Why Your Digital Reputation Is Your Best New Sales Tool

I’ve spent a lot of years working at the intersection of hospitality sales and marketing, and here’s a shift I think our industry needs to pay a lot more attention to: your prospects are forming an opinion about you long before you know they’re looking.

Hospitality has always been a relationship business. Make the calls. Work the trade shows. Stay in front of your accounts. Build the Rolodex. Be the person they think of when an opportunity comes along.

I’m not suggesting we throw any of that away.

But while we’ve been busy measuring calls, emails, meetings and proposals, buyers have changed the way they buy.

Today, someone may encounter your company, your CEO or one of your sellers months before anyone raises their hand. They see your LinkedIn post, hear you on a podcast, watch a video, ask a colleague about you, Google your name or visit your website. And increasingly, they ask AI who they should be talking to in the first place.

My Lure Agency partner, Cory Falter, recently had hospitality marketing strategist Scott Eddy on the InnSync Show, and Scott said something that really resonated with me: “The buyer doesn’t care whether the first thing they saw came from your marketing department, your salesperson, your CEO, a podcast, or a LinkedIn post. They know they started seeing you.”

And that means selling can’t begin when you finally get the prospect on the phone because by then, the sale may already be underway.

Your Buyer Doesn’t Care Who Owns the Funnel

One of the things I see all the time is companies treating sales and marketing as two separate worlds. Marketing creates the content. Sales does the selling.

Except that’s not how the buyer experiences it.

They don’t categorize an article as “marketing,” a LinkedIn post as “sales,” an executive interview as “PR” and a conference presentation as “thought leadership.” They simply accumulate impressions, and every one of those impressions gives them another reason to trust you, remember you and eventually consider you. Or it doesn’t.

This is why I think some of the best marketing ideas in your company are probably sitting inside your sales team right now. Think about the questions prospects keep asking, the objections you hear over and over, why you lost the last deal, what customers are suddenly worried about or what your sellers find themselves explaining on nearly every call.

Those conversations aren’t just sales conversations. They’re buyer intelligence, and they should be feeding your content strategy.

Sales knows what buyers are thinking and asking because they’re hearing it firsthand. Marketing knows how to take those insights and turn them into something useful, visible and repeatable. When the two work together, your sellers stop having to introduce themselves from scratch every time they reach out to someone new.

Don’t Stop Prospecting. Stop Prospecting Cold.

Whenever we start talking about this idea, I can almost hear the objection: So are you saying salespeople shouldn’t make calls anymore?

Absolutely not. Pick up the phone. Send the email. Go to the conference. Ask for the meeting.

But think about the difference between getting an email from a complete stranger and getting one from someone whose name, face or ideas you’ve been seeing for the last six months. That second email hits differently because there’s already some familiarity there.

That’s what I want hospitality sellers to understand. If you consistently talk about the problems your buyers actually face, share useful ideas, answer their questions and show up where they spend time, you’re doing some of the prospecting work before you ever prospect. You’re establishing credibility and giving someone a reason to recognize your name when it finally lands in their inbox.

The goal isn’t to kill prospecting. It’s to warm up the prospect before the prospecting begins.

You Don’t Need an Audience. You Need a Reputation.

I also think we’ve done hospitality sellers a bit of a disservice by telling everyone they need a “personal brand.” For a lot of people, that immediately translates to: Great. Now I have to become an influencer too?

You don’t.

Scott made this distinction: “I would replace the word audience with reputation.”

That’s a much better way to think about it.

If only 500 people could realistically buy what you sell, being known and trusted by the right 100 is considerably more valuable than having 100,000 random followers.

So forget about building an audience for a minute and focus on building a reputation. Talk about what you actually know. Answer the questions customers ask you every week. Explain something complicated. Share what you’re seeing in the market. Challenge an assumption. Have an opinion.

Especially that last one. As Scott put it, “Thought leadership actually requires an actual thought.”

There’s an incredible amount of polished, professional content online that says absolutely nothing.

You don’t need to post three times a day, dance on TikTok or suddenly call yourself a creator. You need to be useful, specific and recognizable. Do that consistently enough and, over time, that becomes your reputation.

Your Rolodex Still Matters. It’s Just Not Enough.

