Mr. Paton

Human Resources, Recruitment & Training

Building a Guest-Centered Sales Culture

By Mike Paton, Senior Vice President, Signature Worldwide

To capture a bigger share of the market, your employees must focus on delivering more bang for the buck than your competition. Otherwise, guests decide where to stay primarily based on price and location. And that means you're nothing more than a commodity to most of your customers.

Hotels with a guest-centered sales culture outperform competitors by building more value into every guest interaction. When your sales and service team is dedicated to providing a special experience for each traveler, you create preference and loyalty with your guests. And that helps you fill your hotel at a higher rate.

Sounds simple, right?

Anyone who's tried to build and maintain a sales culture knows it's not easy. But in working with more than 5,000 companies since 1986, we've found that it can be done by following three basic steps:

Use the Right Glossary

The biggest obstacle to getting your associates focused on selling is emotion. Many employees so dislike the idea of selling that they actively avoid it. You can help your team overcome that fear with a better definition of the task.

"Selling" was once defined by Webster's Dictionary as: "to persuade someone to recognize the worth of something." But the days of the persuasive, used-car salesman method are gone. With today's savvy consumer, sales professionals must educate rather than intimidate.

Employees are much more comfortable with this idea of selling. Reservations agents and front desk associates enjoy using their expertise to determine guest needs, provide information about the property and help prospects make an educated decision about where to stay.

So what is a "Guest-Centered Sales Culture?" The Gallup Organization defines "Corporate Culture" as "the attitudes and behaviors of employees in your work environment that impact key business outcomes like customer loyalty, employee retention, productivity, and profitability." Therefore, a "Guest-Centered Sales Culture" is one where every employee is focused on two things: creating legendary experiences and helping people buy.

Hire the Right People

To make every employee part of your sales culture, first define what role each position in your hotel plays in creating legendary experiences and helping people buy. Then fill those positions with people who can - and want - to do those things well.

When describing any position in your hotel to a potential employee, make sure you explain that being part of the "sales team" is an important aspect of the role. Tactical and interpersonal skills can be taught, but the desire to work with customers cannot.

When recruiting, look for candidates with great people skills and service experience. When you have a server or customer service representative that impresses you, hand them your business card and tell them you'd be interested in hiring them if they're ever in the market for a new position.

Once you make your expectations clear and start looking for associates in the right places, it's important to thoroughly test the qualifications of each candidate. Of course, you will want to carefully review resumes and applications, and check every reference.

During an interview, try to identify the way a candidate feels about sales and customer service by asking these questions:

Candidates who are uncomfortable with these questions and prefer to focus on the technical aspects of the job may have a hard time immersing themselves in your guest-centered sales culture.

Some employers also use assessment tools to identify the skills and attitudes of potential hires. A simple three-step process is the key to using assessments to improve employee job-fit. First, give the test to your current team. Then look at the results of your top performers. When hiring, find people whose strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits closely match those of your best employees.

Help Your Team Do Great Work Every Day

The most important thing you can do to build a guest-centered sales culture is to create an environment that helps every employee excel. You can do this by:

Teach

As crazy as it sounds, most companies fail to tell their employees exactly how they want customers and prospects to be treated. Most training is focused on tactical skills, like using the reservations system or making a bed. Without a simple process for creating legendary experiences and helping people buy, your team won't even know what "success" looks like.

Teaching employees a basic formula of proven sales and service skills will help them know exactly how to behave during every interaction with a guest. While such a formula should reflect your hotel's unique needs and image, it should also include the following components:

Employees who follow this simple sales and service formula focus their attention squarely on the guest's needs. This will help them use your hotel's attributes to satisfy a guest request, solve a problem, or create enough value to secure a reservation.

Motivate

Knowing what to do is important, but associates must also want to challenge themselves to use the new skills they've learned. To help generate buy-in, position training as an investment in your staff's skills rather than something new you are requiring them to do.

Make your sales and service training program fun! Contests and games get your employees excited about the program while continuing to build their skills.

Give employees plenty of opportunity to practice their new skills before speaking with actual guests. By allowing your staff to role-play in a non-threatening environment, you reduce apprehension and increase the chances for success with your new system.

Reinforce

No matter how effective your training program is, most employees won't adopt their newfound skills unless you reinforce those skills with an ongoing program to measure performance, coach for improvement, and recognize success. These tools are essential to changing the culture at your hotel.

Most managers evaluate the sales and service skills of their employees by casually observing them at work and with guest-satisfaction scores. Those techniques, while helpful, don't tell you whether or not your team is using the simple formula you've taught them.

I recommend regular mystery shops - both by phone and onsite - to objectively measure performance. Done properly and tied to a robust management reporting tool, the results can help you manage sales and service performance the same way you manage financial performance with irrefutable data.

Regularly measuring performance also makes it clear to your team that creating legendary experiences and helping people buy are important goals for your hotel. As the saying goes, that which is measured improves.

Once you have your measurement system in place, make sure to recognize and reward your top performers. And, don't be afraid to set minimum performance standards for your team. Your willingness to coach struggling employees will send the message that you're trying to help them succeed, rather than catch them failing.

If you're like most managers, you want to increase revenues while delivering exceptional service to every guest. Building a true guest-centered sales culture will help you achieve both of those goals. Don't get caught up in the idea that sales and service require different sets of skills. Simply define sales as a way to help your guests make an informed decision about your hotel, hire staff members who understand and embrace your culture, and provide them with the tools to do great work every day. Once you see how well this redefined relationship between sales and service works for you, you'll wonder how they ever lived apart.

Mike Paton leads the sales efforts at Signature Worldwide, a training and business solutions company dedicated to helping hotels and resorts create legendary experiences for their customers. With more than fifteen years of experience as a top seller and sales manager, Mike knows first hand the value of creating a customer-centered sales and service culture. Paton is a national champion public speaker and holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from The Ohio State University. Mr. Paton can be contacted at 800-398-0518 or mikepaton@signatureworldwide.com Extended Bio...

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