Chesapeake Hospitality: Turning Salespeople Into Business People
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Client: Chesapeake Hospitality, national hotel management company
Industry: Hotel management, full portfolio
The challenge
Revenue was sliding and the cost of winning business kept climbing. The wins the sales teams did have came from a race to the bottom on rate, not from building value.
Revenue management was doing its job. The problem was demand. Sales teams sold mostly through third-party planners, convention bureaus and the brand, and their relationships were with the people who place orders, like procurement and travel departments, not the people who decide where the business goes.
Sales leaders were using the same approach they always had, and didn’t know how to get a different result. The investors kept hearing the same updates, with lots of activity and no clear link to performance in the market. Everyone was working hard. They just didn’t have the foundation to move revenue.
What we did
We worked across the whole portfolio, with the regional vice presidents and Directors of Sales.
- Science and strategy. Every hotel built a strategy tied to its financial goals, with tactics that grow a segment, not a to-do list. At one hotel, a segment expected to grow 58% had no strategy behind it and four low-level tasks. We changed that.
- Customer engagement. We gave the teams a consultative sales process built for today’s buyer, not one built in 1972, and moved their selling from order-takers to the vice presidents and senior leaders who move the business.
- Coach-by-the-side. Sales leaders can’t give away what they don’t have. We taught the process, then coached alongside the regional leaders and Directors of Sales so they learned to coach strategy and skill themselves, and the learning stuck.
- Marketing aligned to the target. Marketing programs and campaigns were pointed at the same customers the sales teams were going after, to raise return and booking conversion.
The results
Hotel by hotel, the new approach paid off quickly:
- A $1.3 million account closed at a distressed 250-room hotel, two months after the team learned the new sales process.
- 5.5 times the room nights from a single lead at a Florida hotel, by working through the customer’s organization instead of quoting the one request.
- 4 times the revenue from the same account at a Detroit hotel, by developing the one account it already knew.
- A new expectation across the company: sales teams calling on senior business leaders, not just purchasing.
The teams went from selling rooms on price to selling value to the people who make the decisions.