Forecasting & Benchmarking
Predictable sales funnel management – true forecasting and benchmarking
Forecasting on past year’s activity is inherently risky and unpredictable
Today’s modern hotel business requires powerful and accurate forecasting tools. Ownership and management groups depend on front line sales staff to accurately and successfully predict future revenues. Without this ability disaster lurks. Every day hotels are forced into receivership due to unexpected declines in revenues. How does this happen? How do some hoteliers get their revenue projections so wrong? It’s easy.
Most meetings management tools allow hoteliers to forecast expected revenue. These forecasts are typically based on previous years’ bookings. But, as we all know, the hotel business can change drastically from one year to the next. The economy can turn south; new hotels can enter the marketplace, corporate travel budgets may be cut. Literally thousands of things can affect yearly revenue spent on group and transient bookings in the hospitality industry.
Forecasting and benchmarking the correct way: True, predictable sales funnel management
But what if there was another way? What if a hotel could successfully predict bookings based on the proactive outbound sales activity of their employees? Instead of forecasting results based previous years, properties could actively search, find and compete for all of the potential business in their market?
That’s exactly what Target Net provides. Not only does Target Net offer all the forecasting and benchmarking features of traditional meetings management tools, but it also allows director’s of sales and general managers to successfully predict revenue based on proactive sales efforts. Start with a database of virtually every group who has ever had a booking at a hotel in the past. Apply your sales managers to proactively contact groups who’s past bookings would work in your property. Then track their activity. How many calls does it take to set a site visit? How many site visits will lead to a proposal? How many proposals need to be created to generate a contract? And, most important of all, how many contracts must be sent out for each booking. It’s called funnel management. And for too long it’s been virtually impossible to do with existing tools.
Target Net makes funnel management easy. And with a predictable sales funnel, forecasting becomes much more reliable. Without it, forecasting is really just a series of hunches built upon guesses. Even if you take these guesses and plug them into a software tool, they’re still just guesses.