The survey does not say anything about hotels, but imagine how much time hotel B2B salespeople waste printing reports from the hotel PMS to re-enter information in Excel for analysis and reporting. The hotel could quickly eliminate manual work costs by integrating the PMS and the Sales CRM. There are five areas where fewer systems in hotels could improve profitability.
Cut costs
It is difficult for hotels to find salespeople and assistants to the sales team. It is possible to cut costs in terms of fewer employees and to use fewer systems. Yes, the hotel will pay for integrating the hotel PMS and the Sales CRM, but the total savings will be many times the extra cost. There are also cost savings by using fewer systems. The onboarding and ongoing training of salespeople will be shorter when they have to learn fewer systems.
Integrate tools more easily
Systems integration is complex in hotels, but it is getting easier with modern systems with open APIs. When the hotel selects and implements a new B2B Sales CRM or any other system, the primary selection criteria should be industry-specific integrations to collect data from many different sources automatically. The direct benefit is a reduction in workload that potentially saves overtime costs.
Train salespersons more efficiently
Traditionally hotel sales have not been about productivity because it is a person-to-person interaction and cannot be about productivity. Maybe, only person-to-person was true some time ago, but today it is all about building an efficient process and solid data quality to analyze performance and trends. The hotel needs to train the sales team according to the most productive workflow, the importance of data quality, and how to analyze data to make better decisions. User adoption will be higher since it is more efficient to use one system.
Improve team collaboration
The sales team is part of the commercial team. Break down the silos have been the buzzword in the hotel industry for some time. The only way to encourage collaboration is to have a system that spans over the old silos. One example of cooperation is between sales and revenue management about pricing corporate agreements, MICE deals, and groups. Improving the collaboration will save time and effort, speed up the sales process, and increase the deal's win rate. User adoption will also be higher when several roles see the benefits of using fewer systems.
Speed up the deal progression
Finally, hotels need to speed up the deal process from inquiry to winning a deal. The competition will be fierce during the recovery, which means that the team that responds the fastest with the most engaging content and the best price will win the deal. A well-designed process, smooth collaboration, and a supporting system will lead to a higher win rate and higher revenue.
Demand Calendar B2B Sales CRM
The survey confirms our philosophy when developing the B2B Sales CRM module. Our guiding principles have been.
- Specific B2B Sales CRM for hotel salespeople
- Integration that allows for automation to eliminate tediously manual work
- Maximize speed and throughput of deals
- Collaboration between sales and revenue management
- Easy to onboard with a minimum of training time
The result is a B2B Sales CRM that maximizes the productivity of hotel B2B sales.