What Does A Top Seller Look Like in the Digital Era? - Eric De Neef

Thank you. So on this one, I try to summarize what we have defined as top seller and what we have trained. We have embedded this in all the training and coaching sessions. These are the five key skill sets of the top seller that we have defined. We have worked, as I said, on the curriculum, on the level of training, and also on the coaching for the first-line managers. The first one is focused on digital research. The second one is develop the social media. The third one is master the analytical expertise. Fourth, build trust. And fifth, be relevant and adaptive.

So really, what we have tried to do in the last two years in the curriculum is to say, how can you leverage digitalization going forward to enhance the skill sets of our sales people and to increase the revenue efficiency of the revenue generation.

So if we go to the first one, on the focus on digital research, is something that we have covered already. It is in fact the customer intelligence. In this phase of the work is the preparation work, as we have said, it happens prior to any guest interaction. We ask a seller to know the industry of the corporate. We ask them to learn about the consumer, the company, the buyer. We ask them really to be prepared. You have access to all these data online through the different platforms we have.

In order that before entering into a negotiation or discussion with your customer, you know precisely the industry they are working on and the situation of the company. The second one is the knowledge of the social media platform, which for the sales team was maybe something odd because it was much more a marketing responsibility. But engaging with your consumer or your customer through the LinkedIn business account and platform, the Twitter account, helps you to understand what is really important for this company, the items and the issues they are facing and what is driving the company.

And this is critical in order to also increase your knowledge of your consumer or customer in order to be, at the end of the sales journey, very relevant and personalized.

Then we come to mastering the analytical experience. This is what we discussed also in the last days. We have developed an integrated IDE platform, and for the SAP colleagues in the room, it will please them because it is an SAP solution that we have customized for Radisson. It is an ID platform, a vertical integration of PMS for the property management system, so the system you have at the hotel level, the reservation system, and then going into your content management system and your customer relationship management CRM.

It is a vertical integration and we have a 360-degree view of our customer, which is very important. On this platform, and everybody on the RevGen has access to this platform, you have the account profile, you have all tracking of the interaction with your customer, being on sales or social. Then you have the revenue generated by the customer. You have it by property, by country, by region, by day of the week, by rate, so you can slice and dice the way you want.

It enables the seller to understand the situation of the customer versus what has been agreed in the contract, and to come up with tailor-made solutions if needed, and to get back to the customer. This is critical. This platform is an access for the whole revenue teams, and everybody has the same single source of truth to understand the situation of each and every customer.

Then, of course, you have the fourth layer, which is on the next slide, where you come into the mindset of our seller. The top seller really needs to become the trusted advisor. What we insist a lot in training and coaching on a daily basis is that it is about selling a solution, not selling a brand or a property. We need to be much more consultative and less transactional. A transaction is the result of your consultative approach.

So it is critical that we understand what the customer wants. Somehow we are selling sleep in the hotel industry. It is about the bed, the shower, the breakfast. That is what ninety percent of our customers are using in your property. But this is nothing new, because that is what everybody is expecting when engaging with Radisson or one of the majors. As I said, today the safety protocols are key in the mindset of our corporate clients. Duty of care is the number one priority today in all companies.

So what we are doing is sending these safety protocols, what we are putting in place in every property, in order to ensure the safety of your customer. Again, you don't sell your bed or your shower, you sell a solution. This is where we really push our team to be much more into this consultative approach rather than a pure transactional approach. Certainly in the service industry.

Then the last slide will cover the customization and the relevance. Because once you have a clear view on the company's current position, the company's potential, and the needs, then the sales process can start.

To help them, and again, this is where we have used digitalization to help the efficiency of the sales team. We have created, for example, what we call the sales presenter. It is a cloud-based software where you have all the information, it is an online repository with all the information of Radisson: all the corporate presentations, all the brand presentations, the 1,200 hotels information plus all the visuals.

It enables you as a seller to customize your presentation to the needs of your customer. As a seller, I just need to edit the text I want, upload the image I want to show, and the sales tool is preparing the whole presentation for me with slides on brand. We started in 2016 with this solution, and it has been in full power since 2018-19. For a presentation of 50 slides, you need 10 minutes to do it because you know precisely what you need.

This is the type of benefit and added value of the digitalization. On the advertising platform that we built, the same. It has been developed with an API integration in mind, because you have more and more companies today that want to have a direct connectivity between the company and Radisson. They do not want to book through third-party websites or distribution channels. This is going through an API, and in three to four weeks' time you are able to connect both companies.

Again, it is not about selling a bed, it is about answering the needs of your customer. This is why being very close to the customer, understanding what they are looking for, helps us to drive the business and to be better than the competition. That is also why, what Christoph mentioned earlier in one of the KPIs, the biggest and most critical one we have at Radisson is the market share. We want to be always above 100, meaning that you are outperforming your competition. This is our guiding principle when it comes to business generation.

So that is more or less the summary of the five key qualities and skill sets of the top seller that we are embedding in all our training and coaching sessions that we organize. That is for the top seller. And then I prepared, if you go to the next slide, what we think on the Radisson side the best RevGen leadership skill sets are. What are really the five key skill sets for all sales leaders.

We covered this already in the last few days. Living the values is first, critical, because we defined values, but we see that the most critical point is that all the management is living these values. Your teams are focused as much on the walk as the talk, and this is critical. The company culture is the credibility of the management.

