Wanted – A Passionate Hospitality Salesperson. 

Where has the passion of the salesperson gone? Or, was it ever there in the first place? Is glib-talking a pre-requisite of a salesperson? Does an MBA warrant a quality salesperson’s potential? And does experience suggest supremacy in the art of selling?

‘Madam, kindly grant me a couple of days to assess your requirement vis-à-vis other booking options we have – accordingly allow me to revert if we can permit your conference at our hotel,’ said the Sales Head of a 5-star resort hotel, glibly. While the terminology sounded very impeccable, there was no warmth or caring for the client’s needs in this script. Also, it stank of a shade of arrogance. This choice of words was sufficient to convince the ‘Key Decision Maker’ following up on a possible closure for a 250 room nights sales conference, that this was not the place for her requirement.

In a rare moment of candour, this senior corporate professional who books 1000+ room nights (international + domestic) annually for her company, confessed that she is still looking for a salesperson who cares for the client with a passion only superseded by that of a mother bear for her whelps! Wanted – A Passionate Hospitality Salesperson!

A truly wanted passionate hospitality salesperson brims with passion, has a caring heart, an unselfish attitude, and a desire for the client’s needs. When the customers feel this, they are more likely to be motivated to reciprocate and give the order to this salesperson. Helping customers succeed or get what they want is not being philanthropic. It is a powerful means of achieving one’s sales budget. That’s the paradox. The more important it is that one makes the numbers, the more important it is to stop concentrating on one’s budgeted targets, and start concentrating on the customer’s needs.

Here are some typical situations I notice happening far too frequently over the past few years.

• The client calls the salesperson to elicit rates and details and is told the salesperson is in a meeting, sales review, or budget review.
• The salesperson cuts the client’s call and sends a pre-set or automated message… then does not call back.
• The client does not get a revert from the salesperson, even though it was promised in a specified time.
• No apology is forthcoming for the delay in revert, nor any intimation from the salesperson as to when they will now revert.
• The client is connected to the Sales Head, who diverts the query to a team member, then disconnects from the conversation thread, rationalising that their underling is now handling it.

It would be an interesting exercise to audit the client’s impression of the salesperson handling the client’s account. Startling revelations may tumble out and help hotel leaders re-engineer their sales orientation. When we take guest feedback for departments and people in our hotel, why should we not do the same for our corporate and MICE clients in their dealings with our salespeople? This way, we would identify the truly wanted and Passionate Hospitality Salespersons from amongst the team.

So, where has the passion of the salesperson gone? Or, was it ever there in the first place? Is glib-talking a pre-requisite of a salesperson? Does an MBA warrant a quality salesperson’s potential? And does experience suggest supremacy in the art of selling?

‘Skills are cheap, Passion is priceless,’ says Gennady Vaynerchuk, a successful Belarusian-American entrepreneur.

This brings me to the Root Cause Analysis as to why a Passionate Hospitality Salesperson is a rarity and is so wanted! After coaching sales teams and conducting numerous sales seminars over the past decade, my understanding of this issue is far greater than when I was a General Manager with sales teams reporting to me. I have also been fortunate to meet some passionate salespersons during this time, albeit far less in numbers than I would have expected.

I enumerate below, the possible reasons for this ‘lack of passion.’

1. Has the salesperson entered the profession by intent or by default? Most salespersons enter the selling space without initially planning to do so. While this is not inherently wrong, and also happens with other disciplines, it limits potential performance vastly. In our industry, graduates who take up Food Production (Kitchen), Front Office, F&B, Spa, and even Housekeeping, normally opt for these verticals knowing what these departments entail. Not so in Sales, as they normally do not get industrial experience in this line.
2. No takers for ‘sweat & toil’ field jobs. For hospitality sales, where personal connect will remain the ‘sine qua non’ for successful client relationships, one nowadays observes the hotel salesperson preferring to connect online from the office, rather than trudging over to the client’s office… There are enough excuses not to meet personally, what with alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and now omicron!

