Hospitality Innovation In 2018

How Hotels Can Build Increase Sales Using Video

For a long time, sales professionals have understood the importance of building relationships to grow their revenue. This works great if you can get a potential customer to attend a site visit or if you can pop by their office, but what if they are much farther away? You’re normally stuck with trying to schedule a phone call so that you can showcase your personality and make a real connection. In the past, setting up a call was the highest possible chance you’d have to win the business through relationship and rapport based selling.

Technology is Changing The Game

What if there was a way to make it easier to schedule a phone call with you or to showcase your personality to potential clients remotely? In this article we’ll outline 3 of the top tools you can use to stand out as a hotel sales professional in 2017. These tools won’t need to be integrated into your existing technology and you most likely won’t require approval to start using them. The best part is, they’re currently free.

1. Sell With Video

A new app called Helpful is changing the way businesses communicate with one another through their disruptive new video technology. Helpful is a smart phone application that you can download quickly and use to immediately differentiate yourself from your competition.

Imagine that you’ve received an email to send an RFP to a potential customer. You want to follow up but you’ve already sent an email and it doesn’t seem like the right situation for a phone call. You can easily use Helpful to record a quick video of yourself that will then be emailed to your potential client. It’s like snapchat, but for business.

Simply login to the app and record a short video of yourself using Helpful. Then, select the contact you’d like to send it to and they’ll be emailed your video. The video will also be transcribed into text into the email so they can read or watch your follow up. The best part is, they don’t need to download Helpful to watch it. By seeing you live, your potential clients will see a real person behind the RFP, making them much more likely to respond.

2. Make Setting Up Calls Easier

If you’d like to setup a call with a potential customer, we suggest using Calendly. In our research, we found that scheduling phone calls was one of the largest roadblocks in the sales funnels. The back and forth emailing to get on the same page to setup a call just doesn’t work. Instead, you can try using Calendly, which offers a free basic version.

To get started with Calendly you can sign up for a free account and connect your calendar from Gmail or Outlook. Next, you’ll choose your availability and allow potential customers to select various times to setup a call with you. You can provide instructions for them when setting up the call as well, such as your extension or any other instructions for them before the call.

The best part about Calendly is that it double-syncs with your calendar, meaning that if you block off a time in your calendar and you aren’t logged into Calendly, it will still update in Calendly. Likewise, if a potential client selects a time in Calendly, it will also update your calendar. It makes scheduling a breeze and removes all of the back and forth so that you can connect with potential customers faster and easier.

3. Use GIFs In Your Emails

In a recent study done by Predictable Revenue and Bizness Apps, sales professionals inserted a GIF of themselves at the beginning of their emails to new customers and prospects.

The results spoke for themselves:

• 300% increase in cold email reply rates;
• 100% increase in calls scheduled;
• 100% increase in calls attended;

They essentially used GIFs for breaking the ice with potential customers and prospects alike. In the study, they used a simple GIF of themselves holding an item, like a surfboard to build a sense of fun and personality. Hotel professionals could also make a GIF of themselves in a popular meeting space or location that the hotel would like to show off. As we all know, a picture says 1000 words and GIFs are a short video that can relay a message to a potential customer in seconds. It also gives you a chance to showcase your personality before you connect. (You can make GIFs yourself by shooting a video on your phone and uploading it to EZGIF)

To Sum It Up

Whether you adopt live video, calendly or GIFs to your sales process, it is our strong belief that if you want to increase sales, you’ll need to differentiate from your competition. More than ever, large brands are focussing on making real connections with their customers. The sooner you do this in the sales process, the better as this will drastically increase the likelihood that prospects will be motivated to get in touch with you. After all, wouldn’t you rather work with a “real person” that isn’t afraid to showcase their unique personality, instead of your typical boring corporate replies? By demonstrating that you aren’t afraid to have fun with your sales process, you’ll also send potential customers the message that you are innovative and modern. They’ll be much more likely to believe you when you say you are different from the other hotels that they’re speaking with and you’ll be off to a much stronger start.

To automate more of your event planning process for your Hotel Sales, check out www.eventtemple.com, which is the perfect companion to follow up on Helpful videos, send Calendly links to schedule appointments, or introduce yourself to prospects using GIFs.