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

This online resource is to help hotels and sales professionals navigate through this crisis and prepare in the reactivation of B2B and MICE revenues following best practice communications.

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
Antoine

Antoine Asselin

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

Simon Dowell

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

There are many unknowns in the post covid-19 era, but we can already clearly identify how to influence the trajectory of your hotel revenue going forward. Since the initial revenue opportunities will come from domestic and local markets, your hotel B2B and MICE sales team will play an important role for your recovery.

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.

Here is a list of points to start discussing internally:
  • 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.

Vivienne Le Page

Managing Director at Magowan Consulting, with over 30 years of experience in leadership role at Marriott International.

Recommendations of reading to get ready

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

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.

Recording of previous webinars

    •  
Educative content to improve your knowledge and expertise

Suggestions of certification and online courses

Hospitality Podcasts

B2B Sales podcasts recommendations

Curated Global Covid-19 resources and articles

Resources

 

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.

What we’ll cover in this section:

  • 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

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:

 

External Data Sources for Meetings and Events

Stage 3: Communication

Set up an effective selling strategy whilst considering all communication channels, resources and time.

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

Vikram Singh

What we’ll cover in this section:

  • 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

Stage 4: Track, measure and report the success of your effort

Being able to track and measure the success of your communications will allow you to make informed decisions on how you move forward, from assessing the performance of your communications and deciding what may need to change.

 

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

The digitalisation of your sales processes doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive, it simply needs some planning and preparation.

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.

If you have additional resources you believe would beneficial to include, please drop us an email on support@upmailsolutions.com.

Exclusive Covid-19 Sales Reactivation Offer

20% off + Pay nothing for the first 90 days

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UpMail continues to provide team PPHE a competitive Edge

UpMail continues to provide team PPHE a competitive Edge   Headquarters Amsterdam, Netherlands Type Hotel chain Number of hotels +49 Region Europe Company Size +5,700 employees About PPHE PPHE Hotel Group is an international hospitality real estate company with a...