Hospitality Marketing the Podcast Show 268

Hospitality Marketing the Podcast Show 268 Transcripts (English U.S.)

Announcer — Welcome to this week in hospitality Marketing. The podcast show number 268 with your host, Loren Gray.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to hospitality marketing in the podcast. I’m your host, Loren Gray, and this is episode number 268. So each week we spent around 20 to 30 minutes sharing the most interesting tools, news and techniques being used in marketing for the hospitality industry. We also do a quick recap of our weekly live video show this week in Hospitality Marketing, which also airs every Friday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern US time. So with that, let’s get started now.

Announcer — Today’s new resource tool.

So our tools for review this week or a little bit focused centric Lee on sales? Um, we’ve had some fun conversations over the past couple weeks on the line on the live show, and what we’re finding out is that there is this shift between sales teams, those that are still in place, those they’re still sitting in the chair, so to speak and score sales teams that have been removed from the position you’re looking to reevaluate and get stepped back into the industry as the hotel you that they were attached to or the corporations are attached to has the need for them to come back in and or whether or not they’re looking for other opportunities.

But what hasn’t been really discussed much is the transition between the technologies that used to exist, did exist, were used or not used, were aware of or not aware of. And what tools and techniques are out there right now? I want a feature. Two aspects. Tow our conversation tools this week. The first is a tool that I use extensively for my business that keeps track of my dialogues and engagements in CRM customer relationship management. Um, and that is sales flare sales flare dot com to be exact.

Now this platform I used to really keep myself organized. Um, any communication that I have it ties directly to my Google Mail, which is my primary base platform. It also does the outlook into the platforms as well, and it creates stages of integration of pipeline. Now there are other platforms, and please know that we could spend many podcasts and many training sessions as to all of these ones that create pipelines literally There’s one called Pipeline um, that do the progression of engagement, the initial awareness, the initial contact, follow up, particulars so forth and so on and through the entire process of it.

But I choose sales flare. I got it exposed to me early on. I find to be very useful, very easy. Creates great tiles. You can have prioritization. You can have reminders. You can put context as to what the value proposition of the communication is the long term or short term value proposition of who they are, the last communication with them. It also aggregates all of the communications with that contact person on one click. You look at your boom. When was the last time I talked to them?

What have I talked to him? Up to this point? What’s been the constant process of this was my last meetings. What were my last meeting notes about this? It’s a great aggregate source to control and work with in this current technology level, the means and needs to basically throw wide net, if anything, now, more so than ever. It’s not about favored unique relationships that you used to have prior to covert where you would cultivate very nurtured relationships with known entities that were there they were gonna be doing business with in the future.

They could do business elsewhere, which is why you had to maintain good relationships with him. But it really wasn’t a lot of, well selling. We weren’t really so much hunters back then. We were gatherers. We took odors on phones. We we took the business that came across our doorstep. We would solicit expanded business with those that were already doing business with, um, we really were just basically for better lack of a better word, happy and content to take on the business that we’re is easy to get to that came to our doorstep or that was easy to expand upon for those we had relationships with.

We really weren’t the aggressive hunters that had to go out and create cold calls. It was the last time you had a cold call sheet you had to be tracked on and how many cold calls you made and how successful was it? So, anyway, sales flare dot com is a great tool to help organize the hunter within you. Uh, the ability to go over and organize those people that you already connected to have had been connected to as to the prioritization is to what you have done with them in pan times, past times, current and potentially times future.

And we also know that a lot of people those positions have changed. That person may not be in the chair anymore. And where did their responsibilities get moved up to or over to from somebody else as other companies that you did business with they to downsize, they to furloughed? And now the same people you used to dialogue with and may have had all that great relationship with no longer exist? So now you have to re establish yourself with whoever is responsible for what that person used tohave, if it even at all.

And maybe there isn’t anybody immediately there. So who else do you need to reach out to? What is the process of that? Well, sales flare dot com helps you with that. The other tool is a little broad and grandiose, but it’s also very valuable and that is become educated on Lincoln at Lincoln dot com. Forward slash learning LinkedIn, as with all platforms, are happy to teach you how to use them better than what normally maybe available and what to use them for and how to use them best and how to advertise with them.

