If you are looking to launch an in-house training initiative within the topic areas of reservations, front desk sales, hospitality/service, or revenue management, an on-premise training program from KTN will ensure that your staff has the tools they need to maximize sales and service success.  All of the program themes below can be customized for your hotel/company’s individualized environment, based on your inventory of rooms, market segments served, and comp-set positioning. 

All programs include a pre-training consultative meeting, and a post-training follow-up report that includes personalized feedback and participant evaluations.

Here is a list of program topics:

• Revenue Optimization Strategies for Today's Front Desk Salesperson

• Creating Ordinary Excellence, DAILY! Re-Humanizing Guests And Delivering Excellence In Ordinary Ways Throughout The Customer Circle Of Life

• So You Really Like Working With People?  Five Principles For Finding Personal Fulfillment In Service Excellence. 

• Cooking Up New Sales! A Cookbook Of Techniques For Making New Sales With Ingredients We Already Have In Our Kitchen

• Hey, We're You're Customers (and Co-Workers) and We Don't Want To Talk To You Anymore. Capturing Your Prospects And Servicing Both Internal And External Customers Via E-Mail

• Reservations  Sails Training.

Revenue Optimization Strategies for Today's Front Desk Salesperson

This program first provides a historical perspective on how the role of the front desk associate has emerged over the years along with the enabling technologies such as PMS, CRS, and the Internet that has forever changed the job description. Participants come to understand their vital role in ensuring their hotel's profit optimization. While a property certainly needs marketing and revenue management professionals for pricing, market strategy and distribution, it's the front desk salespersons who play a tactical role in selling the right rate to the right guest through the right channel and maintining the rules/regulations that management has established for each rate category, segment and channel.

Today's front desk staff must not only help sell the rooms to walk-ins and those who call direct, but must enforce (and reinforce!) the restrictions (or "fences") and maintain them firmly without alienating the guest. This program presents practical suggestions, tactics, and sample dialogue that your front desk staff can use everyday to help maximize revenue and profitability such as:

• Maintaining rate "Fences" during reservations inquiries and reconfirms.

• Eliminating "slippage" from guests who re-negotiate during registration.

• Mastering "Channel Conversion" techniques in order to best-utilize third party marketing channels (including both electronic and traditional channels).

• Upselling effectively at all points of contact, including the initial inquiry and during registration.

• Capturing more walk-in business.

• Securing "move-overs" from other hotels in the area.

• Fielding calls from "rate double-checkers".

• Capitalizing on "after-hours" leads for corporate/group sales, including walk-ins and telephone inquiries.

• Traffic flow managment to create positive first impressions

NOTE: The content of this program is customized to ensure that it is relevant and applicable for each hotel client's brand, property type, and management strategies regarding pricing and distribution.

Scheduling Options: Half Day

Creating Ordinary Excellence, DAILY! Re-Humanizing Guests And Delivering Excellence In Ordinary Ways Throughout The Customer Circle Of Life

This session first explores how in the last 15 years the hotel industry training programs have traditionally focused on creating "legendary", "wow", or "outrageous" service experiences, while most surveys of travelers say that customer service continues to erode. While it is still important to go above and beyond when guests encounter extraordinary challenges, what most guests really want is simply what was originally promised and expected.

Participants then learn about the concepts of Re-Humanizing Our Guests and having Situational Sensitivity regarding the circumstances, situations and quandaries that guest find themselves in while staying with us. Presented next are six stages of "The Customer Circle Of Life" including:

• Initial inquiries and booking process.

• Updates and questions after booking, but prior to arrival.

• Arrival at the reception desk and the registration process.

• Getting settled-in to the accommodation. (In the hours after arrival)

• Life as an in-house guest.

• Pack-up, check-out, and starting the journey home.

The group then works in teams to explore how they can assist various prototypial "guests" (assigned by the trainer) as they journey through the examples of circumstances, situations, and quandaries encountered during each phase of "life".

Along the way, participants not only learn to become more sensitive to special needs, but also to use creative thinking in unusual situations to create the personalized, customized, guest experiences that always result in repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising.

Scheduling Options: Half Day

So You Really Like Working With People??? Five Principles For Finding Personal Fulfillment On The Road To Service Excellence

While most hospitality and guest service training focuses on the "how to" component of customer service excellence, such as the interpersonal communications techniques, phone etiquette, and service recovery tactics, little is said about the "What's In It For Me?" from our staff's perspective. This session gives you training tools to help your operations team remember how fun this business can be, despite its numerous challenges, and how much easier our workdays become when we get On The Road to service excellence.

• The important position of "hospitality" on "The Tricycle of Guest Service".

• Understanding that hospitality is more than a communications technique.

• Bringing out the best in others to bring out the best in ourselves.

• Spend your day helping "real people" and you'll be surprised at who you'll meet!

• Building your "Power of Release" to shield yourself from the negativity of others.

• Remembering that the road to service excellence is a joy ride!

Scheduling Options: 60 Minutes to Three Hours

Cooking Up New Sales! A Cookbook Of Techniques For Making New Sales With Ingredients We Already Have In Our Kitchen!

