The Weekly Manager Meeting

The Local Sales and Marketing Managers job in the weekly manager meeting is to update the team on three things:

1) Discounts spent the prior week generating new and repeat business vs weekly budget

These numbers can be found on the System Financial. If you aren't sure where to get this or your budget, just ask.

2) Parties coming up for the week
Outline the schedule, food orders, party details etc. Confirm confirmation with the Kitchen is good and that staffing levels are appropriate.

3) The top 2 or 3 sales initiatives / priorities for the week

Communicate to your managers the top things you are working on to identify and sell new business

Point of Sale Rules and Regs

We want to limit the number of things promoted in the pub so we can concentrate our message giving events and promotions a better chance of being seen in the pub.  The thinking is customers need to see something multiple times before it registers.

If we are promoting 6 events or promotions people will switch off 'the noise' and ignore the message. As a result, we have two simple rules:

Rule 1: Max of 3 promotions/events +  all the sports promotion

Rule 2:  Table tents: the same on every table using 2 of the three events you are focusing on at the time.

We want table tents to be event driven as people spend more time and attention with these than most other pieces of point of sale in the pub.

Acceptable Example:

Posters:
Pub Quiz, Private Events, Weekend Bands posters + 6 Nations posters and EPL schedules

Table Tents:
Pub Quiz, Weekend Bands

How to Work with Hotel Catering / Sales Managers

Catering / Sales Managers at hotels work with large groups that have booked rooms inside the hotels. They make sure that their meetings, events and catering are taken care of. That means, they try to sell them as much food and beverage while they are in the hotel as they can.

These groups are everything from small 20 person single day meetings to 500 people from a company staying multiple days.

Inevitably, these groups want to get out of the hotel after their day of work and experience the city. Becasue they work closely with these catering and sales managers they will ask them for recommendations on where to go.

How to Get Referrals
So, these managers are great sources of referrals for us; it's something that we have seen work over and over again in many markets. Like all other forms of referrals and sales, they need to know you and trust you so relationship building is very important.

Ideally, you meet these people, invite them into the pub and you talk to them about what we do for events and explain to them our capabilities.  Always talk in terms of what we have done for past clients to build credibility (name dropping is good).

Sales = Asking Great Questions

You should also ask them these questions:

- Do you work with places like ours? What works best? How often do you work with places like ours?
- What do you think we would be good for for your customers?  How could you use a place like ours?
- How can we help you?

Here are some other ideas:

- Setup a happy hour for them and their staff

- Monthly email communication letting them know about recent parties you have done (to build credibility) with an offer to help them on any events they might be looking at outside the hotel

- Seeing them on a regular basis when you do hotel visits

In general, keep these people top of mind when you are thinking about the benefits and the results from your hotel program.