How to connect with them, how to engage with them, how to communicate with them. What is the process of fine tuning your presence on them? They’re more than helpful toe wine. You to be better at using them than the average bear walking in the door going. Oh, I just put my picture there. My bio there. I do this here. It seems that no, there’s really some nuance to what you could do. And Linkedin dot com slash learning is very good at bringing out those details that you need to be better and more efficient and to use the Lincoln pool as it were, the business social that it is to really be able to reach out and identify and collaborate and coordinate with all these people so that our two tools today sales floor dot com and the Learning Tool at Lincoln at Lincoln dot com forward slash learning, and that brings us to our technique of the week

Announcer — now for this week’s hospitality technique.

So my technique of the week. The term that I’m using is from tickler files in RollerDex is. What’s the new tech for sales success? Well, obviously, we’ve touched on a couple of the tools earlier, with sales flare in Lincoln as a training tool and so forth. But there’s so much more that needs to be identified and understood. One of my cohorts in crime that is in near and Dear to me, Holly Zopa, has a great training program called Influence for Sales, in which she really breaks down the usages of, like LinkedIn off things like Spark, which is Ah, interactive media development tool and some of the others.

We’ve highlighted those on previous podcast as well as the live show, and so you can always go back and index those and look for those and you’ll see them come up quite quickly and our previous podcast. But the idea is this Sales is a perennial business. How we did it in 1930 how we did in 1940 fifties sixties seventies, eighties nineties. The process is the same. The methodology and the tools of that methodology have evolved. What used to be handshakes and cocktails is now LinkedIn’s and, uh, pass codes and Social Media’s and, uh, remote learnings and remote contacts and zooms and virtual face to faces and no conferences.

Think about this. Some of our more fundamental tools that we’ve had in sales over these past few years. Conference interaction, uh, personal one on one engagement, uh, reaching out and showing up in people’s offices and and sitting down with them and and one on one discussing with them. Their needs and functions and value propositions between you and then have been taken from us. We don’t have those same tools and capabilities, but we do have other tools and capabilities. It used to be in the old days of sales, and I say old days, it’s not that old, but it has been back a little ways.

For those that may not be familiar with the term of roller, Dex. Rolodex was a big circular index card file, and it was alphabetized, usually categorized if you’re even more robust. And what you did was as you reached out and talk to people on the phone and fax machines. Okay, um, you filled in these little cards of information. They’re all their content in front of the phone their birthday. If you could find that over time their physical address or home address, what they did, what they were doing before they get promoted, where they worked before they working there.

Whatever you could cram into, what you knew about them went on that little card for them. And that little card was indexed either alphabetized or categorized on. That was your role index. That was gold. A sales person lived by the value of their role attacks. If a sales person left their business, the first thing you were worried about is where did that Roland X go Now? Some companies actually created policies that the Rolex was the ownership of the company itself and that it did not go with sales person.

So what did they do? They simply duplicated their cards, left the one roll of decks and brought the other one with them because that was their calling card to get another job. How many people do you know in what levels do you know them? If you called them, would they answer the phone? Those were those were really questions that get asked in different views. Um, also to tickler files. Particular files were something that was done as to a time progression of communication. Um, Birthdays, holidays. Sending gift baskets at the right time to the right person sometimes is not to directly the person was maybe to their secretary or their assistant.

Back then, they used to be called secretaries, and you would tease and treat well the people that were the gatekeepers to these people, the ones that sat at the desk that you enter the lobby. Those people had to be fed before you ever get to the the secretarial pool that get to the level of of the person that you actually get to walk into their office. You basically had to collaborate and work with everybody that had a way of stopping you to get to this person. And that’s why I was so critical.

If that you did have that roller Dex that had the direct connect to those people or at best, the direct connect to the person that was their handler there, secretary or assistant to it, then that was gold. That was how you create those relationships of bookings and so forth, and a lot of those bookings were built on handshakes. Yes, you eventually sent the contract. But if you walked out the door with a handshake from that person saying, We’re going to do that piece of business you just talked about, you came back and posted it on the sales followed that that was done then, of course, the process of contracts and being sent and signed and everything else that process followed.

But really, the sales was done at the handshake. Well, now we’re in the R 20 twenties, and now we’re doing virtual streaming and we’re on screens and now getting in front of people in getting the time to be able to deal with them and collaborate with them. It’s harder to personalize our communications, and we’re not meeting them in conferences and bring them out to dinner and schmoozing them are are showering them with gifts. And then I’ll honestly, a lot of people that we knew that were enrolls in the company may not be in that same role anymore.

