See the sidebar to this story, "Marriott's International Expansion Plans Target China, India"Marriott International is overhauling its corporate sales strategy, shifting its sales team largely out of the back offices of individual hotels and into both account- and region-specific roles. The strategy aims to provide large corporate accounts with their own personal sales contact while giving small and midmarket accounts single regional sales contacts, covering all of Marriott's eight core brands, according to the company.
"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 around the customer."
The first regional sales office, staffed by more than 300 sales associates, opened in December in Gaithersburg, Md., and now covers hotel 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 received in the past, Marriott said.
"Customers were really looking for a primary point of contact," he 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 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 priority for now, he said.
"It's going to be a focus in 2008," Marriott said. "We want to have regionally based sales offices, whether it's a dozen or 13, across the country, but we want to make sure we're handling the appropriate number of hotels. We don't want our sales folks handling too much product."
The sales offices are the second step in a massive sales reorganization, which Marriott said was crafted by reaching out to more than 450 stakeholders, including customers and hotel managers. Last summer the company directed specific staff to handle its largest accounts.
"We designed an organization that provided integrated support teams to provide for specific business travel or group needs," Marriott said. "These account executives who focused on our large accounts own the accounts and all revenue streams from those accounts, providing one primary point of contact."
Bob Brindley, vice president for BCD Travel's Advito consulting division, said that buyers without large volumes at Marriott properties that are unlikely to see much financial benefit as a result of the new strategy. "While they have more of a centralized focus, they still shy away from doing chain discounts," Brindley said. "This is even for some of the large clients."
Marriott said the new sales approach would simplify the requests-for-proposals process for negotiations this year. "As we really get this sales model up and running, it will help facilitate pricing in the future and make it easier for our customers and our sales people to get through that season," he said.
The regional office represents about one-third of Marriott's Washington-area sales force. Another one-third focuses on large accounts. The rest remain in on-property sales roles, but rather than focus on corporate transient business, the on-property sales team works solely with large groups, conventions and catering sales.
Although hotel owners wanted to ensure that each hotel would receive equitable attention under the new structure, there has been very little pushback, Marriott said. Without the 55 hotels bombarding the same base of customers, the sales staff in theory could reach out to 10 times the amount of coverage, he said.
The sales offices also can use Marriott's reservations technology. For example, office computers identify customers as they call in, using that phone number to automatically bring up account information and history so the sales staff can identify the customer immediately.
So far, the strategy is limited to Marriott. Jill Cady, vice president of worldwide sales strategy for InterContinental Hotels Group, said she knows of no other hotel chain planning to adopt a similar strategy and that sales strategies have to be tailored to their respective companies.
"There's still so many different flavors of hotel chains out there, from small boutiques to big multinationals," Cady said. "Just because it works for Company A doesn't mean it fits into the strategy for everyone."
Marriott, however, said that the approach responds to customer frustration with solicitation volume and the explosion of third-party reservation channels.
"Our industry has been a little bit behind in terms of this type of selling approach, but pharmaceutical companies have already gone through this type of change," Marriott said. "We realized that we had an opportunity to really improve our sales efforts and increase our competitive advantage."