Before we launch, you need to realize a few things.
1
First
The front desk or reservation sales training you just went through didn’t teach anyone to actively sell.
I am in no way judging the competence of the trainers or the ability to assimilate new knowledge of the participants. Simply put, the reception or booking desk is not an environment for active sales = acquiring new clients.
A guest who calls the front desk or reservations is a gift to the hotel.
He was probably already there, where everyone is booking online. There he didn’t find what he was looking for from your facility, so he went to your website. And he didn’t find what he was looking for there either.
So he calls and asks not to be allowed to leave. The receptionist is told to unwrap the gift and see if there is a second bottom in the package, underneath which lies the possibility of selling additional services or a higher standard of what the guest has already decided to buy.
We won’t talk about that here!
2
Second
There is no such thing, there is no active sales at the front desk, “on occasion” or “in the meantime.”
Imagine you have an important paper to write, prepare or give a presentation, and in front of you is a TV on with a good series on Netflix.
Well it has no right to work.
Everything that happens at the reception is a TV on.
We won’t talk about that here either!
3
Third
Your sales job, what you have to sell (and what you have to sell is a topic for a completely different material) and why you are calling, nobody cares! That is, of course, if you are the one making the calls and they are not calling you.
Your role first and foremost is NOT to try to solve everyone’s problems. You have your own problem to solve! You just want to talk to them. And in this context, it is your time and your schedule, that are most important.
So DO NOT ask if it is a good time to talk.
Instead, I would say:
“Oh how happy I am to hear from you!:) So I take it that this is a good time, since I’m calling basically just to introduce myself. Good morning, my name is …”.
You do it your way. Don’t try to copy or imitate me or anyone who suggests ready-made scripts to you. Do you sometimes receive phone calls from people who try to convince you that a photovoltaic installation will change your life? So what if you live on the 9th floor with a loggia in a big city!
They are using scripts!
Most importantly, you want to see a beautiful, sincere smile in your mirror or in the second phone you record yourself with (more on that later). Really, you want to have that conviction that you are looking forward to each of these conversations.
And we won’t talk about that here either!
Why should I make 100 phone calls to start ❓
You want to, simply put, P r e s e n t e d! So much! You are the new cool neighbor. As a good neighbor, you want to know a little bit about your neighbors.Such a little bit of an interview (for which you prepare in advance anyway). And you want them to know something about you. They know your history (not your product list).
But this is more of an answer to the question of what you are calling these people with, not what your real goal is for your campaign! Because YES, this is a campaign to help you get off to a good start. It’s a bit like trying to start a Formula One race. Training laps and timed laps, this was your sales recruitment. Your best lap, done in the best weather conditions, on the freshest and well-warmed tires, earned you the start from the first position (that is, your seat at the new desk). There are 20 other drivers behind you.
How do you think you'll hold the position while taking off with the gas pushed to 1/3 power❓
That’s exactly your goal! To cause traffic in your mailbox and on your desk. These are to be customers whose needs you know very well and know what they want to buy from you. By the number of conversations you have, the intensity of this campaign and the enthusiasm that will accompany it, you want to drive this traffic. With this, you want to forget that anyone, ever, could set you a daily goal for making cold calls. You just realistically won’t have time for them!
My first experience, with the rest of every experience at a new desk was exactly the same. I sat down and … NOTHING. I open the new mailbox and there is no email in it. There’s a phone on the desk, another one lying next to it and neither of them rings on its own.
The calendar is empty, and this is as much bad news as good news. The bad news is, it will not fill up on its own, organically. The good news is that this is the one, unique moment when you will have the comfort of calling, absolutely undisturbed by current affairs.
How to find out everything about customers and generate inquiries by calling just to introduce yourself❓
There are probably dozens of questions you want to know the answers to. I’m able to quickly give you a list of at least 50. The problem is that you want to ask all these questions right away, and your conversations turn into interrogations. So let’s agree that time will come for the questions. And you, during those first 100 calls, are supposed to learn how to talk to people in your new role and on your own initiative.
With whom to talk❓
It all depends on what situation you are in.
