Marriott To Create Regional Sales Offices
Marriott International this month has taken another step in centralizing its sales process with the opening of a regional office in the Washington, D.C., area, largely moving sales efforts out of individual hotels and instead giving customers—particularly small and midmarket corporate accounts—a single sales contact for all hotels in the region across Marriott's eight core brands. The hotel company intends to continue this process throughout the rest of the country beginning next year.
"It's a very customer-centric approach," said David Marriott, the hotel company's senior vice president of global sales. "Whereas, in the past, many of our sales efforts were designed around individual hotels, now we're designing the efforts around the customer."
The new office in Gaithersburg, Md., staffed by more than 300 sales associates, for now covers sales for 55 Marriott properties in the Washington, D.C., area. Besides providing support for existing Marriott accounts, the sales office also will focus on bringing in new accounts, cutting down the volume of solicitations travel buyers might have been receiving in the past, Marriott said.
"Customers were really looking for a primary point of contact to do business with," Marriott said. "Many of our national accounts were getting frustrated because they had 15 hotels calling on them a month, even though they were a national account."
Eventually, the Gaithersburg office's sales duties will expand to cover Marriott properties from Baltimore to the Carolinas. Similarly, Marriott will open other sales offices—the exact number has yet to be determined, but Marriott said the goal is about a dozen—to centralize sales for other regions across the country. The approach, which Marriott said is an industry first, ultimately will be global in scope, but North America will be the primary focus, he said.
The regional office, dubbed Sales Force One, represents about one-third of Marriott's sales force in the area, Marriott said. Another third, following a sales reorganization this past summer, focuses on Marriott's large accounts. "These account executives who focus on our large accounts own the accounts and all revenue streams from that account, providing one primary point of contact," Marriott said.
The rest of the sales force remains in on-property sales roles. Rather than focusing on corporate transient business, however, the on-property sales team now works solely with large groups, conventions and catering sales.
Most travel buyers already were deep into their 2008 hotel program negotiations when Marriott's sales office began operations Dec. 3, but Marriott said the approach will simplify the requests-for-proposals process and pricing when in place at the onset of negotiations next year.