Budget season is upon us. Plan your most successful year yet with this checklist for Hotel Director of Sales and Marketing Rockstars.

1. HOTEL DOSM CHECKLIST:
HOW MANY ARE YOU
MISSING?

2. 2016 is your year. You can count on it.
Travel spending is up. Gas and airfares are low. And, technology is constantly making it
easier for guests to book rooms and for hotels to reach out to guests. Don’t let the good
news go to waste. You should leverage and maximize every advantage you have to
score robust profits in 2016. Getting and staying ahead of the game requires dedicating
time to specific activities EVERYDAY.
That’s right, everyday. We know you’re busy. We know your to-do is miles long. That’s
why we put together our annual Tambourine DOSM Checklist for 2016 to make it
easy to reap the biggest profits, little by little, day by day.
DSMCHECKLISTFOR2016!

3. Catch Up On the Metrics
Most Important To Your Owner
Don’t wait until your year slows down to catch up on your vital numbers, or else you’ll be
scrambling frantically to catch up. Everyday, check up on your metrics such as RevPar
Index vs your compset, MCPB (marketing cost per booking), Website conversion rate,
and DRdaR (direct revenue ratio).
These key performance indicators are what will matter to your owner and asset
managers when it comes to reviewing how your efforts are contributing to your hotel’s
revenue.
Read More: 6 Sales and Marketing Metrics Every Hotel Owner Cares About

4. Tap into your guests desire for authenticexperiences
Today’s travelers are obsessed with ‘traveling like a local’. No longer are they interested
in big-ticket “touristy” attractions. Now, they’re looking at farmers markets, distilleries
and craft breweries, hidden local spots, mom-and-pop shops, hole-in-the-wall
restaurants and art walks.
Stay on top of it all by reading your local weekly newspapers, such as Seattle’s
Stranger, and your city’s main magazine, like San Diego Magazine. Or, check if your city

5. Check in On Your
Top 20 Sales Opportunities
Sit down with your sales people and look
over their top group meeting opportunities.
Review the planner’s pain points, their hot
buttons, the other properties competing for
business. Determine what the sales person
can do that day to tip the scales in your
property’s favor.

6. Scrutinize Your Product
With all the marketing programs and strategies
you have in place, in the end it’s a standout
guest experience that will draw guests again and
again. So, in addition to reading your hotel’s
online reviews, leave your office at least once a
day to walk your property.
Experience and scrutinize each touchpoint. Be
ruthless and ask ‘what’s missing’ from your guest
experience? Does your restaurant have a
lackluster menu? Is the spa starting to look
shabby? Are staff uniforms looking out-dated?

7. Study Your Comp Set
With all the monitoring tools at your hotel’s
disposal, there’s no reason not to know what
your comp set is up to. There’s STR reports,
Google alerts, social media mentions and good
ol’ hotel reader boards.
Sign up for a hotel intelligence service to
streamline your daily monitoring. These services
will produce reports that show your competition’s
most active groups, annual repeat business and
which companies are booking their meetings at
other hotels.

8. Engage Guest Reviews
The reviews that previous guests leave behind
are the direct link to your future success, so they
should NEVER be ignored. Just because
someone else at your property is delegated with
the task of reading and responding to reviews
doesn’t mean that you can’t also look over and
act on them.

9. Engage Guest Reviews
After all, many meeting attendees will leave
reviews as a guest. And, if they took the time
to review your property on TripAdvisor, they
are likely to have shared their feedback with
the planner as well. So, make the time to
listen to their thoughts. It takes little effort, just
5-10 minutes a day to see what reviews have
been left recently. Notice the topics that keep
being brought up, then outline ways you can
attend to them.

10. Analyze Your Team’s Performance Against Target
and Goals
Successful DOSMs know where they are in
relation to their sales goals, on any given day. By
tracking your daily progress towards your target
numbers, you’ll know whether you’re behind or
ahead.
How close is each member of your team to their
projected room nights? Are there a lot more
sales calls and follow-ups to make? When
working to increase meetings and events at your
property, you can’t get lax on this. It’s paramount
to monitor your team’s progress on a daily basis.

11. Talk to Your Guests!
They KnowBest!
Don’t stay cooped up in your office trying to
determine what guests and planners want and
need from your hotel. Take 30 minutes to
converse with guests staying at your property
and the meeting delegates lingering around your
conference space. Ask them about their stay and
what you can do better.

12. Talk to Your Guests!
They KnowBest!
Converse with your social media
community as well. Sign up for Linkedin
groups for meeting and event professionals
and play an active role in answering
questions and offering suggestions. All of
this intelligence can be used to lock in
future group business and to improve your
hotel experience.

13. KeepAn Eye on Industry
Newsand Trends
From Skift, to Hospitality Net to Hotel News Now
to (shameless plug, Tambourine’s own #1 ranked
hotel marketing blog… there’s plenty of industry
publications and resources to stay on top of the
latest news and tools impacting how you market
your hotel.
Dedicate a half hour each day to browse these
hospitality sites, file away any articles you want
to refer to in the future, or pass them along to the
appropriate staff at your property.

14. MeetWith Your
Revenue Managers
You should pow wow with your revenue
management team every day, NOT once per
week. In fact, keep them as a standing daily
appointment in your calendar.
Just like your sales opportunities, you need to
stay on top of your upcoming low periods,
property’s pace reports, and strategies on how to
maximize revenue from your ancillary products.
READ: How to build a more cohesive
hotel marketing team

15. TECHNOLOGY AND CREATIVITY
FOR HOTELS & RESORTS WORLDWIDE
www.tambourine.com