HSMAI Global's new Certified Hotel Sales Leader (CHSL) certification is designed to recognize the expertise of hotel sales leaders by emphasizing the most up-to-date sales and business principles, practices, and strategies.
Below are some excerpts from the Hotel Sales Manual ( (The Hotel Sales Playbook: Winning Strategies for Success) from HSMAI International: Winning strategies for success, selected by HSMAI's Americas Sales Advisory Board.
Winning strategies for success.
Technology has radically altered sales processes, creating new opportunities for sales teams to become more efficient, data-driven, and deliver highly personalized experiences throughout the customer journey.
Technology has facilitated some of the transactional aspects of sales, making customer touchpoints even more important.
Robust customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become essential for managing leads, tracking customer interactions, and analyzing sales performance data to optimize processes.
A successful sales leader:
- Fully understand the capabilities of the sales intelligence and CRM tools your team has access to, especially when it comes to lead scoring, sales forecasting, and customer data and analytics.
- Ensure your team leverages hotel CRM systems to manage leads and customer interactions, monitor sales performance metrics, and optimize sales processes.
Thanks to technological advances, hotel sales, marketing, and revenue management functions have become more integrated.
Digital marketing tactics, such as content marketing, email campaigns, and paid advertising, directly support sales channels. Advanced revenue management systems allow revenue teams, including the sales team, to dynamically manage pricing and inventory in response to real-time market conditions.
This integration requires sellers to understand the fundamentals of revenue management and marketing to ensure the right offer is made to the right customer at the right time.
A successful sales leader:
- Appreciate the tools and colleagues specialized in digital marketing and revenue management. Understand how they influence sales discipline and vice versa.
- Ensure your team knows how and when to leverage marketing tools (from content marketing to email campaigns, paid advertising, and more) to support sales efforts.
- Ensure your teams master the fundamentals of revenue management and can identify the most impactful partnership opportunities for sales, including market segmentation, pricing, forecasting, and performance measurement.
- Sales teams now have access to more comprehensive data analytics tools, allowing them to better understand customer behavior, communication and purchasing preferences, and buying patterns, enabling more personalized and targeted sales efforts. These data analytics tools are also used to measure success metrics and make more informed decisions.
A successful sales leader:
- Recognize the enormous value (and role) of data for the sales organization and understand how to leverage it to become a more effective business strategist.
- Develop your salespeople's capabilities to use data to be more strategic and targeted in their prospecting and customer engagement efforts.
Other technological innovations impacting sales today (and how successful sales leaders can leverage them) include:
Digital sales channels: Empower and empower salespeople to adapt their traditional in-person sales interactions to virtual sales environments and digital channels like email, social media, and video conferencing.
Social networks: Understand the role of social media in hotel sales and leverage social platforms like LinkedIn for your personal branding (and that of your team members), networking, and direct interaction with potential customers.
Automation and AI: Investigate automation and AI opportunities to streamline repetitive sales tasks, improve lead scoring and personalization efforts, and answer customer questions.