Hotel Sales Funnel: How to Address 6 Common Pain Points with a POS System

The purpose of a hotel sales funnel is to attract new leads and convert them into guests. If your hotel sales funnel does not drive more bookings to your property, you will lose revenue which puts your business at risk of failing.

We will identify 6 critical issues that cause your hotel sales funnel to fail and provide you with solutions to resolve those issues.

What is a Hotel Sales Funnel?

A hotel sales funnel is a marketing strategy that serves to attract new leads and convert them into customers. It explores the marketplace to identify prospective guests and engages with them to convert them into actual bookers.

6 Hotel Sales Funnel Pain Points: How to Solve Them With an Integrated Point-Of-Sale System

1. You are lacking critical data

You have tried every sales strategy in the book, but you are still struggling to secure those bookings. The first step is to identify the problems within your hotel sales funnel. That means looking at the data. The insight you gain from gathering data can help you improve your marketing strategy and identify the areas you want to fix.

Fortunately, the TallOrder Point of Sale (POS) system allows hoteliers to track sales data, including sales by product, sales by staff member, and sales by location. It also enables hoteliers to track customer data, such as their purchase history and preferences. This information can be used to make informed business decisions and to provide personalised customer experiences.

TallOrder’s integration with the RoomRaccoon hotel management system, also provides hoteliers access to a powerful suite of advanced features, such as the Google Analytics feature, that can assist you with data capturing.

The Google Analytics feature can tell you how much traffic your website booking engine receives, how many clicks your landing page receives, how much time people spend on various pages, and where they exited. Depending on the goals you have set up, it can also tell you your opt-in conversion rate and sales rate.

2. You’re not getting enough traffic

80% of the time, your hotel sales funnel is not working because you need to bring in more traffic. If you aren’t gaining enough traffic, you won’t have enough (or any) bookings.

Use a channel manager to boost your traffic

Using RoomRaccoon’s hotel channel manager can boost your traffic immensely because it allows you to promote your rooms across 200+ booking channels, including Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), Global Distribution Systems (GDS), and meta-search engines at the same time. This will increase your global visibility and brand recognition.

The channel manager will also automatically update your availability when a booking is made and when you make bulk changes to your listings.

Optimise your website

Optimising your website will also help you to increase your traffic. You need to make it attractive and usable for users (on any device) to find the information they need to complete a reservation. The website must load quickly to avoid mid-booking abandonment, and you must also implement search engine optimisation (SEO) to make your website more visible.

Tailor your content for your targeted audience

Tailor your content and packages to match the characteristics and preferences of your guests because 91% of people are more likely to choose brands who recognise, remember, and provide them with relevant offers, personalisation, and recommendations.

If you need data to create this personalised content, TallOrder POS has your back. It gives you insights into your guests’ spending habits by tracking their purchase history and preferences. Once you have accumulated all the data you need, you can customise your website using the RoomRaccoon Website Builder. A fully visual page builder with beautiful, functional pre-built templates to give visitors even more reason to stay at your property.

Offer incentives to your guests

Loyalty programmes entice customers to return to your establishment, therefore increasing sales. A powerful point of sale solution can be set up to receive currency or points-based rewards, allowing them to build and redeem when necessary. Loyalty tiers can also be set up.

Robust booking software also allows hotels to reward their frequent guests with perks and discounts. These programs can be customised to meet the specific needs of each hotel and provide detailed reporting and analytics to help hoteliers measure the success of their loyalty programs.

3. You don’t know your customers

Your sales process will be prolonged without completely understanding your customers. Concentrating on your guests’ needs and fully understanding their pain points makes the difference between a sales process that closes deals frequently versus a sales process that doesn’t. Guests are expecting more personalised and custom-tailored experiences every day.

A powerful POS system can also help you build a better relationship with your guests because it can store and manage guest data, including preferences and contact information. This can be used to create personalised guest experiences and offer targeted promotions and loyalty programs.

A robust booking software allows guests to select their purpose of stay as corporate, business, or leisure. This will enable you to create targeted pricing strategies, personalised guest experiences, and marketing messaging based on your guest persona.

4. Wasting time on repetitive tasks

Nothing will slow down your sales cycle like spending time on routine, repetitive tasks. Automate your upselling duties with RaccoonUpsell. Your hotel staff won’t ever have to spend time upselling to guests ever again. Combine the convenience of online check-in and RaccoonUpsell and increase your average daily rate (ADR) by 15% on average. All you have to do is set it up, sit back, and watch your revenue grow.

You can also automate your front desk administration and control your back office operations with a powerful PMS and save up to four hours of your valuable time. You can access all the tools you need to cut costs, optimise your automated processes at your fingertips, from online check-in and real-time reports to billing and payments.

Streamline your payment process with a POS machine

A POS machine can fast-track transaction times. It is designed to be fast and efficient. It also supports multiple payment methods, including credit cards, mobile payments, and cash, so customers have more options to pay quickly and easily.

Manage your inventory

Manage your inventory with the myStock Inventory Management feature that lets you easily track inventory levels, set up automatic reorder points, receive alerts when stock levels are low, and carry out remote stock takes. This feature helps you avoid stockouts, reduce waste, and ensures that you always have your customers’ desired products.

5. Lack of marketing

60% of businesses in the hospitality industry do not make it past the first year, and 80% go under in five years, which is 10% above the normal business failure rate. There are a number of reasons for this, including having a lack of capital to invest in marketing.

Marketing does not have to cost you an arm and a leg. You can easily plug into 200+ powerful sales channels and start selling your rooms with zero added commission with one of the fastest channel managers in the world.

6. You have a flawed payment process

According to an article by Hospitality Technology, 45% of travellers report challenges paying at hotels, with a third unable to use their preferred payment method. Outdated payment approaches are challenging the hospitality industry’s efforts to deliver an excellent guest experience, leading to negative guest reviews.

With a powerful POS system, properties can simplify the billing and payment process because the system is designed to be fast and efficient, so it can help reduce transaction times. The system can also be integrated with multiple payment methods, including credit cards, mobile payments, and cash, so customers have more options to pay quickly and easily. This seamless integration allows for one bill to be paid by the guest at checkout.

When you integrate TallOder’s POS with RoomRaccoon’s HMS, you can have access to a wide variety of online payment providers, including:

• Peach Payments
• PayGate

Final thoughts

A functional hotel sales funnel can boost your bookings and increase your revenue. That’s why it is important for you to ensure that yours operates optimally. Integrate RoomRaccoon’s hotel management system with TallOrder POS and get the tools that you need to increase your traffic and convert the lookers into bookers and, ultimately, to returning guests.

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