Sales Skill Development & Other Services

At SHG Consulting | Management we have provided sales skills training for many clients including international brands, franchised hotels and boutique hotel properties. Our typical clients serve the select-service and extended-stay segments where attracting, selecting, training and retaining sales team members can be a particular challenge and therefore requires superior training.

We have created customized and proprietary sales training for management organizations and brands as well as utilized our own relationship based approach to sales that instructs attendees in the art of identifying the right prospects, gives your sales team members the skills to ask the right qualifying questions, the tricks to uncovering clients' needs and teaches your sales team to match client needs to your hotel(s) in a way that gains loyal commitment from your guests.

We also identify the four key participant groups in a hotel that contribute to sales and provide follow-up tools to ensure that our training is put to good use... increasing sales.

Our Sales Skills Training Guarantee:

Each attendee will leave satisfied that they have increased their sales skills or your training fee money back!

To learn more about our sales skills training for your hotel, management company or brand contact Bradly J. Sax:

Voice: 877.744.4744 Ext 702

Email: BSax@SHGonline.com

Sales Skills Training:

An Integral Foundation of Revenue Generation Success

The current employment climate makes attracting and retaining effective sales team members a challenge especially for lodging establishments and specifically those in the select-service and extended-stay segments. These segments history of low wages, short-term thinking and salesperson unprofessionalism is often cited as reasons for the current employment climate. Some of this reputation may be earned by practices such as promoting those from within the ranks to a sales position who possess little or no selling experience or skills and/or upper management’s lack of investment in training and development. This coupled with the steep learning curve associated with professional selling usually creates excessive turnover, poor revenue results for the hotel and can develop sales team members who are more skilled and interested in servicing clients or creating ads for the newspaper than making productive SALES use of their work time. Consequently, many new sales team members fail within the first few months because of the lack of investment made in them by upper management. This cycle creates higher costs through additional recruiting, loss of momentum and lost clients.

In today’s marketplace hotel guests are easy prey for your competitors. There is an abundance of new hotels with an ever-increasing list of amenities and rewards programs competing for your guests; providing them with ever-easier ways to “sleep around”. It is imperative that hotels focus on educating, developing, growing and investing in their sales teams as the asset they are.

It is also interesting to note how many sales team members we have met who have been “in the business” for years who are only servicing accounts and cannot explain the basics of professional selling or the many other intricacies of maximizing a hotel’s market penetration. Most of these “experienced” sales team members are simply fielding inquiries and completing paperwork, not actively selling, maximizing client share or penetrating their market.

Well known for our Sales Skills Training, SHG Consulting|Management can assist you in breaking this cycle by providing the ultimate learning experience for beginners as well as seasoned professionals. Creating a learning environment that is entertaining and informative for our participants we approach lodging sales from our “Basic Five Skills” and focus on the four key hotel participant groups of whom involvement is needed for long-term sales success.

SHG Consulting|Management takes a unique approach to selling lodging properties because today’s lodging sales teams are selling to a more sophisticated client base, which have significantly advanced tools including the internet and easy access to the Global Distribution Systems (GDS). Coupled with a lack of product differentiation and the commoditization of the lodging industry as a whole; the current sales approach used by most lodging businesses is archaic, overly complicated and does not serve today’s marketplace.

In our five day training sessions participants will learn to employ our Basic Five Skills of selling through proven techniques and tactical strategies that enable them to succeed in today’s competitive environment, to better understand and feel comfortable with the sales process and to build revenues by building client relationships. We even provide tools to with which they can measure their success.

To learn more about creating a sales investment return for your hotel contact Bradly Sax today via email at BSax@SHGOnline.com or telephone at 877.744.4744 extension 702.

Simple Outline of our Sales Skills Training

The Basic Five Skills

Prospecting for the Right Guests

Qualifying to Understand the Business Potential

Identify the Real Needs of Your Prospects

Linking Your Guests Needs to Your Hotel

Gaining a Loyal Commitment from Your Guest

Four Key Participant Groups

Our sales model is one that is simple, confronts the current challenges and trends in the industry and provides measurements to analyze success. However, it is also one that at its core requires the involvement of all levels of the organization inside and outside of the sales team. The success (or failure) of sales does not rest solely in the sales office. Our four-level sales approach examines, involves and evaluates the four key participant groups and their contributions to the sales effort. On the first level is Ownership (or executive level management). On level two the property General Manager/Sales Leadership. On level three are the direct sales team members and on the fourth level is the front-line lodging staff.

Ownership: We provide owners with better tools and techniques, including compensation models and staff development information to hire, train, manage and retain better sales associates. We then provide the “Basic Five”. The five things owners must review each quarter for each lodging property to ensure they are on the right path and to identify areas of opportunity.

General Manager/Sales Leadership: We identify the supervisory skills needed to manage the direct and indirect sales teams. We demonstrate the daily interaction required between sales team members and the sales leadership for achieving success. Utilizing the monthly version of our Basic Five we educate the sales leadership on what they must know about their properties each month to ensure sales success. We also introduce some simple but powerful sales account tracking tools they can implement with their sales teams to assist in monitoring account/client progress.

Sales Team Members: We educate and coach sales team members on direct sales and on selling to clients one-on-one over the telephone and in person. We facilitate the implementation of selling techniques so that sales team members may understand the client and guest needs and provide solutions to their lodging dilemmas creating a relationship based approach. SHG provides simple but powerful tools for sales team members to use each day to track their own progress. We address current issues such as; the challenge of client reach-ability with voicemail and “gatekeepers”; changing distribution channels such as the internet, the GDS systems and direct to PMS booking; and how to get out of the commoditization game and how to differentiate their hotel and grow market share through a positive, ethical and guest focused sales approach.

Lodging Staff: We provide informative and entertaining training methodologies for sales team members and others to facilitate sales awareness for line-level team members such as front office and reservationists training. We provide measurement tools to utilize with line level and other staff so that they may understand their impact on revenues.

Click on the link to contact us to learn how we can create a sales investment return for your property. bsax@shgonline.com