And now we don’t know who is in that role anymore, and we have no nothing about them and so researching them. Like I said, with LinkedIn learning so far learning who has that role now what responsibility? Who has that title or who has that responsibility is a re searchable thing, and then how do you communicate with them? How do you get between everybody else trying to reach out to them, offering them something that’s similar to yours and how do you get in front of them? That’s the new World order of sales that we have now.

And and and even though we look back at the old times of roller Texas and tickler files, the new technologies now are much more pervasive, much more capable of reaching out to that individual. But you a sales teams have to know how to use these tools, use a sales person, have to understand how to utilize the methodology of discover ability of these people and how to communicate with them that they’re going to be receptive to it. Just getting their Twitter handle doesn’t mean anything. If they’re that important, it might be handled by somebody else, and also they may not even pay attention to something like Twitter.

But then again, emails get ignored or blocked. If they’re not the right one. Sometimes now people have gotten smart there is the email that they get handed out in distribution. That isn’t really nothing more than an email that their assistant handles, but their direct personal email, something that’s kept very close to them, and Onley given to those people that they want to have that direct email communication with. There’s so many different strata of technology now that they’re out there. But they’re discoverable. There’s tools that we’ve talked about before that as people touched your website, you can learn that the companies that have touched it and look at the people by their title and even all their connections with emails and social media to know whether or not there they’re the people that you need to speak with within that organization.

There is so many ways now to target and define exactly who you need to talk to, and there’s tools out there to do that. But you need toe, learn them, whether you’re still sitting in the chair for sales, and it’s your job to find more business or whether you’re looking to get back into a chair for sales and you to show how you’re capable of finding business. Either of those justifies the fact that it’s time to polish off the training, turn into the hunter, sharpen the spear and go out there and find it.

So that is our technique of the week from particular files and roll indexes. What’s the new tech for sales success now?

Announcer — This week’s hospitality news that you should know.

So our news and show review this week we had a guest host, and that was Mark Lee Marcus with elemental E l m n t l great agency, uh, lots of fun talking with him. Hard to recap the whole process. It was really very interesting as to how they approach their projects and what they do for them and what they do for their clients.

I can only say that it is well worth the listen on the live show, uh, to what he referred to what they’re capable of doing. What they do, um, how they approach their markets. How do they invade and engage? Um, it really is hard to recap, especially on a short podcast. The depth we spent well over an hour just going into the nuances of what it is they do the links, of course, to his website and also to the live show will be found in the podcast notes.

Here you can obviously go to hospitality. Digital marketing dot com forward slash live Look at show number 268. There you’ll be able to go to the replay from our interview with Mark but phenomenal conversation to that. And I highly recommend you take the time to listen into yet another excellent professional and their team breaking into and breaking down the means of getting engaged with clients and finding new ways of driving business for them. So one of the other things that we talked about a sui progressed out of that conversation was I p tracking and is it really Thea Add Killer that it proposed to be I. P tracking is, um, basically, instead of using cookies to determine whether you’ve landed or touched a spot is finding out what I p Internet protocol address that you’re using, and from that they can determine tremendous amount of information.

Actually, ah, scary amount of information which delves into the world of how GDR gpr compliance is a C C. P. A two compliant, um, just invasive a Zito. How much? Because then is changing you from the anonymity of who you are is a digital avatar two down to the point that they know you in particular is to who you are and as beneficial, that is, to marketers. It does create a personal information issue issue for how does that data get handled and who’s responsible for it and all the things that fall under the, uh, can spam laws and everybody else that has a hand into How is this data being used, abused or shared?

So I’d be tracking, um, interesting platform well worth the interest to it? Is it is it? Is it bad? Well, anything of used for wrong reasons can be bad if used for the right reasons. It’s a very effective tool to make sure that you’re not getting unnecessary ads for things that you’re not interested in. If it’s used for bad, it’s a pervasive way of of getting in front of you for things that you really don’t want. So we had a great discussion on the live show about that as well, which I had recommend around on the hour one hour and five minute mark, um, other things we highlighted in the show, which were of kind of things that make you, uh, Marriott.

We talked about SG losing hotels last week or the week. You know, the week before I should say, Well, Marriott has missed payments 122 of its hotels. Um, this might be a little bit of a culling of hotels that aren’t up to what they may want, who knows to say, But thes hotels aren’t necessarily bad hotels on about how they work. It may be just simply because Brand isn’t able to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to the ownerships under contract, for these hotels are and, um, they’re basically falling to the wayside and being re absorbed by ownerships to their opportunities.

