← Insights · Lessons in Judgment

Why I stopped selling the hotel 7 days a week

It’s Saturday morning at the Sheraton Houston West, and there’s a pink Cadillac parked out front.

It belongs to my Saturday client. She runs meetings selling beauty products to other women, and holding them at a hotel makes her look the part. The car does the rest.

For us, it’s room hire and a little bit of food.

Tomorrow, a small church congregation will meet in the same room. Room hire only. During the week, we’ve got long training conferences.

I’m the sales manager, and I can sell this hotel 7 days a week.

No, really, 7 days a week. On paper, pretty incredible, right?

I come in on Saturdays and Sundays to see how it’s going. There’s setup, cleanup and staff on hand. The team can handle it. Everything is running smoothly. But there’s a lot of work behind these bookings for relatively little return.

We’re mostly a corporate hotel, but sports groups love to stay with us at weekends: children, parents and coaches. I can sell 30 rooms’ worth of them on a tournament weekend.

Our no-outside-food rule is hard on them. So we bend it. We set up rounds of 10 in the banquet room, let them order their own pizzas, put a couple of big bins in the corners and ask them to clean up after themselves. I even print out a little sign for the door, so it feels like their special room.

Now put the 2 uses of the space beside each other.

A sports group can bring 30 rooms at US$129 a night, with the banquet room included for informal pizza parties. The beauty meeting and church bring in less than US$2,000 combined over the 2 days, with more work involved in servicing the meeting space.

That wasn’t a complete profit calculation. But it was enough to make me question why I was protecting those smaller bookings. The meeting room could help us win room business, and I needed to consider its value across the hotel.

We need the space. And we need our sanity back.

So I increase the prices for those weekend bookings. The clients decide it no longer works for their budgets and move on. My team is much happier, and we can focus on the more valuable business.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

A full calendar looks great on a sales report. But every booking runs through the whole building. Someone sets up, someone covers the shift and someone cleans up for the next thing. Choosing one use of the space can mean another won’t fit.

The person selling it doesn’t always see that unless they go and look.

I had to look beyond the booking I’d won and consider what it asked of everyone else. What did it contribute? What did it consume? And what other business could we realistically use that space to support?

Something you can try this week

Pick one piece of recurring business and follow it through the building. Ask the people who deliver it what it really takes. Then ask what you’d sell in its place if it disappeared.

If there’s no clear answer to that second question, test the alternative before giving up reliable business.

You might change the price, simplify the offer or move it to a different day. You might decide it still earns its place. Give yourself enough evidence to make that call.