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This is the first of a three-part series focused on delivering concrete, actionable steps you can take to ensure you get timely and complete responses from your hotel partners. By offering just a couple of extra bits of information in your meeting requests, you’ll help your hotel salespeople do what they love to do: fight for your business.

Behind the Curtain of the Hotel Sales Office…

The key to getting hotels to work hard for your meeting and submit a killer bid is to understand how to get your meeting RFP to stand out among the sea of leads a hotel sales team receives every day. In order to do this, you need to first understand the hairballs that sales managers deal with, and the key information you can provide that will make them seek out your RFPs and jump for your business.

 
 
Use the purpose to maximize the impact.
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Lana Frank, Project Manager with Humana
Ensure your environment is in sync with the goals of your event. Board meetings, sales meetings, and incentive programs often fit right into the resort atmosphere.

For Humana, Lana Frank plans gatherings from corporate meetings to five-day incentive events. Purposes range from associate recognition, acquisition projects, PGA sponsorship events, consumer-centric information meetings, leadership planning sessions, and a myriad of others that keep Frank’s team of nine planners busy throughout the year.
“Our meetings [and] events involve both internal and external attendees,” Frank says. “Goals as a whole ultimately target engagement and progressing our business strategy forward to continue growth and profitability. Through identifying your goals, you can then begin to work with the resort on establishing a theme to use throughout the event, beginning with the invitations, email blasts, and other promotions geared toward getting your guests involved and excited.”

 

Midwest Meetings