The Best Job You Never Heard Of - Behind the Scenes of the Hotel Sales Office

Best Job You Never Heard of Podcast - Behind the Scenes of the Hotel Sales Office_S1_Ep6

[00:00:00] Hello again. And welcome to the Best job you never heard of. I'm Grace. And today we are going to go behind the scenes in the hotel into one of the most exciting, fast-paced, and often misunderstood parts. Of the hotel, the sales office. If you've ever wondered what it's really like to be a hotel sales manager, buckle up.

This episode is your all access pass to the, the nerve center, the heart, if you will, of the hotel's revenue machine. So what does the hotel. Sales office. What did those people do? Let's start with the basics. The sales office is responsible for bringing group business into the hotel, not individual guests.

Booking rooms on Expedia. We're talking about groups. [00:01:00] Weddings, conferences, corporate events, sports teams, tour groups, reunions, everything in between. It has to be more than 10 rooms and sales managers. What do they do? They're out there finding clients, negotiating contracts, booking blocks of rooms, and coordinating with all of the other departments to make sure events go off without a hitch.

It's sales, it's strategy, it's service. It's all rolled up into one. There's a lot to do. Your day is very busy. So what does a hotel sales manager actually do all day? Well, there's honestly, there's no typical day, but. Here's a snapshot, responding to leads and [00:02:00] inquiries, giving those site tours to potential clients, creating proposals and contracts, and don't be intimidated by that.

It's all form letters. Meeting with the catering people, the front desk, housekeeping, all the departments to coordinate. Upcoming groups, different groups have different needs, and that requires different departments and personnel. So it's a variety of folks that you're gonna need to do the planning with every group.

Now, I also wanna say, as a salesperson, you are usually sort of. At the top of the planning pyramid with the different departments really. Managed by the [00:03:00] convention services manager. So you are sort of overseeing, checking in, making sure things that are very important to your client are done.

But it's the convention service manager who is responsible for all of that, because as a sales manager, your main function. Is to bring groups in, repeat groups, new groups. You are not supposed to be too deep into the planning and executing of events, but a lot of times the clients are attached to you and so you need to show your face and hold their hand on occasion so that they are reassured that.

The person who basically promised to take care of the group, if you bring it here, is [00:04:00] involved.

Also to continue, the snapshot of things that you're doing. You are expected to attend networking events sometimes in other cities or trade shows, often in other cities. Call on clients in their offices. In other cities, you need to follow up with past clients to attempt to secure repeat business. You're gonna need to run reports and document interactions with clients.

You are going to need to document your interactions with clients. Run reports on room revenue, booking pace your forecasted business. That's tentatives and definites and yes, wine and dine clients too. Sales isn't just behind a desk in an office. It's a relationship business. [00:05:00] That's the most important thing I can teach you.

So the players in the sales office, usually there's a mix of roles. There's a director of sales that's the boss. He oversees strategy and performance. Sometimes there's a director of marketing, I would say they often are the. Overseer of the entire department. They're usually the most senior manager, but sometimes you'll have a director of sales and marketing.

So that those roles all, you know, kind of put into one job. And the director of sales is the coach. He helps you with your strategy, your performance. It's a really important job, and when I've had a great director of sales, it's really made a difference. Now, the sales managers, they focus on specific markets like weddings, corporate [00:06:00] associations.

A lot of times it's divided by geography. So first I was Southern California. That's usually the most junior member 'cause it's local, well, local-ish you can drive there. Then I was Northern California, then I got New York. So.

That makes the job really interesting 'cause you're working different markets as you progress in your career. Now there are sales assistants and they support you. By running reports, helping with proposals, scheduling, meeting space.

There's also catering sales managers, but they're usually not in the sales office. They're in the convention services office, although they book banquet events that sometimes have rooms attached, but. [00:07:00] Usually they're those 10. And under that I mentioned, hotel sales relies on a handful of key tools.

