Increase the performance of your sales process

In this article we discuss how as a hotel or MICE manager you can increase your sales by up to 100% by focusing on key moments and steps inside your sales process and by allocating to each of these steps predefined tasks for your team to perform. ​

​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 until now, 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.
We believe there are 7 key moments in a sales process:

1. 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.
2. The conversation: the sales conversation you have prepared in order to introduce yourself and your product. It is when you personalise the sale.
3. 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 organise 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.
4. 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.
5. Orchestration: onboarding clients, but also providing them with a clear schedule to further develop your relationship with them.
6. Impact: the QBR (quality business review) takes place. But most importantly delivering a business impact report to the client executives.
7. 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, 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.
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. At every point there is an opportunity for you to deliver a great customer experience. 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. Indeed, your satisfied clients will talk about their positive experience to other potential leads.  
At each point you should elaborate 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. 

A chance to double your sales

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 in fact strive to improve your performance on each of these points by 10%. Do this 7 times, and your sales will be doubled.

​This is how we think you should elaborate a particular strategy for each of these moments and which benefits you can have in doing so.

Assert your control over your sales activity

Having steps enables you to assert your control over your sales activity. You should make the most of the opportunity to do so.
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.
Indeed, steps enable you to identify:

• actions that work or do not work
• actions your sales team performed well or badly

Imagine your team is good at identifying potential clients looking to set-up an event, and contacts them in the right way to secure a conversation with these leads, but then your conversion rate after having these conversations is low. What you understand is that the tasks to prepare the conversation, such identifying usage cases or preparing the flow of conversation, were badly performed by your team.

As you can now see is that going step by step with precision, rather than letting your salespeople organise themselves as they want, 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 every-lasting learning process, allowing you to perform better, as you can see not only what actions have worked, but also how your sales were achieved and what are the strongpoints in your business.

Give a backbone structure to your team’s 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. After then, you will have standardised your actions so that your team can work as a well-oiled machine. Order and organisation will be better enforced.