is important to sales, as it is something that the meeting planners and corporate negotiators also look at these days.

There are three factors that make the sales function at hotels both different from other functions and also a very interesting analytical problem

now have access to forward-looking demand data, which can help them to benchmark their production against the performance of the market.

Sales negotiations can be quite time consuming. Clients value responsiveness

sales teams can offer certain incentives to the groups to book, including free room upgrades for VIPS or free rooms for organizers, food and beverage packages, amenities- basically any of the products or services offered at the hotel can be included to make the hotel's or casino's offering look more attractive.

is all about negotiations

requesting a lot of space with relatively few rooms that might not be as valuable to the hotel, because they lose the opportunity to use the meeting space to fill the hotel rooms.

would be useful for mining characteristics of groups in the same way it can be used for evaluating customers.

is contributing to this trend, but there are certainly complications to this strategy due to the organization of the industry, particularly on the hotels side

most sales teams look at the ratio of space to guest rooms booked and try to establish a reasonable balance.

require a slightly different application of analytics. Rather than providing a single best answer, analytics to support negotiations require ranges, best and worst case scenarios, and supporting details.

an optimization for the sales function is probably best associated with the revenue management system. Sales should be able to enter the details of the group, the number of rooms, dates, rates, and ancillary revenue.

The numbers need to be presented in such a way that they are flexible enough to account for all the possible permutations of terms and conditions, and also allow for a bit of _____ based on what the salesperson knows about the client and the function.

There's an old saying in sales that each piece of business is about "rates, dates, and space. An organization's ability to measure and manipulate these three factors determines whether the business will be profitable for the property or not.

how many rooms does the group want to book? Is there sufficient capacity? What is the group's budget? Will they be displacing any transient business or are they filling rooms when the hotel would otherwise be empty?

Sales always keep an eye on forecasts. Since they are incentivized to produce a certain amount of demand, sales keeps careful track of the forecast of business they expect to bring in.

Can be used to predict the materialization of a group (how many rooms will actually book versus the contracted amount), which will improve planning at the property level.