How automation will rock your restart

The vast majority of on-site events are cancelled, postponed or put on hold at the moment. There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel though. But how can venues prepare after long months of downtime? How can they stay ahead of their competition and secure the market share they urgently need?

Once life gets back to normal, companies and private clients alike will try to save their dates. There will be a huge demand for personal B2B meetings as well as a flood of inquiries for private parties, celebrations and weddings.

Hotels, venues and event providers will face unprecedented competition. On the one hand even more properties will be asked for a quote for the exact same event, since prospects want to make sure they have alternatives. On the other hand competing venues will be even more aggressive to secure as much of the attracting business as possible.

That’s when automation and efficiency become crucial in event sales.

Prospects will be impatient. They will not be willing to wait their turn. Prospects don’t care whether hotels and venues get dozens or hundreds of inquiries a day - they want to be on the top of the list.

Properties that have the tools in place to quote events instantly will greatly benefit from their first-mover advantage. Providing perfect quotes instantly will get every provider on the top of each inquirer’s short list.

Easier said than done? What if you lost good staff during the pandemic? How can properties accomplish even more with fewer staff hours?

The answer is simple - automation. Once the systems are up and running, productivity is limitless. Boring and redundant copy and paste tasks don’t need to be done by human team members. Event managers are much better at doing sales, taking care of clients and implementing events. They shouldn’t be burdened by dull tasks all day.

With machine intelligence in place and smart integrations set up, automated event quotes happen in seconds.

The strategic work upfront is done only once - the benefits last for years.

MICE clients will not want to be responsible for local super-spreading events. They want to trust that venues will do the very best they can to provide a safe and professional environment. What does this have to do with quoting and selling events?

Thought-through distanced seating layouts, hygiene measures and individually customized texts must be included in quotes automatically. Based on event dates, different terms and content can be offered without an event manager having to think about it. By providing professional instant and transparent quotes that address client health concerns automatically, properties can assure clients they’ll be taken good care of.

As soon as processes are automated, it doesn’t really matter how many of your quotes convert into real bookings. Who cares about quotes being sent if the machines do the work?

In the past hotels and venues thought a lot about whether it’s worth it to even send out a quote. In many cases this was just a guess. Often good revenue comes from inquiries that don’t look promising in the beginning.

It’s not the time to be picky - reply to all inquiries perfectly and count the number of bookings in the end. That’s what pays off.

Every event is totally different, isn’t it? And creative somehow? Even tiny events are complex because of clients’ individual needs. Too complex to be configured online?

Only when the wrong tools are used. If users are faced with dumb inquiry forms or the limited configuration capabilities of standard MICE platforms, events indeed are way too complex to be handled this way.

That’s why the most relevant information often is copied into forms’ comments fields. All details have to be filtered manually; emails have to be sent back and forth - it takes too long to come to a quote which really reflects what the client needs.

Why bother with information ping pong?

All individual event offerings, dynamic or complex pricing models, and generic rules can be set up easily. If highly individual events cannot be configured online, and if the instant quotes are not better than the ones created manually, maybe you’re using the wrong tools.

A huge number of team meetings, sales conferences, parties and - of course - weddings will be quoted during the coming months.

The providers who manage to automate their event sales with fast, error-free and seamlessly integrated systems will do the business.