The commercial leader is now a key role within the hotel executive team. Gone are the days when that commercial lead reports into operations.

Rather, revenue-focused organizations have commercial leaders reporting directly to the CEO. A leader that is committed to sales, marketing and revenue management is becoming more understood within our industry and is needed. Having that commercial leader or center of excellence for those teams is only the first step. What is still an enigma is how revenue leaders are collaborating; engagement does not mean that they are integrated and driving revenue forward. Reporting structure only helps in leveraging teams, but integration to create optimization is next-gen thinking.

Focusing on the customer journey is the most effective way to break down silos and increase revenue. Traditional thinking of “Push, Pull, Price” in marketing falls short in integrating the customer experience, and illustrates what we do to the customer, rather than how we engage with customers to own more mindshare.

Next-generation thinking is identifying and understanding the very beginning of the customer journey when customers are going from being unaware of your product or service to aware — or what we identify as the “point of inspiration.” Map the customer journey to the point of sale, focusing on what is top of mind for them at each point.

In an industry that prides itself on customer service, one would believe that the customer journey would be ubiquitous within our space. However, it isn’t.

Today’s technology can help identify customers and customer sentiment prior to them being aware of our product or service. Once customers are in the awareness stage, they very quickly move through the buying process where it becomes commoditized and ultimately a price-driven sale. It will become more critical that we understand the point of inspiration and the technology to help identify customers at this valuable point.

Effective marketing will give us the lift that revenue management gave us yesterday.

Within hospitality, we are just skimming the surface of digital marketing and are lagging other industries on how to use marketing to its fullest potential. Digital marketing goes far beyond search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Next-generation marketing leaves behind performance-based marketing to connect with customers to not just engage but build community and ultimately loyalty.

If we look at what is currently mainstream within our digital marketing efforts, it can be described as mass media communication. Generally, we are telling customers about our service or product. We are trying to achieve reach.

We are using keywords and search terms to create our message to capture customers by telling them about our hotels, restaurants or destinations. Where this falls short is it is very rarely about the customer, but rather what we value and want the customer to know about us. It is the first step and is common practice in what we do today. This is first-generation thinking.

Second-generation thinking takes a deeper look at personalization and customization, where we start understanding what customers, guests and clients are looking for and crafting our products or messaging.

Third-generation marketing looks at how do we take this to the next level to build a community that transcends the purchase. At the third generation, we are driving influence and crafting value.

Artificial intelligence can help us to understand and nurture our community. We see innovation particularly within the retail space. Although hotels, restaurants and destinations are different in product and service, the mindset and innovation are applicable.

Throw away 1980s action plans and SMART goals and become hyper-focused on strategy execution.

Sales plans, action plans or marketing plans have gone long past their expiration date. Long gone are days — or should be gone — when action plans were at their core to-do lists that focused on activity rather than impact. In many cases, organizations still cling to activity goals for their sales and marketing teams that were born from an operational output mindset.

Next-generation thinking looks at what the revenue model achieves and is prioritized by profitability. This is vastly different from the action plan.

What we see the best companies doing differently is focusing their leaders and teams on strategy execution and leaving the tactics for the team to decide. This seems apparent and logical. Yet, in even the most sophisticated of teams we commonly see reporting on activities and tactics and missing the strategy entirely.

Next-gen thinking can be summarized as having the tactful audacity to throw away some of the back-to-basics thinking that has become a barrier to innovation.

Kate Burda is CEO and founder of Kate Burda & Co., a consultancy focused on improving revenue performance.

The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.

Read more news on Hotel News Now.