recovery webinar – Focused on the MICE industry in Asia by DBC (Recording from 30th April 2020)
- HSMAI Europe Webinar: Shifting Gears – Navigating the rough terrain ahead and planning for smoother roads ahead (Recording from 30 March 2020)
Educative content to improve your knowledge and expertise
Suggestions of certification and online courses
- Free Cvent Certification
- LinkedIn Online Training Courses and LinkedIn Learning. In both cases you can tailor your searched for B2B Sales, not necessarily directly related to hotels, but still great content.
Hospitality Podcasts
- Hospitality Mavericks – with Michael Tingsager
B2B Sales podcasts recommendations
- Grant Cardone – How to get through Unprecedented Times | Be Yourself
- Sales Success Stories – Chance Favours the Prepared Mind | Finding Sales Success on LinkedIn
- Get in The Door – Building a Robust Prospect Pipeline
- Brainshark – The 22 Best Sales Podcasts to Listen to Right Now
- Modern Sales – Remote selling
- The Brutal Truth About Sales & Selling – THE #1 MINDSET OF THE TOP 1% OF SELLERS WHO CRUSH IT
Curated Global Covid-19 resources and articles
Resources
- HSMAI Coronavirus Resources
- techtalk.travel COLLECTIVE – Exclusive sessions for hoteliers only. Open exchange among hoteliers. Sharing of ideas, best (coping) practices and experiences regarding the Covid-19 crisis.
- List of cancelled & postponed trade fairs in Asia, America, Africa and Australia – MeetExpo
Stage 2: Prepare and collate contacts data
Grouping contacts and cleaning up your customer data may not have the lure of closing a deal, but is so important to get right from the offset. So whilst it’s quiet be sure to have your team work through to organise your customer contacts in the groups that are aligned to your recovery strategy.
- Overview of internal and external source of contacts available (covering free and paid options)
- How to organise, clean and enhance the quality of your contact database
- How to increase the size of your prospecting database
- Where to focus resources for maximum return
Database not strong enough? Then look at where all leads have originated from, be it third party planners or via on-line portals, these are prospects too and will want to know what you’re offering, so be sure these details are entered into your database/CRM and send a communication specific to that audience.
Recommendations and tips
- Review all internal data first and assess its relevance
- Group your data in a way that works for your activation strategy and then assess whether you need to source external data.
- Keep it simple, you should focus on the first 2-3 segments and then continue iterating in smaller sub-segments.
Instructions to extract contacts data from your systems
How to extract contact data from
- Opera S&C (link to be confirmed)
- Delphi / Salesforce (thanks to Emma Keeling)
- Cvent portal
Resources to grow your contact lists on your own
To find organisations or contacts:
- LinkedIn (free) and LinkedIn Navigator (costly, but powerful)
To find email addresses of contacts:
- 8 Actionable Ways To Find Anyone’s Email Address
- Email Hunter – We’re using this one at UpMail.
External Data Sources for Meetings and Events
Stage 3: Communication
Contacts have been grouped, segments defined, strategy agreed upon – now is the time to communicate and stimulate demand through targeted powerful messages. Just take a moment to assess the most relevant communication channels available, to drive your message.
Caring is the new currency
- Overview of B2B communication channels and trends
- How to create a simple and engaging sales campaign following hotel B2B best practice in times of uncertainty.
- How it’s possible to differentiate yourself and re-engage with your clients and prospects.
Tips and Recommendations
- Evaluate your timing, there is a period to build relationship and a time to sell
- Build your credibility and expertise by sharing relevant and external content
- Use a combination of channels to reach your clients (email and phone)
Resources to get your started
- UpMail Revenue Reactivation Pack – Get access to UpMail off-the-shelf B2B and MICE revenue reactivation templates.
- Is your sales team running fast enough – Blog post on the usage of Sales Acceleration of Technologies in the hotel industry.
- How Sales Teams Can Thrive in a Digital World – Harvard Business Review (20th Feb 2020)
Stage 4: Track, measure and report the success of your effort
What we’ll cover in this section:
- Overview of the important metrics to collect
- How to use these metrics to assess the performance of your sales activities
Tips and Recommendations
- Measure the performance of your sales communications by using the right technology
- Track your email communications to get the right signals and then spend time on the right leads
- Make it fun by organising some competition in your team (Gamification)
Summary
We hope this online documentation will help provide guidance and structure to your leadership and sales teams, to elaborate, plan and reactivate your B2B and MICE sales strategies whilst leveraging all available resources.
Get in touch to discuss how we can help your hotel
For more information about UpMail, take a look at our blog
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