As a hotel or MICE manager, how can you increase your sales by up to 100%?
Focusing on key moments inside your sales process and allocate tasks to each of these steps.
Clients will remember only some precise moments of the sales process. Focus on these key moments.
If you ever ask a client to whom you have sold your event or rented out your venue what he recalls from the day you first contacted him, most of the time his thoughts will turn to certain key moments. Clients do not remember the sales process in its entirety, as it can last for many months or even years. They only remember some key moments. Focus on them.
7 Key moments in the sales process
- The very first contact: when you have identified a person who is trying to achieve a goal that your services can help him fulfil. The very first email you send or the first phone call you make to your lead.
- The conversation: the sales conversation you have prepared in order to introduce yourself and your product. It is when you personalize the sale.
- The diagnosis: when you try to understand your client and identify the usage cases in which he could use your services to solve his problem or to achieve his goal. This goal can for instance be to organize a conference or book a hotel for a group tour. This is a crucial step in sales as the client will have the feeling he is not being sold to, but he will also be attracted to your service.
- Negotiation: of the price of your event or venue, and how various services will be delivered. This stage gives you the opportunity to sit on the same side as your client and find a common deal, beneficial to both sides.
- Orchestration: Onboarding clients, but also providing them with a clear schedule to further develop your relationship with them.
- Impact: The QBR (quality business review) takes place. But most importantly delivering a business impact report to the client executives.
- Growth: Now that you have sold your event or rented out your venue, this stage gives you a great opportunity to increase your profit by further developing business with your client. This is done by up-selling, cross-selling, or re-selling your services.
For each of these steps or key moments, pre-defined tasks are performed to successfully guide your leads through the sales process step by step.
A huge 70% of the companies that follow a process in sales structured around key moments are high performers and have more accurate business forecasts.
At each key moment, there is an opportunity for you to deliver a great customer experience.
All moments mark the client’s journey through the sales process. This will allow you to sell more to this customer, but also to other customers as a great experience is your most effective marketing tool.
Your satisfied clients will talk about their positive experiences to other potential leads.
At each point, you should elaborate on various actions or tasks that your salespeople should perform. Each of these tasks is not only an opportunity to develop your business but also a chance to enhance greater customer experience.
At every one of these points, you can increase your performance by up to 10%.
This means that instead of focusing on doubling your leads at the start of the sales process, you should strive to improve your performance on each of these points by 10%.
Do this 7 times, and your sales will be doubled.
How to create a strategy for each of these moments
A chance to double your sales
Having steps enables you to assert your control over your sales activity.
At each step, you should ask your team to perform precise pre-defined actions. By doing so you will be able to set up a selective strategy.
Steps enable you to identify:
- actions that work or do not work
- actions your sales team performed well or could be improved.
Imagine your team is good at identifying potential clients looking to set up an event, and contacts them in the right way to talk to these leads. But after these conversations, the rate is low. This shows your team needs to improve their sales talk to make leads convert. By identifying this you can use usage cases or prepare the flow of conversation.
This strategy takes a step-by-step approach rather than letting your salespeople organize themselves as they want.
It enables you to identify the problems in your sales process more precisely and solve them in a more efficient manner.
A step-structured sales process becomes an ever-lasting learning process, allowing you to perform better. You can see what actions have worked, how your sales were achieved, and what are the strong points in your business.
Assert your control over your sales activity
Clearly identifying the actions to be performed at each step will give a backbone structure to your team’s activity.
Having worked in the past with various leads, you will acquire greater knowledge of which action to perform at each key moment. You will build a standardized system of actions so that your team can work as a well-oiled machine.
Prepare for the worst and be adaptable
Taking your clients through a series of stages allows you to know what will happen at the next stage. This visibility reduces the chances of being surprised by some unexpected event happening inside your sales process, like your sales representative taking a sick leave or outside your sales process, like the current Covid-19 crisis.
Use your talents, overcome weaknesses
Salespeople like all people have various talents and weaknesses.
Every action linked to any step requires a different set of skills. Having defined key actions that work for each step and knowing what each individual team member is good at doing, you can affiliate a particular task to each person.
This will make the most of each individual’s talent. Optimize salesforce talent and you will perform better.
If you have good knowledge of what resources, (manpower, data, equipment), you have at your disposal and if you have established predefined tasks for each milestone, you will be able to allocate resources more effectively.
Identifying your chances of success and better forecasting
If you set up predefined actions, then you can see more clearly at each step if the lead is promising or not. You can do this if you break down your general sales efforts into various tasks which you can then analyze to see if you have performed them well or not.
Judging each task will enable your team to report to you on the progress in achieving every step more precisely.
This precision will enable you to have a better idea of what is going on in your company. Therefore, you will be able to prioritize leads over others which ultimately will increase your conversion rate.
If a sales process is a set of repeatable steps, it gives you a more consistent picture of how many deals your team closes over the original quantity of leads it originally had. This allows you to predict your win rates and set quotas with more accuracy.
The only way to succeed is to be customer-centric at every level
Focus on each key moment and define every action whilst always keeping in mind your client’s needs.
It’s all about choosing actions that will release him from his pains and solve his problems, not the actions that are useful to you. Your chances of success at each sales milestone will dramatically increase.
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