Top salespeople know that they can never get enough training on "sales basics," so make sure your company gets on the road to sales excellence by participating in this fun yet effective training program developed by KTN President Doug Kennedy, who has been writing and delivering sales training for more than 17years. Cooking Up New Sales is an upbeat, fun alternative to "old-hat" sales basics presentations. While still covering the fundamental building blocks of success in all lodging industry sales environments, Cooking Up New Sales! provides alternative sales terminology that is surprisingly well-retained and useful in handling today’s millennium-era callers.

• Discovering your "recipe" for success.   (Know your product and know your customer.)

• Double-checking your list of ingredients, and going shopping if you have to.  (Always strive for a higher level of achievement.)

• Having fun while you sweat it out in the kitchen!

• Finding out what the people you are cooking for like to eat.  (Listen and discover what they need to know to buy.)  

• Using the proper utensils for the cooking task at hand.  (Adjust the sales strategy according to the sales call at hand.)

• Spicing up the meal according to individual tastes.  (Personalized, benefit selling techniques.)

• Adjusting the menu according to all dietary needs.  (Overcome objections.)

• Pacing the meal; eating slowly is better for everyone.  (Control the sales cycle.)

• Serving-up a sweet tasking desert.  (Providing more than was expected or required.)

• Presenting the check with a smile.  (Closing the sale benefits everyone.)

Scheduling Options 60 Minutes to Three Hours

Hey, We're You're Customers (and Co-Workers) and We Don't Want To Talk To You Anymore. Capturing Your Prospects And Servicing Both Internal And External Customers Via E-Mail

No so long ago, returning from a long meeting or rare day-off would mean coming back to a stack of pink telephone message pad slips. Then came the age of voicemail, and the pink slips were replaced by flashing light indicator on the phone. Now the dozens of daily voicemails have dwindled to a few, and so quickly we find ourselves struggling with 50 - 75 - or even 100+ e-mails daily. This session will help you train your sales, guest contact, and operations/management staff to maximize your organization's efficiency and make e-mail their friend.

This session first differentiates between "external" e-mails, such as those from our clients, prospects, and vendors, and "internal" e-mails, from our co-workers and colleagues. Then, specific training tips are provided for selling and servicing our internal and external customers via e-mail such as:

• Why is training on e-mail so essential?

• When and how should we sell and service our customers via e-mail?

• Adjusting your e-mail communications style to "mirror and match" the customer.

• Choosing your words carefully and making sure key points are not missed.

• Organizing your staff to ensure a quick response time.

• Strategies for providing for personalized, customized customer contact experiences via e-mail.

• Using safe, low-risk cyber-humor to humanizing this cold hard medium.

• Being specific on what is promised and precise in the terms.

• Incorporating age-old sales and service fundamentals into your written communications.

• Knowing when not to use e-mail.

• Making internal e-mail work: focusing on efficiency and avoiding e-mail overload.

During this session Douglas will also provide both good and bad "real world" examples of key points, including his own anonymous e-mail inquires to the participating group. Depending on the group size and program length, this program includes an interactive component during which participants practice composing sales-related e-mails using the new techniques.
Scheduling Options: 60 Minutes to One Half Day

Reservations SAILS Training

This highly interactive workshop provides reservations sales agents with the training they really need to succeed in today’s world of ultra-informed, and often misinformed callers who have already seen the thumbnail pic’s, taken the virtual tour, and read reviews on TripAdvisor or ZoomandGo.Com, but still want to talk to a live human being.  Everyone knows that the types of calls agents field these days from over-scheduled, multi-tasking callers bear little resemblance to the those from even just a few years back, but until now hotel reservations training has been stuck in the 90’s.  Finally, through his new company KTN, Doug Kennedy has created this fun, participatory workshop that gives participants the contemporary world of reservations sales, incorporating material from his experience on the current lodging industry lecture circuit, the consulting services he provides for top-tier lodging companies, and of course the monthly column he’s been writing for www.hotelmotel.com for five years now.  

The program first explores five principles for reservations SAILS.  However, as opposed to out-dated linear models based on “5-steps to the close” process and scripted sales pitches such as “quote for benefits, two rates, and then close,” this program recognizes that not every “step” or “tool” applies for every caller and that no one in enjoys talking to a robot.  Instead of trying to apply an outdated sales process that is ineffective if not annoying, agents learn how to quickly identify at the start of the call where the caller is at in his or her quest for the details they need to complete their emotionally-based travel buying decision, and then to utilize only those tactics need to convert each individualized reservations inquiry into a booking.   Here is an overview of the information provided in this full-day workshop:

Reservations SAILS:

S ituational sensitivity
A lluring descriptions
I nvestigative selling approach
L isten interactively
S ecure the reservation

This Program Also Covers:

• Sales tips for handling today's multi-tasking callers.

• "Downselling" in advance of peak demand; Upselling during shoulder/ off periods.

• Mastering "Channel Conversion" techniques where appropriate.

• Closing the sale helps all parties involved.

• Handling over - and misinformed callers.

Scheduling Options: Half day or full day.