Conference Team Incentives & Office Practice

The Conference Office. So many different ways of working, but which is the best?  Depending on the type of property you are working in, this office has many guises; Event Management, Reactive Phone Sales, Wedding Planner, Social Function Managers, Proactive Conference & Groups Manager, the list goes on and on...  We come across many different ways of dividing responsibility between these different roles.  Do your reactive sales team do show rounds, or is that left to Sales?  Are the reactive team there just to take the calls and get the contract signed before handing over to the event manager who is responsible for up selling of technology and other extras? Does the Director of Event Management work with the Director of Revenue to construct a coherent battle plan for groups &  meetings with bedrooms?  Are you fighting with the rooms division to get bedrooms for a specific function?  Are weddings shared amongst the team, or are they looked after by a double act?  One person to proactively sell this segment, and another to look after the parade of “Bridezillas”  that arrive in the hotel, and have to have their every whim catered for from 6 months out to the morning after the night before?  Time consuming for a relatively small amount of revenue – depending on the client of course!  But a small price to pay for filling your space every Friday, Saturday and Sunday with weddings!

Once you have got your department sorted, and working like a well oiled machine, the biggest question is – How do we incentivise all of these staff in such different roles? For those hotels that have a significant amount of space, which drives some business, but is not the major focus of the hotel (rooms nearly always being the focus!)  putting these incentives in place can be a very difficult  sell to the GM, and the justification can take a lot of time to be proven. Especially as some of these measures will take at least 3 months to realise their potential, which is the same with most sales functions of the hotels.

We looked at the importance of turndowns in a previous blog post (click HERE for the link), and from our perspective one of the most important factors in getting these incentives set up is to make sure your own data is up to scratch, and as accurate as it can be. After all, would you want to be  judged on your own performance with bad data?  Putting in place a good incentive which relies on accurate data  can also provide a welcome boost to the poor data integrity in your systems as well  - “I am being measured on the success of upselling this meeting – If I don’t add the revenue correctly under the correct code, it won’t count in my revenue total”. One of the main goals here at The Conference Bench is to automate the upload of data from hotels to the system, but data integrity within systems at times is so poor, hotels will not even consider it, leaving the finance team to provide the high integrity data that is required to take part.    We are still constantly surprised that Conference & Banqueting reporting still lags so far behind the exact science of bedrooms reporting.

So what can be measured once you have all of your data systems in place, and  you are recording your Conference Office’s every £ of revenue and the activity that surrounds it?

Conversion rates – one for direct bookings and one for agency bookings? Are you even tracking the call volume that is coming in to your office for MICE business?

Revenue Targets– are these, monthly, quarterly, annually, or all of the above?  Do you have an up selling target? Are group rooms included in the target?

Customer Satisfaction – Test calls?  Are your reactive team asking the right questions to capture the vital information needed to convert bookings? Click here for one of our favourites – BDRC's Venue Verdict

So we have some of the measures above – we then come the question of how you reward success in these measures?  - is it with vouchers? Cash bonuses?  Extra rooms provided within chain hotels portfolio of hotels?

This is going to sound obvious, but one of the key things to understand when deciding this is – What will our staff respond to? What will motivate them to try and really beat their targets for the above measures? Will they be happy just to reach the target, or will their bonus be increased for every 10% that they achieve over their target?

There are a few measures above – how do YOU do it on property? Are you putting this in place for your teams at the moment?  What difficulties are you having getting it setup?  Does your GM believe it will help drive the business forward? What incentives do you use for your Conference Staff? Comment below!  Don’t forget, you can comment anonymously if needs be...