ORLANDO, Florida — Gone are the days of hotel revenue management, sales and marketing each operating in silos or, in the worst-case scenarios, even against each other.
Speaking during the "A New Framework for Converging Sales, Marketing & Revenue Optimization" session at the 2022 HSMAI Marketing Strategy Summit, Ed Skapinock, chief commercial officer for Appellation, outlined seven areas in which revenue, sales and marketing teams all have distinct tasks that could benefit from greater collaboration and cooperation.
Those areas are:
- Finding customers.
- Communicating and promoting.
- Monitoring competition.
- Creating content.
- Managing performance.
- Managing relationships.
- Working with operations.
He noted in those areas each department might be doing different tasks "but at their core they're trying to accomplish the same thing."
Skapinock said the best hotel companies are moving those three disciplines "into more of a hybrid department." He said his company, which is a start-up hotel management group, has built its team from the ground up with the principle that these three disciplines should maximize collaboration. However, even older hotel companies with more legacy frameworks could benefit from thinking along these lines, he said.
"When you look at the overlaps and what your teams are doing, there's probably some things you can say, 'Well, you know, we can change how we do that,'" he said. "Maybe it's changing roles. Maybe it's changing the process or the technology that supports them."
PM Hotel Group is a more established hotel management company that has sought to integrate its sales, marketing and revenue teams to a greater degree, and Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Lovell Casiero and Vice President of Revenue Management Tina Meredith agreed those efforts help the enterprise as a whole.
Casiero said those efforts start specifically with the relationship between the two of them.
"Every day I start my day with Tina, and we start with a cup of coffee," she said.
Casiero said the interrelation between the departments has transformed how the company approaches the upcoming request-for-proposals season, which she described as "one of the hardest RFP seasons we've ever had."
"Revenue management has done such a wonderful job of driving our [rates], and now we have to decide whether we even still need some accounts," she said. "So it takes a village, right? Two months ago, we decided to brush off one of our spreadsheets and have everybody look at what accounts they currently have ... to kind of understand where we're going from there."
Casiero said it's vital for sales and marketing to lean on the data provided by revenue management, particularly at a time when they're seeking out new accounts that are asking for metrics hotel companies haven't historically tracked or shared when selling.
"Companies are actually making decisions about whether they do business with you based on the social impact that you have on the environment," she said, adding the marketing team has also had to put together materials on the company's sustainability efforts for sales outreach.
Meredith said the company has had to navigate this more complicated landscape with fewer people than it has had in the past, making cooperation even more paramount.
"We're all doing more with less out of the pandemic," Meredith said. "Staffing is just not what it used to be."
Another aspect that has grown more difficult is forecasting, which has typically fallen under the purview of revenue management, but is now more of a joint effort across the hybrid sales, marketing and revenue teams along with working more closely with operations to get a better sense of expenses, Meredith said.
"It's such a collective effort," she said. "We can't have just one individual doing all of this."
She said directors of sales now have greater input in forecasting for individual hotels, and in some cases, teams have decided that forecasting simply shouldn't be treated as the be-all-end-all that it once was.
"For me, this is probably one of the best examples of the convergence that's probably always kind of been there but has been magnified throughout the pandemic because it's so crucial to [be] accurate these days about what we're bringing to the bottom line," Meredith said.