EP #16 – Best Practices For Reaching Your Sales Goals with Doug Kennedy

Sales is the lifeblood of any hospitality organization, and here to share his best practices for achieving your sales goals is sales expert Doug Kennedy, founder of Kennedy Training Network. On this episode of Hospitality Academy Doug shares what he’s learned in his 20+ years of hotel experience, what the sales process is like today for both the buyer and the supplier, as well as his recommendations for technology to use today to set you apart from your competitors! Essential Learning Points From This Show: * What is lead fatigue? * How to get a leg up when a prospect requests dates that can’t be met. * The two questions to ask to improve your non-response rate. * How can your sales dept be organized and structured to improve the sales process? * Why we need both emotional IQ and efficient processes for optimal results. * And so much more! Doug initially began his career in the hospitality industry as a bellman. He worked his way up to front desk manager and then moved into sales, which he thought was the easier position in hotel services! But he soon discovered that was not the case. However, he continued to work as a hotel sales manager, and eventually co-founded his first training company called HSA International in the 1990’s and then later started the Kennedy Training Network in 2006. His organization works with clients of all sizes around the world by providing sales training and mystery shopping as well. On this episode of Hospitality Academy Doug explains how the sales process has changed and what you need to know about sales in today’s environment and technology you can be using to help your organization stand out from your competitors. When Doug started out in sales it was a very different ball game. The two main sources of leads were past clients and encyclopedias of groups. They would cold call prospects and wait to hear back from them. He says it was a good day when he would come back from lunch to messages from potential leads he had called! Compare that with today and the lead fatigue many sales managers face. According to Doug, most managers open their email inbox to discover 40 leads or more every morning, and they are scrambling to keep up. And that’s why responses that are sent out to those 40 or more leads are often canned and impersonal, the manager is simply trying to keep up with the incoming lead demand. There are several things general managers can do to help with lead fatigue and the ensuing overwhelm. First make sure your team isn’t in more meetings than necessary. Meetings can be an unnecessary waste of time. Second, and this also goes to saving on time, rather than sending countless emails back and forth with your team members to answer a bunch of questions gather those questions and write them down. Then have a quick check in with that team member to get them answered all at once. Rather than 4 or 5 emails you can have a 5-minute check-in, again saving you both time. Doug also goes over some technology he recommends to set you apart from everyone else: you can create videos of the meeting space your potential client is interested in, send personal photos of the honeymoon suite for prospective brides and grooms. He goes into detail on the advantage of using these types of technology, plus a few others and much more! Grab your notebook or your Evernote and jot it all down when you listen to this edition of Hospitality Academy. [ctt tweet=”Go high tech to be old school!” @SusanPannozzo coverup=”anbAr”] Important Links & Mentions From This Episode: * Kennedy Training Network