How We Do It

Services

Internet Web Site Review-At the most basic a property’s web site should be positioned as the property’s 24/7 sales office, reflect the quality of the facility, provide necessary decision-making information, and allow those interested parties to make a purchase. Customers look for ease of navigation and purchase along with a comprehensive list of the hotel's attributes, emphasis on Fire/Life Safety and rate integrity. Operators look for transparency between the physical property and the web site, search capabilities, increasing sales at lower costs, and acquiring the loyalty of third party internet channel customers. Our review provides insight from the industry's best practices in these areas.

Marketing Plan Development—achieving or exceeding a goal requires planning. The development of a practical plan - one that all team members contribute towards and support, is vital to the property’s success. The components of the plan must take into consideration a number of key measurements. The Situation Analysis is the snapshot in time, while the Positioning Statement considers the Situation Analysis, then presents the product in a manner that will allow it to be successfully sold to its various market segments. Objectives should be outlined, clear strategies defined, and measurable robust tactics enumerated.

Sales Productivity Measurements--as we know sales team members are more successful when they manage their time well, recognize their training needs, and are positive towards their work environment. It’s fairly obvious too that with the demands of the business precious little time is available to arrive at the root cause and a solution for an obstacle impacting sales productivity. Sales teams are charged with selling and that is where they should rightly be focused. It’s also fair to say that these are bright people who can identify both problems and solutions, and would like the opportunity to resolve some of the key issues surrounding time usage, their training needs, and their work environment.

Value is created for the property as follows:

Team & Management have current measurement on three key sales productivity influencers (Time Usage, Training Needs, Work Environment)
Team has agreed on key issues impacting increased productivity
Team has prioritized key issues based on effort to remove obstacles, and impact on productivity and revenue
Team has accepted/assigned responsibility
Team and Management have agreed to seek reasonable resolution

Sales Review— the external objective of the property should be to make itself easy for the customer to conduct business with it. The review process identifies where that is not the case, and suggests remedies to fill those gaps. The internal objective of the property should be to constantly seek the potential of the business in terms of financial achievement. Our sales review evaluates the Product, the Plan to "sell" it, the resources applied to the plan, and the People who execute the plan. Again, recommended action is provided to fill the gap between actual performance and the desired outcome. During the course of the review, over seventy processes are evaluated, as well as interviews conducted with each of the sales team members.

Shops—a critical component of your marketing plan is the testing of your processes through customer shops. Advoco Hospitality will conduct periodic testing of your reservation, group sales and catering functions to ensure that service is being delivered in a consistent manner, and that your brand is being properly represented.

Six Sigma—the many processes in the marketing function should, as stated previously, be designed to benefit the customer in such a way that the property is viewed as one that is easy to do business with. Too often, however, the processes are tedious, require multiple approval levels, and do not respond to the customer in a timely manner. We work with you to map the key sales processes to identify waste in steps and time, which neither add no value for the customer, nor enable the property to better serve that customer.

Team Building—high performing teams have certain characteristics such as sharing a common vision, commitment to similar goals, and an agreed upon game plan and rules, and a realization of the value that each member brings to the team. Team building exercises allow the team to define its particular stage in this development process, and to become aware that break through results occur only when the team reaches a high performing stage on a consistent basis.

Trouble Shooting—morale is down in the sales department; the reservation conversion rate is trending downward; repeat business has fallen dramatically; brand equity is eroding. None of the foregoing are mutually exclusive, however, Advoco Hospitality works with you to reach the root cause of a process or outcome that has gone awry within the sales function.

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