Hotel lead generation: simple fixes that fill the pipeline

Most hotel sales teams say they are busy, yet the pipeline of new corporate accounts stays thin. Hotel lead generation is often still done the way it was twenty years ago: a team walks the city, notes company names and then spends weeks trying to reach them. The fixes are rarely big. They are small changes in how leads are found, how signed clients are treated and how sales time is spent.

David Kijlstra, a hotel school graduate who worked five years in the commercial team of a hotel chain before founding his own consultancy, helps hotels apply sales principles from the tech industry. His starting point is simple: many of the tactics hotel sales teams still use would be seen as outdated in almost any other industry. Below are the lessons from his work that any hotel can apply. You can also watch the full conversation.

Why sales blitzes waste your best selling time

A sales blitz sends the team out into the city to find companies that could sign a corporate contract. People walk past office buildings, write down which companies sit there, go back to the hotel and start trying to contact them. Kijlstra calls himself one of the biggest enemies of this practice, because people spend weeks building lead lists that could be built far faster.

The deeper problem is that the time goes into collecting names instead of talking to buyers.

Hotel lead generation in hours instead of weeks

The method Kijlstra teaches uses the networks of your competitors' sales managers. Many hotel sales managers keep their LinkedIn connections open, so you can see who they are connected to. Those connections are exactly the people a corporate hotel salesperson wants to reach.

• Connect with five hotel sales managers in your area.
• Open their connection lists, which are often visible.
• Filter on job titles such as travel manager, office manager and workplace experience manager.
• Export the result with a scraping tool, which he admits is a little unofficial.
• Start contacting the list, which in his example holds about 400 relevant people.

In his experience this takes two to three hours at most. It also shows which bookers your competition already talks to. That is hotel lead generation built on data rather than on footsteps.

Turn signed accounts into a source of warm leads

A hotel salesperson does four jobs in one, Kijlstra explains: business development rep sending cold emails, onboarding manager, partnerships manager who makes sure the client actually produces room nights, and account manager. Without clear direction, people do a little of everything, and most focus on getting the signature. Yet many corporate contracts are only a letter of intent: a company promises a hundred or five hundred nights, but does not sign off on them.

At a European chain of almost eight hotels, his team changed that. They defined what to say to a client after signing, how to make sure everyone in that company knows the hotel, and they added two programmes:

• An incentive programme that rewards a client at 50, 100 and 250 nights produced.
• A referral programme that rewards a client, with a reward or a stay, for introducing another company.

Existing partners started producing and sending new customers, so the team needed less cold outreach. By his account, corporate reservations grew strongly in the first year, and the team had 15 to 20 warm leads it could sign that same year. Warm leads also come from meetings and events, where a fast hotel RFP response often wins the booking.

Staying top of mind matters here too. Sales managers tend to think a booker still remembers them after a month, while in reality the hotel is soon forgotten. A personal onboarding series of a few emails, like the ones tech companies send after you sign up, solves part of that. Gifts are another part. Most hotels send a cookie, chocolate or a bottle of wine, which often ends up in the office Christmas raffle. Kijlstra prefers a gift people keep, such as the personalised gloves knitted by grandmothers in Amsterdam as part of a movement against loneliness, with a note inviting the receiver to text the knitter a thank you.

Give sales a process, a number and time to sell

Hotels have standard operating procedures for operations, but rarely for sales. Kijlstra wants the same for the commercial team: email templates you know convert, and a sequence for what happens when a contact does not answer. If you know one in five or one in ten emails converts, sales becomes a numbers game and the task is to find hundreds of good prospects. The same discipline can turn a hotel call center into a revenue engine.

“Every tech company has a sales sequence that's nailed down to a science for every step they know is gonna work.”

David Kijlstra, 33:13

He has not met a single hotel that uses dedicated email outreach software, while in his view nearly every tech company does. Going back to the basics and standardising them, with a personal touch, is the core of his approach.

The second piece is a number. Almost no hotel measures the return on a salesperson, and general managers often think it cannot be done. He counts only new business signed, not room nights from accounts that already produced year after year.

“I personally think that a sales manager should be achieving a 15 or even 20 times ROI on their salary.”

David Kijlstra, 17:54

The third piece is time. At the chain mentioned above, a sales manager had weekly recurring meetings with the revenue manager, the general manager, the sales team, the commercial team and the whole hotel, often repeating the same update. Clearing those freed almost one and a half days in everybody's schedule within a short time.

Find out why a sales team underperforms before you fix it

When an owner asks how to make the sales team more effective, Kijlstra first asks whether the people are really the problem. A concept that does not appeal, low review scores or a location with little business around it make selling hard for anyone.

“Are they underperforming because they haven't had training? Are they underperforming because the concept is just really bad?”

David Kijlstra, 31:16

If the product and the market are fine, he looks at return per salesperson, from around five times up to twenty times, and runs interviews with the team. Often the cause shows quickly: no time because of internal meetings, no freedom to try things, or no tools.

Training is the other recurring gap. He sees hotels hire a graduate, give a two or three day onboarding with a set of procedures and say go and sell, while the tech companies he compares them with train new sales staff for months. The best performing chains he knows keep training their people on the important topics, so the method becomes second nature. The same applies to reservation agent training, where bookers learn to sell.

Frequently asked questions

What is hotel lead generation?

Hotel lead generation is the work of finding companies and contacts that could book rooms, meetings or groups, and getting them into a conversation with your sales team. In the approach described here it covers more than cold outreach: building focused lead lists, onboarding signed accounts properly and using referral rewards so existing clients bring in warm leads.

Are sales blitzes still worth doing?

In David Kijlstra's view, mostly not. Walking around office buildings to write down company names and then contacting them afterwards can cost a team weeks. He prefers building a list from the open LinkedIn networks of local sales managers, which in his experience takes two to three hours and produces a list of several hundred relevant contacts.

How do you measure a hotel salesperson's performance?

By comparing the new business they sign with what they cost. Kijlstra believes a sales manager should deliver 15 to 20 times their salary in new business, not only in room nights from accounts that were already producing. He also looks at whether the team has time for client meetings, or whether recurring internal meetings take up the week.

How often should hotel sales teams be trained?

Far more often than once a year, according to Kijlstra. He sees hotels give new sales staff a two or three day onboarding, while the tech companies he compares them with spend months training new hires. The hotel chains he sees performing best keep training their people on the most important topics all the time, so the method sticks.