Many recent surveys show that event organizers pick the first quote that fits their budget and requirements and don't wait for all quotes. As a result, your speed to market has a huge impact on your win rate. So how do you improve speed to market? Following are some areas that can give you significant bang for the buck.

Improve Lead Management

Hotels get leads from various sources like third party web sites, phone, local convention bureau, brand, etc. a lot of which are not a good fit. Significant time is wasted on finding relevant leads and then assigning to the sales manager that specializes in that area or segment.

With modern technology, hotels can consolidate leads from different sources and assign it to the right sales managers automatically. Further, leads can be rated based on profitability, current occupancy and lead size to enable sales managers to zone in on best leads instantly and improve the pipeline by efficiently responding to more RFPs.

Expedite Group Pricing

Group pricing strategies vary from a percentage off BAR to complex math based on group revenue and outflows. Rigor brings profitability, but also negatively impacts speed to market when done manually.

Hotels can adopt pricing software built specifically for groups to avoid the speed vs. profit dilemma. Such tools take a percentage off BAR as a base and vary it based on revenue and outflows to get you best of both worlds, better profitability with instant quotes.

Streamline Contract Process

Many hotels still use a manual process to plug in quote data into proposal and contract templates and print, fax, and scan them multiple times, wasting valuable time.

Hotels can further improve speed to market without sacrificing quality by auto-generating proposals and contracts and using an efficient e-signature process that is also convenient for the customer

End Goal – A 2 minute RFP Response

The steps in this article can enable sales to respond to RFPs in a few minutes and win a lot more business.