I love that hospitality is a relationship business, and I hope that never changes. Relationships get meetings, builds trust and opens doors that might otherwise stay closed.

But relationships alone are becoming a more fragile sales strategy. People leave companies. Accounts change hands. New decision-makers appear. Buying committees get bigger. And the person you’ve known for 15 years may not be the person Googling your company or asking AI which vendors should make the shortlist.

Scott said, “Relationships can get you access. Relevance gets you considered. Results are what get you retained.”

Modern hospitality sellers need all three. Your relationships still give you a tremendous head start, but your digital reputation helps validate why that relationship should turn into an opportunity.

Your Trade Show Should Last Longer Than Three Days

This one drives us a little crazy here at Lure Agency.

Hospitality companies spend a small fortune sending teams to conferences and trade shows, and then we try to squeeze the entire ROI calculation into what happened during those three days. How many booth scans did we get? How many meetings? How many leads?

Those things matter, but I think we leave an enormous amount of value sitting on the conference floor.

Both Scott and Cory suggested that a three-day conference should be able to fuel three months of marketing, and I completely agree.

Talk to customers on camera. Interview your executives. Capture the questions people keep asking at the booth. Turn presentations into clips, conversations into articles and customer stories into case studies.

Don’t just come home with leads. Come home with intellectual property.

Because the trade show isn’t necessarily where the buying decision happens. Someone meets you there, likes what they hear and remembers your name. Then they go home and research you.

What happens next? Do they find useful ideas, customer proof, active experts and a company that clearly understands their world? Or do they find three press releases from 2023 and a LinkedIn page celebrating National Donut Day?

Attention gets you noticed. Evidence keeps you in the running.

And Then AI Walked Into the Funnel

Here's the real game-changer hospitality sales leader should be paying attention to.

Imagine you work your butt off to get the meeting. You finally get in the room, have a great conversation, and the prospect likes you and the solution. The opportunity moves forward.

Then they research you.

They Google your company, look at your LinkedIn profile and compare competitors.

Increasingly, they may also ask an AI tool who the leading companies are in your space, which vendors have experience with hotels like theirs, who has demonstrated results or what they should know about your company before hiring you.

Suddenly, your sales pitch is being fact-checked against your digital footprint.

If everything the buyer finds reinforces what you just told them, you’ve made the seller’s job easier. If they find almost nothing, that silence says something too.

Scott made another point during the conversation that I think is critical: “You can’t suddenly manufacture authority when somebody is ready to buy.”

You have to build it before you need it.

Case studies, customer stories, useful articles, smart videos, third-party mentions, executive expertise, seller expertise and a clear point of view all create evidence that buyers can find. Increasingly, they also create the kind of information that search engines and AI systems can understand and use when people are researching your category.

Visibility compounds. So does invisibility.

Which is one of the reasons we are so passionate about The WINS Method™ for our clients.

The Seller of the Future Thinks Like a Marketer

At the end of Cory’s conversation with Scott, he gave him three choices for the seller of the future: hunter, marketer or creator.

Scott chose marketer. I would too.

That doesn’t mean tomorrow’s great hospitality sellers stop selling. They’ll still prospect, network, build relationships, negotiate and ask for the business. But I think the best sellers are also going to understand attention, positioning, storytelling, psychology, distribution and reputation.

They’ll know how to contribute before they ask, educate before they pitch and build familiarity before they prospect. Most importantly, they’ll understand something the traditional sales funnel never really accounted for: your buyer may be deciding whether you’re worth talking to long before you know they’re looking.

So yes, keep the relationships. Keep making the calls. Keep going to the trade shows.

But start treating your digital reputation like the sales tool it has become. Because when your buyer, Google or their AI assistant comes looking for evidence that you’re worth the meeting, you want to make sure there’s something worth finding.

Would AI Recommend You?

This is one of the questions we’ve become a little obsessed with at Lure.

Your prospects are already researching you. What they find can either make your sales team’s job easier or quietly make it harder.

That’s why we created Lure’s Visibility Graders. They look at your digital sales ecosystem through the eyes of today’s buyer, from visibility and positioning to content and conversion, to uncover what’s helping you get found, trusted and shortlisted and what might be quietly costing you opportunities.

See How Your Sales Ecosystem Stacks Up →