Sector: Hospitality

Convention Sales includes selling seminars, meetings, events, incentive programs and conferences. It is not about selling rooms in the first place, but selling the conference section of the hotel. In addition, capabilities in selling rooms and event programs are essential. in the convention sales training courses cover the full scope of capabilities needed for selling in the conference world.

Designing attractive conference packages, conference room rates and conference amenity packages is often a matter of competitive intelligence. Understanding the needs of customers, tailoring best and transparent offers and closing the sale, however, should be the key competence of the convention sales agents.

Convention Clients Require Special Attention

Customers in convention sales are business clients: Either agencies, third party service providers like trainers or consultants or the company directly. Their decision making process is much different from individual guests. Hence, having agents catering to both convention customers and individual customers is not a good choice – although it can not be avoided in smaller hotels.

Convention sales agents should be highly educated in their business. Certainly, good locations and good offers partly are selling by themselves. But to ensure a fully booked conferencing section the agent to always key to success.

In our convention sales training we focus on clients’ needs and their decision making process, on the necessity to have a streamlined offer process as well as the need for and the successful arrangement of the personal interaction with selected clients.

Convention Selling

Convention Sales Training Course Outline

The following aspects are part of our inhouse convention sales training:

Your Conferencing Offer and the Convention Client

  1. Fully understand what you offer: From conferencing rooms, technique, conferencing packages, convention amenities, room arrangement, additional event-offers and key selling points for individuals
  2. Understand the decision making processes of different types of convention customers
  3. Know and understand your competition
  4. Elaboration of unique sales advantages

Exercising the Convention Sales Process

  1. Overview of the sales process and its pain points
  2. Understanding your client’s needs
  3. Understand your chances to surpass client’s expectations
  4. Quoting: Many options vs streamlined quotes
  5. Follow-Up: Best ways to stay in the loop and exercise soft pressure

Site Visits

  1. When to push for a site visit
  2. The ideal preparation: Understand the visitor
  3. Surprise and advertise naturally during the visit

For reservation sales training, visit our respective course outline here.

Trainings Structured to Client’s Needs

Our convention sales trainings are designed to run for at least one day. To get the best out of it, two days are best. Of course, as your convention sales team may not be available in full at one occasion, the training may have to spread over more days.

Other options include a mix of training and coaching. The latter takes place on site during working hours, accompanying the convention sales team during the working day. Coaching alone can not replace trainings the basics of convention sales in a suitable training environment.

To make the most out of your training investment, we suggest a longer period with initial trainings in the beginning, some time to gather experience with the new insights, tools and procedures, and trainings and coachings thereafter, to discuss and further finetune the acquired skills.

Contact us to discuss the best convention sales training program for your needs and to get a quote:
Felix Küsell | Tel.: +49 (0)30 4005 490 | request@globis-consulting.com