Overheard in Your Sales Office

It's Spooky Season! Here are five of the spookiest things I've observed happening in hotel sales offices lately.

"What rate can I quote?"

Rather than qualifying business and doing homework, salespeople enter a lead into their sales system and ask someone - either the automated group analysis tool or the DORM - what they should quote. If you have no idea what to quote and no opinion about how to handle the business, you are not a salesperson. You are a data entry specialist and can easily be replaced by someone cheaper.

"She has a sales look."

This is usually said by an older hotelier who has the mistaken idea that sales success is derived from personal appearance. While I don't deny that looking professional is table stakes for sales, THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. as a sales look. (Note that these old schoolers never say this about dudes.)

"Hi, who just joined?"

There are few things that make me want to pull out my hair more than the round-robin of every stinking person on a conference call having to vocalize their attendance and ask how everyone is. Just, no. Use a conferencing service that makes people announce themselves or type in their names, and spare everyone this frustration. Please.

"We don't do X."

That's a scary statement under any circumstances, but here I'm referring to a particular online lead source that lots of inexperienced planners use to send out RFPs. Your hotel is listed, the site gave me a rate for your hotel, and I asked for a proposal from you. Why aren't you participating??? (I will come back to this particular phenomenon later. It's baffling.)

"Oops."

The accidental reply-all email. And also? The on-purpose reply-all email. I have learned the hard way that sometimes you need to copy extraneous people on emails to get a response, but most of the time you are copying too many people. Especially if your only message is the word "Thanks." Stop doing that. 

What is scaring you lately?