Of course, all this may sound Greek to Eureka Forbes (market leaders in water purifiers and vacuum cleaners), who has been a pioneer and trendsetter in direct sales in India and is amongst the larger direct-selling companies in the world. The company has gradually extended its sales efforts online, but it has not given up on its ‘tried & tested’ direct selling model. So now they connect with potential customers online, get a prior appointment, and then visit their homes. But all this is hard work and not for the faint-hearted.

3. No allure in Sales Jobs. Pre-Covid, my business partner hosted a sales seminar series with three different management institutes. The students were to graduate with an MBA in Sales and Marketing. He asked the participants which vertical they were interested in opting for, now that they were almost ready to graduate. The majority raised their hands for Marketing, then Advertising, then Brand Management, then Product Management, then P.R. & Marcom. Finally, only 3-5% raised their hands for a career in sales!
4. India has yet to offer a concerted MBA graduate program for Sales. The closest it comes to it, is an MBA in Sales & Marketing. While we know that these are two distinct topics, the institutions are yet to act on this and create separate streams. The students are more attracted to Marketing, even as a moth to a star… (remember the English poet Percy Shelley,who saw the moth’s desire for the light of the stars as a symbol of our heart’s desire for something distant, maybe even transcendent?)
5. Recruitment considers Degrees, Experience, and Personality. I have interacted with extremely proficient salespersons having moderate education and linguistic skills, but who are super-stars in their organisation. H.R. departments know that these unpolished jewels are star performers. Yet, I find that organisations still recruit for skill over will. In spite of experiencing great sales performers who do not necessarily have the H.R. job specifications, this does not change the mindset of the recruiter, and the malaise continues – thereby building a plethora of nonpassionate salespersons in the field. Would it not make sense to brush and polish the passionate salesperson, instead of concentrating on the stylish, yet ineffective one?
6. A high churn in Sales. This department suffers from one of the highest employee turnovers. Adequate options, burgeoning competition, the lure of better salaries, a demanding work landscape, a perceived lack of development, and an escape from performance review (especially for salespeople who have been promising business thus far eluding them as the ‘will-o’-the-wisp.’) are reasons enough for this high churn.
7. Are we at fault in this, as leaders?
   • How often have salespeople been told that to be considered good at their job, they need to have the skill set to sell ice to an Eskimo, or a comb to a bald man? Salespeople believe that they need to be slick talkers, and be able to talk a dime a dozen to impress their clients. Sadly, both these beliefs are incongruities, and they instead end up antagonizing the client. This philosophy propagated by leaders stuck in a time-warp when demand was greater than supply, is one of the principal reasons why clients avoid salespeople.
   • As an organisation, do we develop our sales team on a continuous basis? Most salespersons find themselves intermittently developed, with ‘training’ conceived in organisations, more as a KRA rather than an ethos. How can a training workshop, for example, be effective if given once in 3-4 years only? Most sales-people we ask, tell us that this is the average gap since the last time they attended a sales-training intervention.
   • What accountability do we proportion to the salesperson for the development we have initiated for them? Do we review their learnings, to ensure an adequate ROI on their development cost?
   • Do monetary incentives always work? In the months when sales budgets are steep, the mediocre salesperson does not seriously attempt to achieve it, as he/she knows that incentives cannot be achieved. In lean months they work to achieve their incentives, as budgets are lower. For the nonpassionate salesperson, if they get incentives in half the number of months in a year, with a marginal effort, they are gratified.

We need to ask ourselves tough questions which may help us understand why our sales teams are not passionate and ‘cutting the mustard,’ as desired by the organisation. Can we better motivate them and achieve higher retention of our sales teams? Can we feed their passion for the customer rather than only talk of sales figures they need to attain? Can we also lead from the front and keep the customer ahead?

Achieving organisational revenues by selling to the customer resembles the ‘chicken and egg’ story – a metaphorical adjective for a causality dilemma… Which one comes first?

This article has appeared in ET HOSPITALITY WORLD.COM December 2021