It is imperative that we focus on new strategies based upon changing habits in the consumer’s travel buying behavior. The question is how will the implementation of these strategies be measured in order to evaluate their effectiveness?

The hotel industry in general has not been as systematic as many industries in goal setting and measuring the sales activity of hotel sales departments. Most sales driven industries have benchmarking mechanisms in place to evaluate the success of marketing and sale strategies.

How the sales activity of a hotel sales department is measured can indicate whether or not a marketing campaign or a sales strategy is producing the desired results. Far from being a punitive judgment on the sales team, it is a valuable tool to be able to say to management or marketing that the number of leads generated is inadequate to justify the marketing program or based upon the call activity to a certain market segment, it is not producing the level of interest that was previously anticipated in the strategy to pursue this segment.

In tough economic times, it is imperative to measure the results of sales activity so we can measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing strategies:

• Call to Closing Ratio. Measure all sales contacts, include the number of all sales contacts made over the course of the week or month, phone and email. Hotel Sales people sometimes make more servicing calls than necessary. Divide the number of calls by the number of contracts closed – that will give you’re the ‘call to closing ‘ ratio. Bear in mind that some market segments, such as SMERFE, require more calls.
• Average Group Size. The average group size is important because the steps of the sales process are exactly the same for large groups as small ones. Take the number of contracts over the measurement period and divide that into the number of room nights. When we recently did this at a client’s sales office, we found a surprising result – the SMERFE sales manager’s average group was 35 rooms while the association and corporate sales managers rooms average between 15 and 25.

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