Mr. Arenas

Meetings & Conventions

Automating the Sales Process for Simple Meetings

By John Arenas, Chief Executive Officer, Worktopia

With today's advanced technology, there is no longer a need for your sales team to spend time engaging in lengthy RFP responses for simple meetings for up to 100 participants. Through the use of a web based meeting booking engine, customers and meeting planners can now literally search , compare live quotes and request bookings that include meeting space, catering and amenities themselves. This means hotel sales teams can focus on customers who have already been pre qualified on budget, timing and space needs. This article shows you how to reduce sales and marketing costs associated with meetings up to 100 participants, while serving these high value, customer relationships.

$24 Billion Opportunity

After all, meetings for under 50 participants represent $24Billion in revenue to hotels each year. With encouragement from corporate customers, the travel industry is migrating to on-line procurement solutions for small meetings. From Sales and Catering System vendors like Micros Fidelio's Opera and Newmarket International's Delphi to Global Distribution Systems like Sabre and Worldspan, and booking engines like Worktopia, the market place for meetings is getting connected and coming on line. Meeting and event booking capability is a welcome improvement from the longstanding practice by meeting planners of creating requests for proposals and submitting them with the hope of receiving a timely response.

RFP Avalanche

Hotels can't be faulted for this gap between customer expectation and delivery. The advent of electronic RFPs, has meant that customers have an ability to submit requests to multiple hotels, quickly and efficiently, even if it was simply to conduct research or consider a remote possibility. Hotels dutifully responded to eRFPs until the avalanche of requests overcame them. With no way to qualify the requests, hotels resorted to answering only the proposals that they felt were suited in terms of size, budget, timing and facility requirements. Add to this a growing number of eRFP channels and there in lies the challenge, plenty of inquiry, no way to prioritize it or manage it. Enter inquiry management tools like Newmarket International's Meeting Broker, meeting space booking engines like Worktopia, Hilton's eEvents and Hyatt's eMediate Meetings.

The Current Off-line booking process for simple meetings is evolving away from a telephone and RFP based system toward a connected marketplace, providing hotels with access to new distribution channels for reaching and serving customers.

Back at the Hotel Sales Office

So Meetings procurement is moving on line... what does that mean for hotels and their sales teams? It means that hotels can now match their sales talent with the biggest opportunities and let customers with simpler requirements complete research, get live pricing proposals and in some cases book the meeting space and room block on-line 24/7 before a sales person needs to make contact. It means catering managers are not spending time creating proposals for unqualified customers, but rather spending time customizing and up-selling a customer who has decided to buy. Now that's the definition of a qualified inquiry: a customer that has gathered all necessary information about the property, reviewed and accepted pricing and requested a booking.

Serving the Relationships

Every hotel would love to add a 300 participant annual meeting with 300 room-nights. Wow! that might be a $100,000 sale in many hotels including rooms, meeting space rental, catering and equipment. This special kind of meeting might require a great deal of planning of menus, venues, exhibit space, receptions, special AV requirements, registration, rooming and participation management and other complexity. Call in the Sales Manager.

Now compare this to a company in need of regional recurring training meetings for 50 participants and 15 room-nights for each meeting. Assuming the company needs the hotel six times a year, for three years. That's a total revenue of over $100,000 for winning that one company. Not to mention that this kind of meeting rarely limits the property from taking the big business it wants. If you were the meeting planner, where would you book your regular recurring regional meetings? Facilities being equal, it would be where you could procure, measure and manage your procurement for simple meetings on line at your corporate rates.

Readiness Assessment and Steps to Success

So now what? Before taking steps toward automating meeting bookings you must assess your readiness, address technological and operational challenges, and plan carefully to ensure success.

Complete this Readiness self assessment by answering True or False to each question:

1. My property has capacity for more short lead time, corporate meetings for up to 50 participants? True or False?

2. My property sales team finds it difficult to respond quickly to RFPs for simple meetings of up to 100 participants? True or False?

3. My property meeting room inventory pricing and availability information is not available except by contacting a salesperson or catering manager? True or False?

4. My property has a sales and catering system, but it is not connected to the marketplace to allow customers to receive live quotes on meeting rooms, catering and AV equipment? True or False?

5. My Hotel or brand website has a meetings and events page that could accommodate a meeting booking engine True or False?

6. My Brand website has a meeting booking engine, but I would like to have more inquiries from every possible marketing channel, while maintaining control over group room night bookings. True or False?

If you answered True to questions 1,2 or 3 it is time to evaluate automating the meeting sales process, and creation of revenue management rules for your meeting space. Simple rules such as "Always say "yes" to inquiries within 6 weeks, that have at least $X revenue or Y number of room nights associated with the meeting".

If you answered True to questions 4,5 or 6, you are ready to explore solutions for automating your inquiry management for meetings, and even adding a meetings booking engine to your website or connecting to 3rd party meeting booking engines.

More meeting room and associated room night revenue is coming on line, and the properties that can offer customers the ability to search, and request bookings on line with automated booking engines, will drive incremental revenue and win market share. The balance for hotels is to maintain control over inventory through revenue management, Maximize distribution, maintain operational simplicity and drive down cost of sales in creating the on line meeting booking solution that meets your customer's needs for responsiveness and trust. Good luck as you evaluate your next steps toward bringing your meeting bookings on line.

Founder of Worktopia, John Arenas has more than 20 years experience in commercial real estate. As chairman and CEO of STRATIS Business Center, Inc., Mr. Arenas brought the 1997 start up to a merger with Regus Business Centres (RGU: London Stock Exchange). STRATIS investors realized an eight-fold return. Prior experience includes tenure as a commercial real estate lender for Citigroup and project engineer for Turner Corporation. Mr. Arenas holds a B.S. degree in civil engineering from Rutgers and a Masters degree in business administration from the University of Michigan. Mr. Arenas can be contacted at 914-468-0812 or john.arenas@worktopia.com Extended Bio...

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