Sales and marketing initiatives are critical in driving guest traffic to your property and meeting organizational financial benchmarks.
Having a sales and marketing standard operating procedure (SOP) or hotel advertising initiative keeps your sales team on the same page and gives the whole department clearly defined goals to work towards.
In this post, we explain why it’s important to create a hotel sales and marketing SOP, who uses them, and how to start creating your own plan of action. We also provide a free checklist template to help you get started. Welcome to SOP sales and marketing 101!
To continue your learning, check out our comprehensive Hotel Operations Management Guide.
A sales and marketing SOP is a protocol for how your hotel’s marketing and sales department approaches advertising initiatives and sales goals. Sales executives and managers use SOPs to onboard new sales members and quickly align their staff. It helps to keep everyone working toward the same strategic financial objectives, and it defines and outlines things like:
Having a sales and marketing SOP is crucial in uniting staff with a clear plan of action to drive sales. An SOP outlines expectations around performance and conduct across the sales department too.
It aids in team collaboration and motivates your individual sales staff members with clearly identified levels of performance and benchmarks for reward. To understand how SOPs fit into all aspects of hotel operations, check our Hotel Operations Management Guide.
But it doesn’t just clarify sales team conduct: hotel sales and marketing SOPs also set up a standard approach to create and maintain brand awareness through consistency. Hotels use SOPs to drive brand recognition and promote customer loyalty.
There are typically multiple pieces to a sales and marketing SOP. Ultimately you want to include anything that clarifies the sales process and unifies your team around strategic marketing and advertising initiatives. This can include everything from a general guide of what to expect when you first join the sales team to a checklist of how to conduct sales calls.
We’ve included a few key documents we recommend including as part of your hotel’s sales and marketing SOP:
To ensure new sales staff can hit the ground running, it’s helpful to include a hotel sales training manual for onboarding new team members. Having a clear onboarding process for sales personnel helps new employees hit the ground running toward sales goals so they’ll be able to hit benchmarks quicker.
We recommend including a hotel sales kit that outlines the basics of your sales processes and procedures. This provides an easy way for existing sales staff to review what’s expected of them. It’s also helpful for new team members who might need to regularly review processes. A sales 101 guide should include a clear overview of sales procedures and marketing initiatives as well as any information around brand standards for sales and advertising.
As part of your hotel sales SOP it’s ideal to include a lead sheet for managing prospects. A hotel sales lead sheet includes the information for prospects so that your sales team can pursue their initiatives with the appropriate leads.
The marketing plan is an essential tool for Sales and Marketing teams to align on. Each hotel has a number of marketing channels both digital and traditional that help grow brand presence and drive bookings. Since marketing is an ongoing effort, a good SOP includes tasks that will continue to drive traffic to the location. Items such as posting on social media and managing a Google search account are essential to profit growth.
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When you’re putting together a hotel sales and marketing SOP, the first thing to do is identify your organization’s overall financial goals around sales, marketing, and advertising. Define your goals and KPIs so you can include them in your documentation. If you have specific goals for individual roles or personnel, be sure to identify them.
From there, consider your audience—work toward recording your SOP information in a straightforward way that will make the most sense for your sales and marketing team. It might be as simple as creating a bulleted list or sales cheat sheet for certain things, depending on who you’re communicating to.
Using a digital tool like Xenia to manage SOP documentation or SOP checklists can help create an accessible, single source of truth for sales and marketing procedures. Solutions like Xenia allow everyone on your hotel team to access checklists, documentation, and team messaging features directly from their mobile devices, so your team always has the information they need to make the sale.
A positive reputation is the key to success in hospitality. Now more than ever, properties must strategize to build and protect their brand image. A proper management strategy will increase brand awareness, boosting guest acquisition, providing opportunities to deliver a positive experience, which leads to increased loyalty and advocacy. So how can we build a reputation?
