Revenue management meetings indeed help businesses maximize revenues and yields.
NB: This is an article from Catala Consulting
But what parameters guarantee a successful revenue management meeting? How can you get better results from such meetings? If you are looking for ways to improve your strategies, this article is the right resource. We have provided a detailed guide to help you ensure a successful revenue management meeting.
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A revenue management meeting is whatever you want it to be, and your agenda doesn’t have to be cliché. A sample meeting could be about content brainstorming, sales challenge revenue meeting, etc.
For most revenue teams, meetings are just about tracking outcomes, going over the same data, showing accountability, discussing potential opportunities, and forecasting. However, in today’s ever-changing digital world, revenue meetings should be a lot more than they were.
The competition in the industry is enough for you to allow time for more innovation, brainstorming, and creativity during revenue management meetings. But how do you run a successful revenue management meeting?
Steps on how to Run a Successful Revenue Management Meeting
The first thing to do if you want to have a successful meeting is to ensure that the meeting is set up correctly. To do this, you may want to consider the following:
- Understand what a revenue management team is
- Ensure the right set of people are part of the team
- Decide how often you want the meetings to hold
- Choose a revenue team meeting
- Ensure smooth communication between team members outside meetings
To take it further, we shall be looking at each step one after the other:
- Understand what a revenue management team is
A typical revenue team consists of managers from your sales and marketing team within your company. A large chunk of their activities will be geared towards increasing the sales and revenue of your organization. The revenue management team develops and executes strategies in your organization.
Understanding what objectives and challenges your business is facing will give you insight into how to utilize your revenue team meetings to usurp those challenges. Some of these challenges could be the absence of sales-driven content ideas, difficulty implementing content into the sales process, the sales team not collaborating with the marketing team, etc.
- Ensure the right set of people are present in the meeting
Ensuring a successful meeting means you have the right people in the room. You can make a simple organogram for a specific Revenue management meeting and what the roles of each attendee would be during the meeting.
The following set of persons should be present in every revenue management meeting:
- The general manager
The GM promotes and supports a system of revenue generation within the organization. In most cases, they are expected to provide or make some strategic adjustments for the organization.
- Sales or marketing manager
In some organizations, they are referred to as the Director of sales or sales and marketing. They discuss and render advice on sales processes concerning the current trend in the general market. They also provide the team with forecast data on marketing actions focused on a target market.
- The Reservation manager
They are responsible for deliberating and offering advice on the inventory and price management of both short and medium terms.
- Front Office manager
They are responsible for ensuring overall customer satisfaction; therefore, they offer advice and strategies that would lead to an increase in salesforce.
Additionally, you can always make changes to the members of your team. Whoever you’re bringing into the team should be able to tackle challenges. You can bring in a revenue manager, a group manager, or a financial controller.
- Decide how often your team will meet.
The frequency of meetings varies according to the challenges your business faces, what makes sense for your organization, and the timeline for achieving your goals.
For some hoteliers, bi-weekly or monthly meetings for an average of 60 minutes are enough. It will enable the team members to keep up with trends, analyze trends and prepare reports.
However, your meetings can last longer when there is a need for more detailed analysis.
The structure of your meeting could consist of a brief analysis of issues highlighted in previous meetings (that should last for 20 – 30 minutes).
Deciding the frequency of your meeting will help you gain clarity on how much has to be accomplished in every meeting.
- Choose a Revenue meeting facilitator.
No successful revenue management team is complete without a facilitator. They hold the team members accountable. If you hold a revenue meeting without a facilitator, you will lose focus and waive off crucial issues.
Therefore, you need a meeting facilitator to consolidate individuals from across the business. He helps them work together to achieve a common goal. The facilitator guides and facilitates every meeting to ensure that the entire team is aligned and the purpose of the meeting is achieved.
- Determine what information is needed in the meeting
You must always keep every meeting highly strategic, since you will most like only a few hours together. Team members should bring only the most critical data to the table. Examples include Competitor data, pace by room type, data on arrivals and departure, insights from online media, and 30, 60, or 90-day forecasts.
Managers of various departments should have easy access to information and, more importantly, the ability to react to hotel pricing measures.
- Set your meeting agenda
Now you know what a revenue meeting is, who should be involved, and your meeting frequency, the next is to draft a plan for your meetings. An agenda is a crucial part of your meeting, and it will help you figure out what activities should take place during the meeting, which should be there, and ultimately help you keep to timing.
- Ensure effective communication outside the revenue team
The ability to communicate with the rest of the team outside meeting hours means everyone is on the same page and up-to-date. Communication outside of meetings is highly recommended if you don’t hold team meetings frequently.
It can serve as an easy way to circulate pre-meeting updates so that everyone is kept abreast before the meeting.
What are the key issues to be discussed during meetings?
You can begin your revenue meeting with an overview of previous meetings and highlight the fiscal year data and essential budget modifications. To be more detailed and specific, you may want to look into areas such as:
- Harmonization and collection in the current month and the coming months
- Significant changes over the last seven days
- Demand by segments
- Reservation roof
- Identification of crucial dates
- The general economic climate and marketplace dynamics
- Property performance trends
- Competitive information
- Month-end postmortem
- Sell strategy development
Why are Revenue Management Meetings essential?
Revenue management is essential to hoteliers because it helps them maximize revenues and yields using data analytics and intelligent innovations. One primary reason hoteliers carry out revenue management meetings is because it helps them foresee market demand and react promptly to changes in the market. It also helps them work through problems quickly and ensure specific goals are met.
What Makes a Revenue Management Meeting successful?
A typical weekly revenue management meeting is characterized by an ample dose of accountability, four main components, and shouldn’t last more than an hour.
Action and Implementation of issues addressed in what makes a meeting genuinely successful. Once the meeting is over, the following action should be harmonizing information obtained from the meeting, and each team member working on translating information into visible improvements. Team members should also immediately push recommended rates to the CRS, PMS, and channel manager.
The success of any Revenue Management meeting depends on frequent improvement and optimization of strategic actions.
How Revenue Management Works
Revenue management involves using data-driven methodologies for predicting buyer’s behaviour to increase revenue and sell products at the right time, prices, package, and location. Revenue management is commonly used in industries where demand fluctuates regularly. Examples are hotels, online retail, and hotels.
Many hotel businesses face varied and fluctuating demands that rise and fall due to factors such as holidays. However, the volume of demand varies with changes in time. Revenue management helps businesses predict demand and estimate the number of purchases, orders, and inventory availability by leveraging greater precision and developing data-driven methodologies.
Demand Segmentation and forecasting
Demand segmentation involves a company categorizing its customers into various smaller segments and then forecasting the demand for each segment. This is made possible with the help of data: companies learn more about market characteristics such as buying time, purchase volume, customer demographics, and psychographics.
The company then uses the results to adjust each segment’s inventory levels, prices, and market tactics.
Potential strategies to follow up after the meeting:
- Pricing strategy
- Inventory adjustments
- Marketing strategy development
- Exploit available marketing channels
Conclusion
The main objective of revenue management meetings is primarily to maximize revenues and prices. If you follow the steps highlighted above, you should be able to organize a successful revenue management meeting that will help you increase sales and leads for your business.
