Failure of Leadership Made a Hotel Sales Cold Call Exercise in Futility

Recently, I was the target of a hotel prospecting effort that illustrates how most sales outbounding these days is an exercise in futility, caused by a failure of leadership. Here’s what happened and what leaders should be doing to fix it.

First, a voicemail arrived from a hotel salesperson, whom I’ll rename “Anna,” representing a large conference hotel near Miami Airport. Anna spoke enthusiastically; in fact, all of her vocalics were perfect. She was articulate, and her message covered many of the essentials we teach in our sales workshops, including at least a basic attempt at stating why she thought our company might be a good fit for her hotel.

Shortly thereafter, an email arrived with a message similar to what she said in voicemail. As we teach in our sales training, the arrival of her voice message helped her email stand out from the many others in my overstuffed inbox.

There was so much that was impressive about Anna’s effort, and in many ways she reminded me of myself long ago, when I moved over from rooms division to hotel sales, where my first assignment was non-stop cold calling, or “dialing for dollars” as we called it back then. Most of all, this reminded me of how much I also lacked good leadership to guide my efforts, and how I was forced to find my own way in sales prospecting through self-study of books and audio cassettes.

First of all, it was impressive that Anna was even doing outbound sales prospecting. Based on my experience in conducting hotel sales team audits, there’s very little of that happening right now. Most salespeople are struggling to keep up with the flood of inbound leads caused by automated sales inquiry platforms that send dozens scrambling at the click of a “submit” button on a platform. Or the never-ending need to respond to loosely qualified leads from “brand.com” that require a timely response to keep the lead faucet turned on.

Secondly, it was impressive that Anna was doing research on her own, and at least trying to humanize her sales messaging.

With guidance from sales leaders, Anna can become a true sales superstar, because she’s already taken the hardest, first step, which is to overcome sales reluctance and to get in the game of outbounding. In fact, I suspect that she will make it on her own, despite her apparent lack of having guidance from a good mentor.

Let’s take a look at what Anna did do, then what could have been done even better.

Basic research vs. digging deeper

It was good that Anna identified my company as a potential “suspect” for booking meetings and events, because we do in fact present training at meetings small and large. However, had she dug just a bit deeper into our “about us” page, she would have found out that our services include “customized, on-site training workshops, private, live, small group webcam training events,” clearly seeing that we do not plan our own training events and therefore are not a sales prospect for hotel conference space. She also might have noticed that the first words are “Headquartered in the Metro Atlanta area,” another sign to move on to sales prospects in Miami.

Let’s just say that her visit to our Kennedy Training Network website showed that we hold our own events in hotel conference spaces. In this case, she should have researched deeper to identify a specific contact name. Like many companies, we offer a “meet the team” page that shows names of specific contacts, so that when she called us, she could have specifically asked for someone versus saying “Hello Kennedy Training Network.”

This is where AI comes in, making research quicker and easier. As we teach in our programs, it’s important to keep up with the emerging, subscription-based, AI-powered research tools. For example, we show our clients how to use one that, for a few hundred dollars a month subscription rate, allows us to unmask the names, titles, and emails of the top leaders from virtually any company worldwide.

Personalized sales messaging

It was good that Anna said “Hello Kennedy Training Network” in her voicemail and went on to mention a reason why she thought our company might at some point need more meeting space. But her authenticity was diminished when she read our website copy word-for-word. Less effort was evident in her follow-up email, which simply, generically, said: “We have heard great things about Kennedy Training Network.”

Feature flooding vs. storytelling selling

Despite that literally every sales training course ever written warns against randomly listing features, Anna’s messages were flinging features like Peter Parker shoots webs. Based on what I see during sales assessments, Anna is surely not the only salesperson doing this; all too often even the seasoned veterans continue to feature dump. Anna’s message immediately jumped into telling me about the “massive transformation” her hotel was undertaking, complete with what was obviously copy-paste wording and a generic capacity pitch. Again, assuming that KTN did actually book small-group training classes, how likely am I to care that her hotel has over 350 rooms and over 170,000 square feet of meeting and exhibition space?

Instead, a bespoke, storytelling selling approach would have better served to show personalized intention, which may have grabbed our attention, had we actually been a qualified prospect.

Anna, if you do end up reading this and realize I’m talking about you, know that I highly respect you and am impressed that you are doing outbound sales. If I were a hotel DOS in your market area, I would definitely try to steal you away. I’m highly confident that you will have a long and successful career in hotel sales, because the skill of proactive prospecting is so rare. I hope you tune in to the free training resources we offer by way of our Kennedy Training Network YouTube channel and the monthly columns I write here.

Based on my experiences conducting hotel sales training for clients from all market segments, I know there are still in fact many hotel sales leaders with a passion for generativity, which is a desire to guide, nurture, and develop salespeople. Because hotels with strong sales teams are the most likely to regularly engage with sales training, we see the best of the best, and they provide me with validation that the concepts shared here work in the real world.

But from what I hear from asset managers and commercial strategy consultants, too many sales leaders have grown comfortable living off the fat of an upmarket. If you want to get the same business as everyone else gets, do the same things everyone else does. If you want a bigger slice of the pie, then mentor and train your salespeople on proactive sales prospecting. 

Originally published in Costar News Hotels.

Doug Kennedy is President of the Kennedy Training Network, Inc. a leading provider of hotel sales, guest service, reservations, and front desk training programs and telephone mystery shopping services for the lodging and hospitality industry. Doug continues to be a fixture on the industry’s conference circuit for hotel companies, brands and associations, as he has been for decades. Since 1996, Doug’s monthly training articles have been published worldwide, making him one of the most widely read hospitality industry authorities. Check out his monthly webcasts at www.KTNwebcast.com or visit www.kennedytrainingnetwork.com.