1️⃣ SALES IS YOUR NEW EXPERIENCE. You’ve been promoted to an existing sales office (e.g., from the front desk). No one has time for you, but they say, “well sit down youngster, make yourself comfortable, here’s your list and go. At 5pm you will say how much business you brought in.”
- Ask about your predecessor’s customers!
- Ask for a historical implementation report in a competitor such as Z-Factor!
- Ask for a historical report of all requests (completed and not)!
Reach for data from 3 or better 5 years ago.
Call everyone who sent inquiries to you at the time or did events at competing facilities.
Say you want to introduce yourself. You used to receive inquiries, but you know that the pandemic has split many relationships and arranged people’s life paths anew. So you are:)
2️⃣ YOU’VE SELL AGAIN, but you’ve changed jobs. Everyone expects you to fire up your Excel and start moving customers en masse from your previous location. At this stage, the weight of the decision to work with you is on the side of your promising contact list, not your personality, character, reliability and a host of other qualities of your genius. And at this point you feel the most pressure to prove to everyone that it’s not just a list, that you’re actually a real buck.
Now watch out! Is your phone going silent? Your customers aren’t looking for you because they feel a void at the very thought that you are no longer at your previous location? Your customers still have your old business number saved in their phones, even though you sent them a goodbye text message with your new number?
This means that for the time being they have nothing to do with you! There they had. But there they had a whole environment, complete with you, built up over months or years. They had, complete with you, the location, Guest habits, corporate contact at the regional level, loyalty programs, credit for 45 days, etc. Here you have to build it all from scratch.
Don’t rummage, don’t try to prove to yourself or anyone else that you are able to “move” all your customers to a new place. And certainly save yourself at this stage from telling about its advantages and possibly discrediting your previous workplace. Your relationship stems from the fact that your customers once trusted you. They made good decisions then right? What should have changed in a few days?
- Ask the current sales office for exactly the same reports as in point 1.
- In addition, ask about the industry/product breakdown or the nature of the intermediaries with which each vendor works.
- Start your warm contact list.
In the first instance, call where you find points of connection between the customer history of the current location and your clients. With a concise context, it will be much easier for you to flow the conversation from pitches to specific business.
Call all intermediaries who work well with your current location, but do not fulfill orders here for clients you have served together before.
Only later call all your customers with whom you have a doxed relationship. Prioritize these calls according to the sagging temperature of the relationship (Kasienko dear – Kasia – Ms. Kasia – Ms. Katherine). This will happen very quickly anyway. In the meantime, training from previous calls in a new environment will allow you to become comfortable. As a result, people with whom you have excellent relationships will pick up the phone from the real you.
Watch out! Resist the temptation to make appointments for now, for today, for tomorrow, just because you have to report them. You want everyone to come to that meeting with you in the first place, and not everyone will immediately throw themselves into the trip. So, in order to “get laid” you’ll pack in trips with a flyer and a company pen, which will take away from your ability to close the first 100 calls in a timely manner.
- At the very beginning, make appointments as soon as possible, but only at your place.
- 80% of the time to complete the campaign, 20% for the first meetings.
- Meetings outside preferably only with specific occasions / campaigns that assume such meetings / for decision-making processes that require it / for clients whose company may consider a meeting at your place a potential refreshment as incompatible with policy or values.
3️⃣ YOU ARE THE FIRST PERSON HERE TO CREATE A SALES OFFICE (BRAVO!) AND SALES IS YOUR NEW EXPERIENCE. You don’t have any specific reports, you don’t have any specific definition of your target audience, you don’t know yet what specifically you want to sell.
Surely you have some statistics, such as all the companies that have done some turnover since the beginning or just these 3-5 years.
You call all the companies, from the largest growing turnover. Your sticking point is the fact that they do. From these calls, you will get an idea of who the people who use your hotel are for these companies and why they come. It will be easier for you to decide on the next steps (what, to whom, how).
You work with the front desk, you are about every new company profile in the system (there are reports in PMS such as newly created company prosiles, which you can also review daily) and you receive new business cards acquired from Guests every day.
