How Hotel Mystery Shopping Data Can Supercharge Your Sales Team – Part 1: Identifying the Challenges
Think hotel mystery shopping is just discovering who’s delivering a stellar guest experience and who isn’t cutting the mustard? You might want to think again. It’s also about fine-tuning your sales team’s skills to perfection. But mystery shopping at a deeper level needs to be expertly tailored to identify any barriers to your sales team’s success.
This calls for curated questions that zero in on essential sales skills, turning each interaction into a valuable data point. Why? Because understanding the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members and your collective sales team is the first step to improvement.
So, how does this innovative style of hotel mystery shopping work? And what sort of insights is it generating? Let’s take a closer look.
What are the Criteria for Measuring Sales Skills?
Sector specific and highly customisable mystery shopping explores your sales team’s current state of play based on their performance in some or all the following areas:
- Webform submission
- Email submission
- Enquiry response
- Proposal
- Follow up
- Showround
Conversations at enquiry stage are dissected. Proposal personalisation is scrutinised. And follow up calls are eavesdropped on (figuratively). The scores are then combined and analysed to unveil the hotspots that need some TLC.
What do Average Hotel Mystery Shopping Results in 2023 Tell Us?
The not-so-secret secrets? Let’s start with the downside first.
- Up and cross-selling, closing, and negotiation skills – These are the power moves that turn a casual enquiry into a converted one. But they’re also typically the lowest scoring areas. This is often due to a lack of confidence and sales savvy during the proposal and follow up stages – or no follow up at all!
The good news is salespeople are shining in other areas.
- Data Gathering and Rapport Building – These are the MVPs of 2023! Kudos to Sales Co-ordinators nationwide for acing the numbers game and being the friendliest faces in the industry!
Overall, hotel mystery shopping has highlighted the following areas as stumbling blocks salespeople and teams are facing:
- Lack of Skills: The industry is booming with new talent, but training is key for it to reach its full potential.
- Absence of a Clear Process: Lack of a well-defined roadmap can be responsible for lack of sales success.
- CRM Neglect: Your CRM should contain a wealth of customer knowledge. After all, knowledge is power! But sales teams can’t get important information out if it isn’t being put in.
- Sales Team Confidence: Fact: Clients will place their business with confident salespeople, because confidence is contagious and inspires trust.
- Qualifying Quandaries: Digging deeper into enquiries unearths the real needs of clients, giving salespeople competitive edge.
- Follow-Up Fumbles: Proactive and persistent (without being stalker-ish!) beats random or not at all.
- Proactivity Problems: Targeted processes are needed to allow for sales proactivity rather than just firefighting.
- Communication Conundrums: Structure not sporadic is the key to effective client communication.
It’s clear expert hotel mystery shopping empowers you to lift your hotel sales team to new heights, turning challenges into triumphs enquiry by enquiry.
At Selling Savvy, our hotel mystery shopping and sales process analysis is more than a data gathering exercise. In addition, our workshops are then designed to support you in upskilling your sales team in any areas of concern. Get in touch to see how it can help you get the best results.
