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The ambiance has got to include a belief in the minds of every member of the staff that you can be successful. As you struggle to get business, the temptation to quit is considerable. ‘We’ve tried to get hold of him six times. Let’s just file the cor- respondence in the cancellation file.’ No, you haven’t lost till the final whistle blows and the client books somewhere else.

What about the competition? Part of believing you can win is believing that the competition won’t. When the staff think of the competition, it should be with healthy and amused con- tempt. You have to believe you can do better and then there’s a far better chance that you will. How can you have contempt for the Rolls-Royce of the competition? They’ll have weak- nesses. Every product does. Concentrate on the weaknesses.

How do you organize the paper

work?

You want the sales staff to spend as much time as possible selling and helping others to sell. You have employed sales staff because they know how to do it. Not because they can type. So, unless you are satisfied that they can type fast – and unless you want to pay a sales manager’s salary for a typist – have a typist do the typing for them. The same principle applies for reports, statistics, contracts and similar. When they are doing those, they are not selling. Now, they may not complain. It is a lot less wearying doing the paperwork than trying to persuade reluc- tant clients to buy things. You have to keep their shoulder to the wheel, however.

In trying to make sure that your sales people spend their time selling, you need to recognize the difference between selling and research. In the marketing plan it was a student

the past. Apply the same idea to research on increasing your share of markets; if you look after one dinner for a team in a hockey league, do the other teams have dinners too? That’s the researcher’s job, not that of your small, skilled, selling resource. A word about contracts. Everybody sends out contracts nowadays. When they are signed, they ensure that, if there is any dispute, you will win in court. The only thing is that you practically never would finish up in court anyway. And if you did, whatever is in the correspondence is just as much a con- tract. Indeed, if you agree to buy a biro from me for 10p in front of a third party, that is a contract too; without any corre- spondence. Yet the time spent on writing contracts is immense – and costly.

Some paper work is vital. Particularly the records of the old business and the Call Reports. They are discussed in the chapter on banqueting. But, frankly, the Call Reports can be handwritten just as well as computerized. And it is much quicker.

You need your correspondence about future group bookings filed in date order for when they are coming. You need the old correspondence filed in alphabetical order for easy reference. File the old files, so that you haven’t got a mass of unnecessary paper. Of course, we are only talking about the paperwork you need for selling purposes. Operational paperwork is not part of this book. There is, in both areas, however, likely to be a lot of unneeded duplication. The rule is, if you don’t need it, don’t bother to produce it.

One of the most important pieces of paperwork for any sales office is the record of the company’s performance in years past. Say you have a large banqueting room which takes 250 guests. You are offered a party for 150 on a date in the future. Do you take it or not? Well, that depends on how heavy was the demand for that room on the same day in years gone by. The same applies for hotel accommodation, party bookings in the restaurant, etc.

The sales people need to be able to refer to those records at all times. Just producing business, irrespective of the demand pattern, is often useless. For example, you give a corporate rate to a company which books a lot of bedroom accommodation. The agreed price is lower than rack rate. You then find that the

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company only books Tuesday night during peak periods. Every booking you take at a corporate rate costs you money. So check which nights a company with a corporate rate is booking.

There is also a concept called the 80/20 rule. This holds that you need to concentrate on the 20 per cent of your customers who give you 80 per cent of your business. Well, you certainly need to prioritize, but this is the wrong way to do it. It’s fine for selling baked beans. Which tins you sell don’t matter. But in a normal banqueting situation, one of those 20 per cent of clients may give you a group banqueting booking on a Friday night in December. Another, too small to be in the 20 per cent, gives you a booking for a Monday night in January. Which client is the most important? The one who gives you January. Your priority is the client who fills gaps for you.

In hotels you also need to keep records of the performance of travel agents booking groups. To get a lower price, many travel agents offer a series of bookings which include off season and shoulder season groups. Then they cancel the off season and shoulder periods because – as they knew – few people buy them. When, next year, they try it again, you need to know what their performance was on each date. Then you can nego- tiate more intelligently.

Then you need a record of what happened to the requests you got for Brochures and Tariffs. Did you get the bookings or not? If you are checking, it is more likely that Reception will do the necessary work.