NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Both staffing and spending in hotel sales and marketing have met or exceeded 2019 levels, but the quality of salespeople available still doesn't match pre-pandemic expectations.
Speaking during the "New Sales and Marketing Strategy Playbook" session at the 2023 Hotel Data Conference, Lovell Casiero, PM Hotel Group's senior vice president of commercial strategies, said the drop in quality has been noticeable.
"The talent is not what the talent used to be," she said. "What we've realized when we had to lay off so many people and hotels were closed was that it was a very transferable skill to be a director of sales and go into technology or go into a different industry altogether. We lost a lot of people. We also lost a lot of women in the industry because they had to go home and be caretakers."
She said PM Hotel Group has had to make a conscious effort to pivot its hiring away from focusing on industry experience and more on traits.
"We started 12 or 18 months ago hiring for personality because you can teach somebody the fundamentals of sales, but you can't teach someone to be outgoing and friendly and have that type of DNA," Casiero said.
While the talent pool might not be what it once was overall, Kevin McAteer, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Concord Hospitality, said there's been a noticeable improvement over the past year.
"It's a couple of things," he said. "People know that we're back and more open and that this is a career and not a job again. In the hospitality industry, we have found we have to be a lot more creative and proactive when looking for talent."
McAteer said Concord still looks for hotel industry experience for the director of sales level and above, but for lower-level positions, the company is more willing to look outside the industry.
"We are finding a number of people in the ranks below [the director level] that just have a real DNA and ability to connect with people and be proactive," he said.
Both McAteer and Casiero agreed that training and development is more important than ever in the field to help onboard the people who are new to the industry and to also show employees you want to retain that they have a path for growth without leaving.
"Whether you want to stay in sales or whether you want to be a [general manager] — I don't know why people would want to go to the dark side, but anyway — we will support them," Caserio said.
Regardless of the quality of candidate, McAteer said the cost of wages for sales and marketing employees has grown through simple economics, which has been enough to push up overall sales and marketing budgets across the industry.
To make sure companies are getting the bang for their buck, McAteer said it's vital that commercial strategy teams — which include not just sales and marketing but revenue management — are working collaboratively to advance the goals of their organizations.
"It's really important our digital marketing, our revenue management and our sales force are all working together for a couple of reasons," he said. "We know people aren't committed to any one channel. They'll shop many different channels before they make a buying decision. Your message has to be same, and you want your promotions to be carried from brand to social media and other paid media platforms, and it has to look and feel the same way."
Casiero said it comes down to recognizing each group has skills and knowledge that the others can leverage.
"It's really taking the talent you have and the expertise you have and the intelligence ... and just letting people do what they're good at," she said.