Xenia checklists make it easy to create and enforce standard operating procedures and inspection protocols, simplifying quality assurance and brand standard adherence across individual properties and entire portfolios.
The system’s PM and work order tools ensure your maintenance team has everything they need to track fixes on the go and log asset information for a clear understanding of asset health.
Plus the software features all the internal communication features you could need to encourage collaboration, increase autonomy, and decrease miscommunication.
Managers are able to message team members one on one, create chat groups for departments and teams, and even announce organization-wide news and updates via a public feed, anywhere, anytime.
With Xenia, you and your team will be able to track and manage property assets and analyze detailed analytics reports on everything from inspections and maintenance to room cleanings and task assignments, allowing you to spot patterns quickly and make long-term improvements. And to top it all off, Xenia is fully flexible and customizable, so you can tailor your digital experience to fit the way you work.
To learn more about how Xenia can help streamline operations at your hotel, check out our website and schedule a free demo.
Our solutions can help you set up and maintain clear SOPs, improve accountability and team management, increase visibility into day-to-day work, and more. We’re here to make your hotel the best, most optimized property it can be!
Xenia unifies daily operations, maintenance management and quality assurance to help General Managers ensure teams and facilities are effective and efficient.
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Our customers love Xenia's robust use cases including:
Create checklists, SOPs, Inspections and Data Logs to power accountability, training and staff clarity on every task.
Create recurring schedules for daily opening and closings, performance review meetings, inspections, cleanings and more.
Centralize team communications with in task chats, one-on-one chats, team messages and company wide announcements
Defeat pencil whipping and disorganized responsibility assessments by standardizing operations with Xenia. Chat with teams on any device, track time, collect photos, and ensure high quality work.
Use Xenia's analytics dashboards to view staff work reports. Filter by asset, location, category or due date and export the report in PDF or Excel
Create work orders with associated team, asset, location, priority, category and due date. View live progress reports on each work order, chat with teams, and review resulting template submission, images and notes to improve operations.
Create a preventive maintenance calendar to ensure asset uptime is not compromised. Attach images, templates, videos and notes to every task and assign to a team or individual for completion.
Generate and attach QR codes to equipment and facility locations to enable fast and accurate inspections and data logs.
View work history for every asset and sub asset in Xenia. Review performance data and enable corrective actions to improve your operation.
Put your brand standards in a clear and operational checklist to be attached to work assignments.
Xenia's operations template builder has built in conditional logic into each step. This allows you to trigger actions based on a form response such as creating a corrective action on a failed inspection step, sending a notification to management for out of range meter readings, and much more.
Operationalize inspections with fast work order assignment arising from a failed inspection step. All corrective data is stored in the checklist submission for auditing and accountability.
View live dashboard summaries of tasks, employee performance, template submissions and more. Filter, organize and export compliance reports to PDF and Excel formats to simplify compliance management.
Xenia is empowering hundreds of teams around the world to elevate their hotel operations management. When implemented, Xenia offers benefits such as:
With Xenia, you can schedule recurring tasks and work orders in minutes. Assigned employees will receive notifications and can complete work on their mobile device.
Build custom checklists, SOPs, inspections, log books, surveys, meeting agendas and more with Xenia. Attach these to tasks and work orders to clarify work and collect crucial data such as photos, notes, time stamps and more.
Xenia's operations platform increases brand standards and speeds up issue resolution to ensure a positive guest experience. When things do go wrong, Xenia provides a central data suite to identify the root cause and execute intervention plans.
Enable any team member to report issues, damage or guest complaints directly on their mobile device. The necessary team will be notified and can resolve the issue immediately.
With Xenia's preventive maintenance calendars and work order management, teams can centralize their asset maintenance and ensure every issue is prevented or corrected in short order. This saves teams thousands each year in avoidable repair fees.
All data in Xenia is securely stored in the cloud for analysis and reporting. We do not delete historical data to ensure that you have a clear view of improvement over time.
