Inbound inquiries are great! Don’t you wish your hotel could survive on those alone? Sure you do! It means you have effective marketing, your hotel has a solid reputation and the choice to put the hotel in that location was smart. But, it’s not realistic to think that you can survive off of inbound inquiries. When hotels tell me that they are so busy responding to inbound requests the bubble over my head says, “Well congratulations! You’ve been commoditized!”
Don’t get me wrong. It is a great thing to have inbound inquiries. To have prospects raising their hand saying they are interested in doing business with you. What we forget is that although these inquiries can keep our sales team busy with the compressed sales cycle, there is a whole other world out there that ISN’T raising their hand. They either aren’t finding your hotel, or they are making preconceived notions as to why you wouldn’t be a good fit for them. They may be deselecting you before you are even given a chance, and without you even knowing!
Through effective sales prospecting, you can:
- Uncover the prospects and business opportunities that make sense for your hotel
- Educate the prospects on why your hotel would be a good fit for them
- Most importantly, you can help the buyer rule out other properties they may have selected for their RFP process either directly or indirectly
The best sales leaders realize that prospecting is designed to narrow the competitor field in the hotel’s favor.
Now, chances are the buyers are still going to go out to bid and send their RFPs to more than one property. You will still need to compete for the business. However, when you are part of the conversation earlier in the buying process you can narrow that pool of competitors & ensure that you’re in the mix. By relying on buyers to raise their hand to you and say they are interested, you are being commoditized, which is a difficult thing to overcome when the buyer is in their final stage of selecting a hotel & you’re just starting the conversation with them.
So, don’t let the prospecting process discourage you. In comparison to receiving an inbound inquiry, the process of prospecting to close is much longer. Not only is it discouraging, but it’s downright painful for many who don’t have the bandwidth and efficiencies in place to run a strong prospecting team.
However, the benefit is clear. It allows you to become engaged in the conversation earlier while the buyer is in their research and education phase. By being engaged sooner, you become an option that the buyer may not have considered. Also, it gives you the opportunity to eliminate competitors that the buyer may have selected.