The second one is caring, and I think Larry covered it very well yesterday. Caring very close to your people, very close to your customers. Certainly now in this forced remote environment where we are in, it is really to find the right approach to be close to your people. We discussed yesterday, Tom, last night about the virtual coffee that I have organized with my direct reports. My direct reports are doing this also with their direct reports. It is a 15-minute virtual coffee that replaced the coffee machine chats we had when we were physically all together.

It is really a 15-minute one-on-one, no business discussions, just you and me, how do you feel, the kids, the dogs, really to be very close to them. And once a week we do a 30-minute virtual coffee with the team just to give this sense of belonging, that we are not alone in this pandemic, in this forced environment.

Then clearly, the team is a critical one. Defining the right organization, defining the vision, defining the compensation model, it is all the company responsibility. But then we ask our leaders to bring to the sales team and the team as a whole the autonomy, the freedom to act within the framework, to be creative, to innovate, to challenge what we are doing in order to push and deliver extra added value. So empowerment is critical because it is not the top-down that will make it. You need the framework, but from a bottom-up approach you deliver so much more from a core responsibility and from ideas coming from the field.

Then you have training, coaching, and development. This is more or less what Reiner covered on the Monday from the VUCA world to the VUCA Prime, is to reassure our leaders and our teams in this quite odd situation we are in. So we need to coach them a lot. Training is one thing, that is your expertise. Coaching is really your first employee, coaching is the responsibility of the manager, not the responsibility of HR. So we invest a lot of time on this.

And then the development, which we try to structure, and to be honest with you, this is where we struggle a lot within Radisson and within the travel industry as a whole. We are working a lot with Gen Y and Gen Z population, and the recovery of the travel industry, if you listen to the big gurus in this space, we are talking about 2024-2025, so it is another three years to go. And for this generation, it is a lifetime, they do not want to wait. So we need to work on adding value to them, to create multi-expertise, to develop them in order to retain them. That is why we are facing a lot of issues; we see people leaving. This is reality.

So this is really where we are now with the leaders on the coaching side, with HR on the training side, to see what we can tackle in order to retain this talent. Because otherwise you have a double dip: first you have talents leaving, and you know that within two to three years you will need to recruit new ones that you will need to train, develop, and coach.

And the last one on the list is multi-expertise development. As we said, we try for each of the leaders, being the leader of property management, leader on the sales, or leader on the marketing side, to build this multi-expertise across all RevGen levers. That is why we have created one organization covering all the RevGen functions, one platform, a single source of truth, and one common incentive to ensure that people are all looking in the same direction and fighting for the same goals and revenue.

So these are the keys to success that we are embedding in our training and coaching sessions with all our leaders at all levels, being at the regional level or being at the center level. That is all I wanted to share with you. Thank you.

It is about data relevancy, to be honest with you, because we are overloaded with data. I always say to the team, it is a car crash. You have so many data that at the end of the day nobody is looking at. So you need to come up with data that you can use as a management tool that is relevant to the business. This is where we invest a lot of time. It is less about tools; it is about the relevancy of the data. Then afterwards, it is to drive the whole RevGen organization to use this data. That is why the platform is critical, because at least you have one single source of truth. If the data is not correct in the platform, what could be the case, and what we have had many times, we need to adapt it and bring it to the right level. The relevancy of the data is critical.

We have resized the organization and created new jobs. If I look at the pure seller, what we called in the past the seller on the road, we decreased more or less by 40 percent, the number of sellers we have. But we have more or less recreated the same amount of jobs in sales operations, in data analytics, and in BI, in order to ensure this. I prefer that the seller is really the top one, the one engaging with your customer, and having this skill set, is not losing time in pulling data. This is not his job. His job is at one point to understand the data, to engage with your customer, and to be customized and personalized in the approach. We created BI, data analytics, and sales operations in order to feed this data and feed this platform. So it is a different type of skill sets that are complementary to each other. We do not ask all the sales people to do the same as the BI team. We have clearly defined roles differently than it was in the past, thanks to the digitalization.

I think it is about rethinking the resources and having clear responsibilities at each level. In the training of the sales people, we do not train them to put the data in. We train them to understand the data and to read the data. This is where I think is the biggest difference from the past, where we asked the sellers to do a little bit of everything together at the same time. Now we are specializing them differently. I am still convinced that we can increase the efficiency of our sales people. When I was looking at the 17 percent, 7 percent, and 10 percent that we discussed this morning, I hope we are not there. We did not drive this analysis on our side. That was a takeaway for me this morning. I will try to work on this, to see the efficiency of our sales team. But when you define clearly the role of each and the limits of each function in the RevGen organization, you gain efficiency.

Yeah, absolutely. There is a big way for us to improve. We are far above to start, I would say.

I think first, my takeaway is that we are all more or less struggling with the same issues and the same thoughts. We are here today with so many different industries. We have product industries, service industries, travel industries, so it is totally different. But at the end of the day, we are in the same boat, in the same approach. That is for me this feeling that we are not alone and we are struggling in the same approach, if I may say so.

Where I will get back to the teams is really to enforce and enhance even more this cooperation. I have been convinced today, when listening to different speakers and colleagues in different questions, that this alignment between the functions is critical. We need to get rid of the silos if we want to be successful. Even though we have created platforms, as I mentioned to Christoph and the team yesterday in the last workshop, we have created a middle organization at the regional level versus the corporate level. And then the kingdoms appear because at one point China is not behaving the same way as the Middle East, and that is the same in the Americas. But that is not the reason to stop developing this. Around coaching and management, we need to adapt. We do not have one size fitting all.

But I think the alignment of all the teams is critical. And what is nice to see is that in the digitalization world, the people value is even more important than it was in the past. It is a people business at the end of the day.

Thank you. Thank you, take care.