Achieving group and meetings revenue targets can make or break your property’s annual performance. But most hotel group sales departments lack consistent, effective marketing support and are forced to generate their own leads.
Typically, hotel marketing teams are focused on attracting transient consumers, rather than assisting the hotel’s group and corporate sales teams.
This is a significant lost opportunity that could have a huge impact on revenues, especially during slower periods.
What’s behind this strange phenomenon?
In almost every other industry, the marketing department is responsible for building relationships with ALL of a company’s audiences and markets. Why has the hotel industry evolved to a place where group sales teams must feed themselves while their colleagues in the marketing department dedicate the budget and resources on transient business?
From our POV, a number of factors have led to this strange evolution:
Lack of B2B marketing expertise: Most hotel marketers are trained in classic, business-to-consumer marketing techniques. Very few colleges teach B2B best practices, which are based on an entirely different ideology than B2C. B2B marketing emphasizes the value of building long-term market trust, while B2C marketing focuses on short-term KPIs.
Complexity of measurement: World-class B2B marketers are experts at establishing systems to measure marketing’s value to the enterprise, but newbies trying to dabble in B2B lead gen are often terrified by the complexity of creating a lead gen funnel and tracking leads to deal completion.
Disparity of channels: There is a large disparity in the number of channels, media and marketing tools available to hotel marketers to attract transient consumers, versus what’s available for accelerating hotel group sales lead flow.
The leadership paradox: Many hotel entities have separate marketing and sales leaders. This leads to a natural separation of budgets, accountability and resources. On the other side of the coin, when there is ONE central sales and marketing leader, they came up from either the sales or marketing ranks and will invariably be more successful at the area they are most familiar with…
No communication: Because of the organizational separation and marked difference in KPIs, hotel marketers often have very little communication with their sales counterparts. Hotel marketers fail to share their capabilities and hotel sales fail to communicate their needs and periods of weakness.
Apathy: Record occupancy, a soaring economy and a dependable inflow of sales lead from their parent brands and sources like CVent have led property-level sales and marketing teams to a comfortable state of passivity.
