The roadmap to long-term, positive revenue performance can be achieved strategically and tactically with several key steps and considerations in place.
Here are six considerations for mapping out your revenue roadmap:
Obtain Executive Buy-In & Vision
Effective revenue management starts at the top and its vision and revenue management goals must be shared by the executive team and board of directors. Presenting your revenue management strategies at an upcoming meeting? Use key terms such as returns on investment and profitability that resonate with the executive audience. Highlight examples where revenue opportunities are being left on the table and educate revenue management for those unfamiliar with its relevant day-to-day activities.
Create a concrete roadmap outlining your objectives and corresponding deliverables. Once everyone is on the same strategic path, you have the commitment and resources needed to start out strong.
Create Your Roadmap
A revenue development roadmap ensures you can work effectively toward achieving your goals and objectives and look back for tangible and measurable results. Use key milestones that are relevant to the executive team to outline the roadmap. Review it thoroughly with the executive team for an official sign-off, which ensures your organization is working toward mutual goals.
Build Culture with Education
Total Revenue Performance goes beyond the revenue manager to permeate every department at different levels of focus and intensity. Create focused sessions or workgroups not only for revenue managers and general managers, but also for directors of sales and marketing, and others in the organization who would benefit from increased knowledge and awareness of revenue management principles.
Revenue management should be the beginning of creating future leaders for your company. Think about your revenue management structure and consider how to create growth opportunities within the revenue team.
Address Big Data
The internet, mobile, online distribution and dynamics that have come with advancements in big data have given us infinite data points to analyze and optimize. Identify and measure challenges and opportunities by creating key performance indicators and meaningful dashboards. Large amounts of data provides valuable information about areas like price, elasticity of demand and revenue – areas that cannot be effectively analyzed when you only skim the surface of available data – and can help hotel operators and owners make more informed revenue management decisions.
Go Beyond Guest Rooms
If you have not tackled other revenue departments yet – now is the time. Culture and technology are starting to fall into place for areas beyond rooms, and hotel groups are now moving on to the rest of their hotel’s assets. When it comes to dealing with non-room departments, you can follow the same principles as in rooms: executive buy-in, culture and education, big data, and automation.
Implement Automation
Similar to big data analysis, automated processes relating to demand, reservations, price changes and inventory optimization are happening fast. To free up time for analysis and to reduce the risk of human error, look to automate all possible processes.
Automation allows revenue managers and stakeholders to focus on strategic challenges and opportunities – dedicating more of their valuable time to achieving the key milestones on the revenue roadmap. Implementing an automation strategy should be an integral part of your revenue roadmap, and continuous improvement and development of any existing automated solutions should be recurring milestones within your plan.