In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen business adapt to a situation nobody saw coming with digital tools and virtual offers. However, during these difficult times many employees have been either laid off or furloughed.
For the hospitality industry, this means the people we typically work with on a day to day basis, like sales managers, are currently inactive. This has disrupted the typical chain of command as their directors are left to manage the various groups, deals, and relationships currently unattended.
You see, many directors lead, guide, and assist a team of sales managers to make the right business decisions for the hotel. The sales managers operate as the “boots on the ground” who forge these relationships while fighting internally to get their corporate group clients the best deal possible.
In addition to their official job leading the charge for the hotel, directors are also taking on the management of these client relationships since sales managers have been furloughed. That’s not a horrible scenario when it’s one or two sales managers, but it becomes problematic when you’re talking about four, five, six, or more now absent from the mix.
Below, we’ll discuss some tips that can be used right now to manage the new workload. Then, we’ll examine ways you can help mitigate risks in the future.
React Right Now
I recently read a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller, and it’s shifted my whole mindset. It shows how to tackle each day with one single, important task in mind that will keep you moving forward.
Operating like this narrows your focus on the most immediate and pressing tasks that need to be done right now. I’ve distilled some of my top learnings for you here.
Be Smart About Time Zones
Let’s say you had five sales managers who handle different geographic territories in the United States. Start your day by working in one specific time zone before moving on to the next.
For example, you might begin on the East Coast before moving through the Midwest and into the West Coast. Not only can this help manage your workload, the time cascades nicely across time zones while you close out each region as their respective business days end.
Be a True Partner
Right now, groups are either canceling their trips or moving their dates. If the groups are canceling, make sure you cancel those dates ASAP. In this climate, you won’t win if you try and fight it.
But we’re also all in this fight together, and you don’t want to leave the planners hanging on the other end. Empathize with their situation—be a true partner. They will come back to you for business if you do this (trust me, I’m speaking from experience).
Be a Thoughtful Communicator
Find the right channel to communicate with your clients. Maybe their inbox is more cluttered now that it’s ever been, so emails won’t find them.
Don’t be afraid to send a text message or even give them a direct call. If you’re working with international clients, you can use WhatsApp. Find what works best for them, and then follow up accordingly.
Prepare for the Future
It seems many people are asking: “How could I have prepared better for this?” Maybe all your group hotels and contacts should have been more organized, or the sales managers could have taken better notes and logged the information in a central location for easy access.
In my years of experience, I find that organization is hard to come by. But that’s because we empower people to sell the way they sell—it’s what they’re accustomed to. After all, you wouldn’t tell a left-handed hockey player to play with his right, would you?
As a result, there can be a lack of unified protocol that causes chaos. Thankfully, there’s plenty you can do to help mitigate this friction in the future. If you implement the right protocols and systems, you unlock the ability for your sales managers to:
- Stay more organized
- Automate processes like contract follow-ups, payment reminders, pending hotel contract notifications, and suggestions for non-intrusive outreach cadence
- Take on more business with the same amount of effort or better yet less effort
Implementing the right systems now, while we’re in this holding period, is key. These are the systems that we have implemented over the past two years at Luxpitality that have allowed us to stay organized and efficient with our business. We hope they help you as well.
CRM
This is the epicenter of our business. Before everyone kept everything they had on their local computers.. Not so bad to fix if you are a small company however the longer you wait the more backlog you will have. What if you had this implemented at the time of furloughing your sales team.
Internal Comms
Keep the email clutter down and use internal chat and channels like slack to keep the conversations focused to a specific topic or channel. Something that has helped us tremendously is that you can search for anything you want in any channel. This way you know that if it’s not in your CRM or email it’s probably there
G Suite
Collaborate and keep everything in one place. This is huge for everything from having your latest marketing materials up-to-date to a repository of all your client contracts in one place. Finding all this in shared drives will be a breeze.
These may seem like no brainers but if you don’t stay on top of it then you are sure to be in a huge mess at some point. Having these systems in place not only protect you but they allow you to tackle every day head on with confidence! Let the systems do the work so you can spend more time doing what you do best while maintaining those relationships.