If you have any hotels around, get to know their sales departments. From these meetings you may (not necessarily) know what networking meetings to go to and who to build new industry relationships with (MICE, Travel).
4️⃣ You have sold before but this is the first time you have attended a HOTEL OPENING.
It’s a powerful thing, and we won’t simply settle it with a one-paragraph post on LinkedIn. How to nail down a strategy for selling a new hotel before it opens is something we need to devote a separate, heavily expanded piece to.
For starters, use the steps 1️⃣, 2️⃣, 3️⃣ and MOST IMPORTANTLY – don’t wait until you have something to show (ready room, ready conference room, beautifully equipped lobby, new technologies installed). Once you have what to show, it will almost certainly be too late to think about sales and a full hotel from the first day of opening. Make sure you have good visualizations, in the sense of getting them from the people who are responsible for it, and SHOW THE OBJECT as soon as according to the security conditions it will be allowed. You will be shocked at how much you can do. How great an impression your customers can make by being able to participate in the creation process. How emotionally involved they can become in the process. How close a relationship you can build through your trust and inviting them in at such a time.
5️⃣ NEVER SELL and BUILD a new sales department in a new hotel before opening.
You know what – let’s just talk about it.
How to summarize each conversation and the entire campaign❓
🟢 As the conversation develops, “keep the conversation going.” You will learn something about the caller, about the company, about successes, about challenges, about dogs, about bosses, about assistants, about favorite hotels and opportunities too. BUT only if it comes out of a cool casual conversation. It’s not an interrogation. It’s your training in pitching 🥰
🔴 If it doesn’t develop. Just make sure to send a business card SMS / email / invitation on LinkedIn and slack. You have 1 repetition in the training passed. Do the whole series and watch in the mirror how the muscles grow 🙂
Just as you need to know how to prepare for a sales call, you also need to know what to do after the sales call and how to conduct a follow up. These are again issues for a separate paper. Our goal for this article was to talk about why to make the first 100 calls and who to talk to.
This goal we have achieved.
BONUS TIME 🎁
1️⃣ After each conversation, make sure that the refreshed or built no new relationships stay close to you already permanently. Enter all numbers and email addresses + all acquired data about the caller into your phone (birthday, social profiles, most important word – association, etc.). Send a text message thanking the caller. Send an email with your own footer. Invite on LinkedIn. Of course, you do all this except for the trivial addition to the CRM.
2️⃣ Set up a follow up – that is, a re-contact if you did not arrange the proverbial coffee during the conversation. Master salespeople and network marketing masters (and they, acting professionally, are the best salespeople) say that there are millions in follow up. I will elaborate on this at some point. Remember in this context the most important phrase “keep the conversation going” even if it should take years. Ours is simply to be close.
3️⃣ Be a student and coach for yourself. Observe yourself in the mirror, for example. Why do you think gyms and fitness clubs have so many mirrors around. The idea is to work out perfectly correct movements that build muscles and shape your figure. You want to see how your face reacts, your smile, how your forehead wrinkles, when you squint your eyes, when you blush, how your body reacts. People see you on the phone exactly the same way they see you in a live meeting.
4️⃣ Record! I have written about this many times before. Create a platform for yourself with training materials, with the best trainer in the world. These materials will then be used by the next people you work with or maybe even already work with, and they are the ones who introduce you to a new role today. Let the student surpass the master. You can keep the materials on your own unpublished Youtube, you can in a gallery, and you can use professional tools (e.g., SOPit15 ) that will be an extension of your cometence and mutually engaging for the whole Team.
5️⃣ Why 100? And why can you make 300!
100 is nothing new. The method of training 100 repetitions originated, if I remember correctly, back in the 1980s – read. Filip Kowarski, training future real estate flippers, talks about the fact that you need to see 100 apartments before you decide on your first transaction. The idea is that you need to gain experience, get comfortable, explore what situations surprise you in conversation and how you handle them, etc.
You want to make your first 100 phone calls and you think it would be best to do it in the company of a❓
Write – we will build a support group and maybe do it together.
In the meantime, share this article with anyone who sometimes has a phone in front of them that asks them to start dialing on it 🙂