Today’s Hospitality Insight
It’s time to reclaim the lost art of managing accounts. Here’s how.
Over the past 20 years, the art of effectively managing accounts has slowly disappeared in hospitality. You’d think that account management would be infinitely better today than it was in the days of “hard files.” But in reality, the opposite is true at most hotels.
Back in the days of hard files, one side of the file was reserved for account information, while the other held booking information. Both sides were equally important and required. Whenever we contacted a customer, we would review the account side of the file to learn all about the customer’s company, industry, business needs, and other key information. It was simple, but it worked.
Then automation came along and revolutionized the way we track accounts.
Today, automated sales systems provide seemingly endless reporting capabilities. We can extract information at the click of a mouse, analyzing production by region, territory, and industry. We can even measure how a market is producing year over year, see how the change of sales managers affects production, and analyze booking pace—all without entering a single number manually.
Despite these amazing capabilities of our sales systems, 9 out of 10 accounts I see at any given hotel don’t have those key areas populated with data. It’s impossible to tell customers’ company types, meeting frequencies, or even their headquarter locations. There’s usually no account quality rating or industry code, either. And many times, there’s no future trace.
While this information seldom seems critical at the time of booking, failure to collect this data presents huge obstacles to managing accounts later on. When I’m brought into hotels and asked to help isolate accounts by industry, territory, or reason for lost business, it simply can’t be done—those fields were never populated in the first place.
Suddenly, one of the most powerful tools of automation becomes totally useless.
How can you avoid this destructive trend at your hotel?
Some parts of the challenge can’t be avoided, since the volume of leads coming through multiple distribution channels far surpasses what it was 20 years ago. Lack of training and high rates of sales turnover don’t help, either. But the solution is actually quite simple: The heart of effective account management lies in creating strong relationships with your customers. In many cases, those relationships are all that separate you from your competitors. So, you have to get that right.
Here are 5 proven ways to strengthen customer relationships and reclaim the art of effective account management in Delphi:
- Create an Account Comment Template that reflects the 5 key questions salespeople should ask when creating a new account.
- Create Custom Fields to track key qualifying information about all new accounts.
- Use Contact Custom Fields to enter important customer information (e.g.: amenity preferences, hot buttons).
- Audit your sales system in the following ways:
- Run queries weekly to show all newly created accounts that are missing key qualifying information (including Account Comments).
- Create queries to separate accounts with past business from those with no past business.
- Manage sales activities—they’re automated for a reason.
- Train, train, train! Train on your technology (such as what fields are mandatory for your hotel, and where that data should be loaded), but also on the sales process, account management, and customer management.
At the end of the day, it’s all about harnessing the power of automation to help you manage accounts effectively—instead of letting automation render your sales team complacent or inattentive. When I work with hotels, I often find that salespeople have become reactive instead of proactive.
Implement the 5 strategies above and your salespeople will begin to proactively create strong customer relationships that translate to well-managed accounts. When it comes to reclaiming the lost art of account management, you need all the leverage you can get.