Sales acceleration technologies are all about increasing the velocity of sales. In the hospitality sector we want to move prospects from initial query to a contract signature as quickly as we can. However doing this is not a question of any trick or sales technique. It’s about embracing tools and technologies into the sales team that enable a company to learn what works best, to repeat those actions, to track their impact and continually improve and optimise. But what does these sales acceleration processes look like?

The Three Keys: Productivity, Impact and Insight

The illustration above I think neatly captures the three keys of sales acceleration. Productivity is about getting more done with the same amount of resources. Now, the best way I know to do this effectively is through the adoption of better technology. This can span from marketing automation providing better qualified leads through to CRM through to our own sales acceleration technologies that allow the creation and sending of high quality communications.

Impact of course is vital. This could be a well-honed pitch, a fantastic website or a beautifully crafted, individual HTML email that shows the proposal in the best possible light. The key is that all stages of the process need to impress the prospects and convince them more quickly to get to a ‘yes’.

Finally, actionable insights are what marks a truly sales-accelerated hotel. This is a combination of analytics, tracking and measurement that tells a sales team and its manager what tactics and which salespeople are performing above the average. It provides the ability to quickly see outlying performance and adopting those successful tactics that really move the dial in a sales team’s performance

I guess the easiest way to summarise the key attribute of a sales accelerated hotel is that it is always learning. Outside of tracking performance against quota, sales teams have been left behind in the tracking and measurement of the communications they use to find out what is working and what is not. This often results in great sales performance being considered a one-of human quality, and therefore not repeatable or measurable.

Email is a key tool to unlock value

For instance, most sales managers consider email to be an absolutely vital part of the sales process. But how many can say that they have done anything to improve, streamline or make the emails more impactful in the last year? Again, there are only so many cogs in the sales wheel and therefore it is essential that each one is working and impacting positively on the success of the process.

To not optimise for productivity and ability to convert is bad. But to not learn over time what works and what does not and to not systemise that into what your sales and marketing teams do every day is worse, it’s a sin.

Sales Acceleration, done right, removes everything that prevents a sales person from doing their best work. It needs to be seamless to the sales person’s workflow. It’s not about creating extra work, it’s about providing them a simple and efficient tool that integrates perfectly with their current workflow.

To succeed, provide your team with the content that they need in a format they can use to make the sales that they need. Provide marketing and sales management with the feedback to actually know what is making a difference, to systemise it and become less dependent on star performers but instead lift the performance across the whole team. That’s how to really impact the bottom line.

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Based in London, UK, UpMail is an email tool for hotel sales people to increase one-to-one email communications productivity and sales conversion rates. UpMail customers includes Jurys Inn, Iberostar, citizenM, and many more.

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