What is Hotel Proposal Management Software?

In the last decade hotels have completely overhauled their websites and consumer booking experiences to meet demands of modern travelers and keep pace with ecommerce best practices. Surprisingly, group booking processes have not kept pace despite group business often being the most profitable and even largest percentage of bookings for many convention and business focused hotels. Proposal management software leverages the same user experience best practices that consumers have grown accustomed to and gears them towards B2B (business to business) purchases. Proposal management software helps hotels provide a fast and seamless experience for travel managers to book trips for their teams. This software does everything from enabling proposals to be sent in seconds with automated upselling of spaces like meeting rooms, automated invoice collection, e-signature, and even digital payments. On the backend, proposal management software makes it easy for sales managers at hotels to quickly and beautifully send proposals then quickly search, modify and analyze historical or pending proposals to save time and make more money.

A request for proposal in the hospitality industry occurs when a prospective clients engages event venues like hotels to provide a quote for space. The RFP process is designed to streamline the time-consuming process of sourcing of new business for sellers (hotels) and buyers (event planners). Often times RFPs are related to group business travel or a corporate event. The hotel RFP process typically involves meeting planners sending standardized information to a hotel group like the requirements for the event space, event dates, contact information, company name, budget and more. Hotel RFP software is designed to streamline that process making it fast, easy and increasingly automated for hotels to provide instant bookable quotes. Hoteliers are increasingly automating incoming RFPs via management tools and RFP software is at the core of solving the problem of losing business to competitors who respond more quickly.

What are the benefits of Hotel Proposal Management Software?

Eliminate guesswork: Stop sending your proposals into a black hole. With proposal management software you can follow what’s happening, see why your prospects haven’t accepted your proposals yet and follow-up.

Increase Revenue: Proposal management software helps hotels close more deals faster. In the competitive world of B2B accomodations, businesses are faced with making quick decisions and lengthy proposal creation can kill deals.

Differentiate your hotel: Most hotel sales reps spend hours on long email chains to field proposal requests which wastes time and creates frustration with buyers. Proposal management software helps speed up this process and alleviate stress for propsects by giving them all the information they need to make a quick decision with transparency.

Steamline workflows: Proposal management software makes it easy for your team to draft, modify and send proposals and dramatically cuts down on tedious work. This frees up time to spend building client relationships, generating new leads or for hotels with less financial resources - this enables them to lean out their sales organization.

Increase revenue per group: Upselling drives highly profitable incremental revenue with confirmed bookings and proposal management software makes it easy to upsell catering services, spa amenities and meeting spaces in a very clear and transparent way.

Transaparency: There’s the old saying “if you can’t measure it you can’t fix it” - with proposal management software, management can get a real time view into sales pipeline and dive into specific proposals to create a system of accountability or tag team between reps. More visibility leads to higher sales and less dropped proposals.

Major Hotel RFP Trends

Guests demand transparency and sustainability. It’s not a secret: combating climate change is becoming more important and many people want to make a positive impact with their day-to-day choices. As a result, you’ll probably start getting some version of the above question more often (if you aren’t already). And that’s a good thing because it’s a powerful opportunity to showcase your green initiatives and boost your business. Let’s look at how even your RPF process can play into that and help you win more climate-conscious clients.

Upselling is not only for hotel rooms. When you hear ‘upselling’, paid room upgrades are probably the first thing that comes to mind. But have you ever thought about upselling your event guests? While upselling may be most common at the reception, there are many (often untapped) opportunities for the events department as well. Now you might be thinking: won't that be too salesy and annoy my guests? Not if you do it right. You don't have to nickel and dime your guests with pushy pitches. Instead, you can use upselling to take their event experience to the next level with extra services and customization options they never even thought of asking for.

Interactive and mobile friendly proposals. Here’s a hard truth to keep in mind: your guests are busy and don’t spend a lot of time actively reading your proposal. The best way to keep them engaged is to make your proposal short, concise and interactive. Allow readers to adjust certain elements themselves such as the attendee count, optional add-ons or the menu selection. This can boost your conversion rate for several reasons. First, it reduces the back-and-forth communication and makes the proposal review process faster and smoother. Second, clients feel like they’re more in control of the planning process because they can adjust the proposal to match their needs. Finally, this approach lets you offer a variety of attractive add-ons. They can both add value to your guest’s experience and boost your revenue.

Key features to look for when choosing a proposal management software solution

Reporting dashboard Enables your sales team or general management to quickly view high level pipeline and booked group business then drill into individual deals to get an understanding of areas where your team can improve their strategy or offerings.

Real-time booking Proposal software should integrate with core booking systems to facilitate real-time booking and block guest rooms, meeting spaces and other fixed inventory as soon as payment has been made.

e-Signing Gone are the days of fax machines and PDF laden email threads. Offer e-signing to provide convenience and speed for your prospects instead of putting barriers in front of them that waste precious time from their busy schedules.

Secure digital payments In the age of cyber crime it’s no longer acceptable to take payment information over the phone, email, or via fax. Secured and encrypted payment processors should be leveraged to ensure that client information is never compromised.

Modern graphical user interface The early to mid 2000’s were defined by the consumerization of the internet and for the last 5-10 years even old world businesses began to realize that B2B buyers are just consumers from 9-5. Providing an easy to use and beautiful interface that these buyers are accustomed to is critical for building trust and closing deals.

Follow-up notifications Hotel sales teams are busy and have a ton on their shoulders. Make sure they’re always on top of deals by setting up actionable notifications based on deal stage. This will save them time and help them prioritze their daily work.

Quick web proposals Quickly draft and send sales proposals to your prospects by pulling various ancillaries and modular elements into the deal.

Hotel RFP Software KPIs to Focus on When Buying

Time per proposal. Track the average amount of time it takes to complete each step of a proposal from the buy side request to the amount of time it takes your sales team to respond and close the deal. Track how many back and forth messages are involved, too, before and after implementing the software to determine how much efficiency was generated.

Revenue per transaction. Track revenue per deal and even down to the granular level understanding how many meeting spaces were sold, catering packages, etc. to understand how effective the new solution has been for upselling and growing AOV (average order value).

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