There are sales platforms, that's systems, computer systems like Delphi Opera or Amadeus, and you'll be trained on those, but they're pretty simple. Lead sources like C Event Hotel Planner or Helms Briscoe CRMs, which is customer relationship management systems that are built into your computer

to track your contacts and. Follow up and, uh, yes, a good old fashioned email and phone calls. You've also got sales kits, which is the collateral [00:08:00] material that shows pictures of the hotel in the rooms, also room diagrams, meeting room diagrams, menus. All of it matters. And the goal is to make the client feel confident and taken care of from first call to final invoice.

Now the thrill of the sale, there is nothing like the feeling of booking a group. They call you, they tell you you've got it, you get the signed contract, the rooms are blocked. The meeting space is, is now turned definite. The catering details are moving forward. A convention services manager is assigned and your hotel just earned thousands, often, tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.[00:09:00]

It's exciting and usually the team celebrates one time. I didn't book this. One of the other sales managers booked a group for the first week in January, and as you can imagine, that's a dead time in hotels. And our general manager said, meet me downstairs in the fine dining restaurant. And he had bottles of Dom Perignon so we could all toast to Lori who booked the group.

And, uh. This exciting piece of business. Sadly, they canceled later, but you know, that's life. I still enjoyed that little celebration so. When you get repeat business from a happy client to, oh, that's such a great feeling. I had a Hewlett Packard group that I just really made, eventually very close friends we're still in touch [00:10:00] with them.

The two ladies that ran their incentive program and I booked them. Three times almost in a row. And that was a really rewarding situation. Not so much because of the business, which was wonderful, but because of the friendship we developed. So the challenges, there are some sales. It isn't for the faint of heart, you will have quotas to hit.

I've found it's pretty easy to do that with all the tools that they give you. You will have tough clients sometimes. That's just the truth. Some people are just hard to deal with. And the good news there is once you book them, it's really the convention sales manager, the convention services manager's problem, but I.[00:11:00]

Usually with the tough clients, you end up working sort of like a tag team with the convention services manager and yourself. 'cause you have to. Oh, last minute changes. Gosh, it's the bane of the hotel business. It happens all the time. And if you put yourself in the shoes of the meeting planner, you can kind of see how and why there are many times pleasing their bosses so they can say, oh no, you can't do that because the hotel said that.

Yeah, most of the time you, you just have to try to make it work. Internal pressure from other departments? Well, it's a team spirit. In most of the hotels that I worked in sometimes let's say your client will not sign off on the menu. On the BEO, that's the banquet event order, and [00:12:00] the convention services manager needs them too, so they can order the food.

The convention services manager will sometimes come to you and say, I need this because you are the one that has the relationship with the client. So you do get sort of dragged in sometimes to situations like that, but you know, it sounds major. Really minor. The rewards are so much, so much bigger and greater and grander and memorable than these little hiccups that you have to deal with.

Oh. And competition with other hotels down the street. Ugh. That's just the way it goes. I mean, you know what? You win some, you lose some. And some of these hotels and other sales managers, you hate losing business to them. But you can't get, you can't get 'em all [00:13:00] right? But if you are persistent, you are organized, you're persuasive, and you're.

Relationship focused, people focused, you will thrive. This is a role that also gives you visibility if you're good people notice and that can open doors to even bigger roles down the road. In my career, I had an instance where a convention service manager that I worked with that we were friendly. I would not say we were friends, we just worked well together, and she left and she went to a bigger, nicer hotel and within about three months. The director of sales and marketing from that hotel called me and said, you know, Evelyn, that was her name has recommended you [00:14:00] and I'd really like to talk to you.

And I had an interview with this lady and uh, and I had lunch with this lady and we hit it off and I ended up going to work there. And it was a big step up, I'll tell you that. So there you have it. A peek inside the world of hotel sales. It's impossible for me to tell you everything in a podcast episode.

You know, it's not just a job, it's a career path that has energy purpose. And just a whole lot of fun and new experiences and exciting opportunities. And once you're in. These opportunities are endless. Next time we're diving into what it [00:15:00] takes to move up in the industry and how to turn an entry level hotel job into a full fledged sales career. I'm Grace, and this has been the best job you ever heard of. Thanks for listening. Keep going after the job that your heart desires and it just might change your life.

Bye for now.