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A hospitality sales professional's first option for knowledge and insights to book more group business and build client relationships that last

Do your homework

“So what does National Speakers Association do?” I was asked by my new national sales representative for a major hotel corporation. It was bad enough she asked. It was even worse that my CEO was there too.
 
And that’s not all.

She proceeds to say “I’ve had your file on my desk for two months. I guess I should have opened it and read through it before our meeting.”

Yes, you should have. And you should have visited our website and talked to your predecessor.

And if you didn’t have time to do all of those things, for crying out loud, DON’T TELL US!

That was almost ten years ago and I haven’t forgotten.

How do you prepare for an appointment with a new client? Do you research their past meetings held at your hotel? Do you check to see if they have future programs on the books? Do you scour the Internet (not just the organization's website) to learn as much as you can about them? Do you look for details about the organization's events including what hotels they use, rate, purpose of their meetings, etc? Do you follow them on social media? If you don’t, you should, and then use the information you learn wisely.

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During a site inspection at Walt Disney World a few years ago, my CEO and I were amazed with the amount of research their event services department did prior to our visit, and the creativity and purposefulness in which they demonstrated it.

We were in a boardroom listening to a presentation on the services they could provide for our meeting when a woman burst into the room exclaiming she wanted to become a professional speaker and join the National Speakers Association. Her clothing was very disheveled (including leaves in her hair!) and she proceeded to tell us that she had survived an extraordinary amount of time stranded on a mountain and wanted to share her story with the world. She began to share explicit details about NSA and our meetings, down to the specifics of membership requirements.

Of course, we soon realized she was an actress from their pool of in-house talent—what a creative way to not only tell us how they could personalize and make our conference memorable for our attendees, they showed us. And in doing so, they communicated how truly interested they were in our business.

You could argue that Disney has resources most companies and properties do not have.  No doubt that is true. However, the resource they used to exceed our expectations was simply our website.

How will you prepare for your next client appointment and what will you do with the information to exceed your client’s expectations and secure their business?


Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net