Most hotel teams charged with revenue generation struggle in managing their data and putting it to work for various reasons.
- Quality is low
- Unclear if and where data exists
- Teams don’t trust the data
- It’s expensive to fix/solve/manage
- It’s incredibly time-consuming
- Teams lack expertise
So the result is missed opportunities and lack of advanced analytics and AI that can help teams compete!
Commercial leaders have a real opportunity to lead data management system improvement. Practically everyone on their team has a job involving data by either interpreting it, using it or creating it. Yet, at GitGo we see most companies struggle as this gets lost at all levels of the organization, and then data is just unmanaged. Teams might create unsustainable work-arounds or just simply give up.
Step #1 for Commercial Leaders:
Get everyone involved!
Regular people who don’t have data or IT in their title are the ones creating, using, interpreting, regulating, planning and making decisions with data. Make sure you have your front line team involved. Including “regular people” is a vital to ensure the organization isn’t creating unrealistic or unusable strategies and steps.
To get started, simply clarify everyone’s roles and responsibilities as data customers and creators. When it comes to data quality, get the feedback from team members as contributors to the project, as better decision-makers and as guardians of the data. This also includes training and supporting the team to ensure standards and processes are articulated clearly and followed by all consistently.
A primary role of the commercial leader in hospitality is to eliminate siloes. We all know this is a tall order, as those siloes have been around for decades in many organizations and most companies are just scratching the surface at implementing commercial strategy.
But, siloes get in the way of data sharing as almost everyone depends on data to do their jobs. In a typical commercial organization a simple example is how sales uses lead data generated by marketing, marketing might use revenue management data on production to target appropriate audiences, sales uses revenue management data to drive conversations with customers for activation, and the list goes on and on. Yet, what we see at GitGo is departments don’t fully understand what data is important to their colleagues or why, and this is why bad data gets passed along.
Step #2:
Track the use cases/needs for data and the flow of where all data is captured and where it exists currently. Essentially, identify the current state and document it.
Step #3:
Build processes that support the identification, needs and communication of those needs between all users and business teams.
This step can be a cumbersome journey, so identifying a lead project manager that can get into the weeds is important. This person will need to be open to challenge status quo and be incredibly patient as they “herd cats”.
This role will also help leadership devise shared and common language amongst the business teams and stakeholders, as that is a critical step to ensure processes stick for the long-term.
Lastly, they will coach, coordinate and train the regular people on the team to ensure a sustainable solution is deployed.
At GitGo, we’ve enjoyed involvement in several key data management projects with our customers and are adept at helping commercial leaders with the above steps, as well as navigating the important regulatory changes around privacy and data compliance for sales and marketing initiatives.
If you’re in the midst of a project or if it’s on your radar for 2024, reach out and schedule a strategy session with your team to identify gaps and opportunities to save time and money as you navigate this challenging journey. https://calendly.com/amyi/30min
