IHG Forms Dedicated Loyalty & Marketing Team for Corporates

InterContinental Hotels Group SVP of worldwide sales Derek DeCross talks:

• Building out the B2B team
• Programming for small & midsize enterprises
• Giving corporates a voice with IHG's marketing & loyalty departments

InterContinental Hotels Group is fresh off a leadership transition. Former chief commercial officer Keith Barr assumed his new role as CEO on July 1, replacing CEO of six years Richard Solomons, who will retire on Aug. 30. But a transition of another sort was already underway at IHG, as SVP of worldwide sales Derek DeCross, who joined from American Airlines in February 2016, worked to fill gaps in the company's sales organization, particularly in the business-to-business segment. He spoke with BTN lodging editor Julie Sickel.

BTN: What have you been working on since you joined IHG?

Derek DeCross: I really spent the first six months or so asking lots of questions, putting together a pretty thorough analysis of [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for] our organization with my team, with my peers, with our customers. I hired Jonathan Kaplan from Starwood to head up our global sales strategy team, and he's filling out his own team. I also brought over Simon Scoot, who was with our InterContinental Hotels & Resorts global brand team, to lead our renewed focus on luxury and lifestyle sales. And we created a new B2B marketing and loyalty team, among other organizational changes in Brian King's sales operations group. B2B sales are very important to IHG, and it's exciting to see the company really collectively rally behind the drive toward a stronger focus on B2B opportunities.

BTN: Tell me how the appointments you mentioned relate to the white spaces IHG has.

DeCross: IHG today does not have a global small and midsize enterprise program. That's something that Jonathan Kaplan's team is working on right now. We have some programs in place already like our small meeting solutions team and business rewards that reward travel bookers, but you'll see us putting more resources into this area. We did not have a broader position on the sales side within the luxury and lifestyle segment, either. By bringing Simon over and by putting people on the West Coast, the East Coast, London and in regional areas around the world, we really filled that out, as well. Finally, the B2B marketing piece is crucial. Having a great B2B marketing and sales organization is essentially like having 10,0000 sales reps all saying the same thing with the latest collateral with the latest propositions, etc.

BTN: What will your B2B team be doing around loyalty?

DeCross: We will absolutely be working with the corporate travel teams to identify opportunities for how we can use IHG Rewards Club to drive compliance to their programs. With the B2B marketing team, we'll have the infrastructure to help make those types of activities actually hit the road map and then be delivered upon over the next few quarters. We also will be working very closely with our loyalty team to make sure that the B2B voice is brought in to heavily influence their activities. There's a lot of opportunity and headroom to improve our penetration within this segment. I also firmly believe that having a strong presence of IHG Rewards Club within a corporate travel program is a very healthy thing for the manager to really help drive compliance. Employees who are rewarded for their business stays are much more likely to engage and drive preference in their travel program.

BTN: What can the hotel industry learn from the airline industry?

DeCross: It's not really learning from the airline industry so much as overcoming some of the structural differences between us. One of those elements is really having access to better account-level marketshare data. Unfortunately, we don't have a Prism equivalent like the airlines do, and that is an opportunity for us as a supplier, as well as our customers. Another opportunity is really involving how we conduct corporate transient RFPs. The amount of human capital spent on the hotel RFP cycle on all sides is truly staggering. One thing we can all agree on is that everyone, whether it be the supplier, whether it be the customer, whether it be the agency, drives far more value to the respective organizations [if they're not] doing this routine six to eight months of the year. It's not that airlines have the silver bullet here, either, but I haven't met a corporate travel manager yet who said they preferred the hotel methodology. While IHG has really standardized and automated the RFP process and we've leveraged proprietary [revenue management] systems and key tools and programs to help our hotels ensure we can get the best rates possible for our customers—and we have been increasingly moving towards dynamic rates and strategic pricing programs and longer-term deals—there's so much more opportunity ahead here to improve.