So fun, interesting conversation about that as well. That well worth listened to as well in the live show for, um, the news item that I do want to hit on a little bit that we didn’t get to talk about on the live show that was provided to us by Mr Robert Cole from Rock Cheetah, who has been able to join us very frequently these past few months because he was an engagement with focused right and J. D Powers, but he does create a absolutely outstanding weekly recap on news relevant to that week on.

If you’d like to center for free, he offers it for free. You goto bitterly b i t dot l Y forward slash rock cheetah All lower case no space. Uh, there you can sign up and get the very well curated list of things that are active and interesting and influential, influential on hospitality for that week. Um, but the article that I want to point out to you in Schrager, which is coronavirus pandemic, will not be a paradigm shift in hospitality. And at first I took this as being on the negative toe what I thought it would be, Um, because I believe the coronavirus is a parodic shift to our industry.

But in the context of how he’s pointing it out, I have to agreed in some part to it that we have seen aspect of previous shifts of technology ast being different in their long term impact compared to what we thought initially there would be on their introduction things like cell phones and, um, chaos of personal checking kiosks, fax machines, uh, going back a little ways to it and so forth. We all thought that they would be, Ah, whole different Pandora’s box of impact that these things would create.

That didn’t happen. In fact, they changed in different ways to the positive that we didn’t feel would be the case. And right now we’re looking at Cove in kind of the same way, not so much as a technology shift per se, but a shift in perception of the industry. Um, what is the long term of isolating cleaning staff from? Uh, guess what is the long term impact off touchless engagement for check ins, checkouts, keyless entries so forth? What is the long term impact for that? What is the impact for large box hotels versus small, intimate boutiques?

And what is the long term impact of travel interest and densities and popularity ease and building structures, exterior hallways versus interior hallways, common spaces on the development of any hotels in the future? Tense as 23 common spaces, whether their internal, external and if external, What is it that they battled Weathers with depending on geography ease? Um, all of these are up to in question at this point, but we certainly can’t sitting where we are right now make long term asset ations like, Oh, my gosh, this is exactly what’s gonna happen in the in the future.

This is what the long term impact of is. We don’t know because just as all these other technologies were introduced and we had what we thought was a clear pictures this is gonna change this or change that. Yes, it changed some of it but didn’t change all of it. And it certainly wasn’t everything that we thought they were going to be on. And they didn’t turn out exactly the way we thought everything was going to turn out. So for that and I do agree with him that we have to put it with a bit of a grain of salt that it isn’t completely what we think it to be.

But then again, there’s probably a strong influences. What? It will probably end up as so not to be vague, But that’s it for the news and show review. So remember, you can find us on Google play apple iTunes I heart radio soundcloud stitcher, Spotify, Pandora tuned in the list goes on 39 platforms and counting. You could even find us on Amazon. Alexa, Google assistant in Syria, just asked to play the hospitality marketing podcast. And no matter which one you may use if you like to show, please please rate us and leave a comment that helps us understand more.

What, you want us to talk about it, whether you whether you like this, don’t like what have you But it also more importantly, helps others discover us as well. Um, also, if this is your first time here, I guess you, of course, can subscribe to us, uh, to our show on any of those platforms that you may have found us on, um, on an archive for all of our previous podcast. You can also go to hospitality, digital marketing dot com forward slash podcasts. Do you find this and all previous 267 episodes off our podcast going back many, many years.

Um, and also there’s a player there for the podcast. In case you’re not on one of the other platforms, you can play back then. Then they said the show links and and content and timelines and everything else for everything we discussed today. And of course, don’t forget our live video talk show that you can join and participate in every Friday at 11 30 Eastern US time called This Week and Hospitality Marketing The live show. For that you simply go to hospitality. Digital marketing dot com forward slash live there look for show number 268.

You’ll see the likes of the recap with Marc Liu. Great conversation with him, plus all the other conversation I mentioned to you earlier so that I thank you for the privilege of your time and look forward to talking to you next week.

Announcer — You have been listening to this week in Hospitality Marketing, the Podcast show 268 brought to you by Hospitality Digital Marketing in support of the HSMAI, the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International. All rights reserved Copyright 2020