How to Create a Hotel Sales & Marketing SOP [+ Checklist]

In this post, we explain why it’s important to create a hotel sales and marketing SOP, who uses them, and how to start creating your own plan of action. We also provide a free checklist template to help you get started. Welcome to SOP sales and marketing 101! 

To continue your learning, check out our comprehensive Hotel Operations Management Guide.

What is a Hotel Sales & Marketing SOP?

A sales and marketing SOP is a protocol for how your hotel’s marketing and sales department approaches advertising initiatives and sales goals. Sales executives and managers use SOPs to onboard new sales members and quickly align their staff. It helps to keep everyone working toward the same strategic financial objectives, and it defines and outlines things like:

• How new sales personnel are brought on
• General sales processes and procedures
• What incentives there are for sales personnel
• Sales and advertising do’s and don’ts 
• Sales lead information
• Other functions that are critical to optimizing staff performance

Having a sales and marketing SOP is crucial in uniting staff with a clear plan of action to drive sales. An SOP outlines expectations around performance and conduct across the sales department too.

It aids in team collaboration and motivates your individual sales staff members with clearly identified levels of performance and benchmarks for reward. To understand how SOPs fit into all aspects of hotel operations, check our Hotel Operations Management Guide.

But it doesn’t just clarify sales team conduct: hotel sales and marketing SOPs also set up a standard approach to create and maintain brand awareness through consistency. Hotels use SOPs to drive brand recognition and promote customer loyalty. 

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What’s Involved in a Hotel Sales & Marketing SOP?

There are typically multiple pieces to a sales and marketing SOP. Ultimately you want to include anything that clarifies the sales process and unifies your team around strategic marketing and advertising initiatives. This can include everything from a general guide of what to expect when you first join the sales team to a checklist of how to conduct sales calls. 

We’ve included a few key documents we recommend including as part of your hotel’s sales and marketing SOP: 

📓 Onboarding or Training Manual 

To ensure new sales staff can hit the ground running, it’s helpful to include a hotel sales training manual for onboarding new team members. Having a clear onboarding process for sales personnel helps new employees hit the ground running toward sales goals so they’ll be able to hit benchmarks quicker. 

📖 Hotel Sales 101 Guide 

We recommend including a hotel sales kit that outlines the basics of your sales processes and procedures. This provides an easy way for existing sales staff to review what’s expected of them. It’s also helpful for new team members who might need to regularly review processes. A sales 101 guide should include a clear overview of sales procedures and marketing initiatives as well as any information around brand standards for sales and advertising. 

📞 Hotel Sales Lead Sheet 

As part of your hotel sales SOP it’s ideal to include a lead sheet for managing prospects. A hotel sales lead sheet includes the information for prospects so that your sales team can pursue their initiatives with the appropriate leads. 

💸 Hotel Marketing Plan

The marketing plan is an essential tool for Sales and Marketing teams to align on. Each hotel has a number of marketing channels both digital and traditional that help grow brand presence and drive bookings. Since marketing is an ongoing effort, a good SOP includes tasks that will continue to drive traffic to the location. Items such as posting on social media and managing a Google search account are essential to profit growth.

Also Read:

• 6 Best Small Hotel Maintenance Software For Hospitality Platforms In 2024
• 5 Best Hospitality Management Software in 2024

Tips for Making a Hotel Sales & Marketing SOP

🎯 Identify Goals

When you’re putting together a hotel sales and marketing SOP, the first thing to do is identify your organization’s overall financial goals around sales, marketing, and advertising. Define your goals and KPIs so you can include them in your documentation. If you have specific goals for individual roles or personnel, be sure to identify them. 

🦗 Consider Your Audience

From there, consider your audience—work toward recording your SOP information in a straightforward way that will make the most sense for your sales and marketing team. It might be as simple as creating a bulleted list or sales cheat sheet for certain things, depending on who you’re communicating to. 

🧰 Utilize Additional Tools Where Necessary

Using a digital tool like Xenia to manage SOP documentation or SOP checklists can help create an accessible, single source of truth for sales and marketing procedures. Solutions like Xenia allow everyone on your hotel team to access checklists, documentation, and team messaging features directly from their mobile devices, so your team always has the information they need to make the sale. 

Improving Hotel Reputation Management

A positive reputation is the key to success in hospitality. Now more than ever, properties must strategize to build and protect their brand image. A proper management strategy will increase brand awareness, boosting guest acquisition, providing opportunities to deliver a positive experience, which leads to increased loyalty and advocacy. So how can we build a reputation?

Reputation Management is a practice with both online and offline as well as paid and organic activities. These include online reviews, social media, TV, search engines, partnerships and paid online advertisements. Businesses should focus on establishing a presence in most of these channels to improve brand awareness and reach. With limited time and budget, managers must learn how to identify and prioritize channels that are driving customers through the door. To do this, establish how a guest found your property and take notes on their demographic, profitability and likelihood to be a brand advocate. Use this information to create a ideal customer profiles that can be used to find more customers in similar interest and behavior.

In order to create a reliable positive guest experience, brands need to establish standards of operation and a culture that upholds them. For your assets create preventive maintenance schedules. For your people, create checklists and SOPs. And to drive the culture, provide training and incentives.

Keeping track of your online reputation is difficult. To help out, we’ve included a free hotel reputation management checklist below to help you track your brand over time.

Xenia: One App to Manage your Facilities and your Frontline

Xenia goes beyond simple operations with a full suite of tools to help simplify, track, and manage every area of hotel operations. The software contains individual and group messaging, built-in analytics, checklists and inspection tools, maintenance features, and more. Check out the list below:

• Guest Request Management
• Housekeeping Management
• Team Accountability
• Quality and Safety Inspections
• Team Communication
• Custom Checklist Builder
• SOP Template Library
• Preventive Maintenance Management
• Inspections and Audits
• Asset Tracking
• Work Order Management
• Lost and Found

Xenia checklists make it easy to create and enforce standard operating procedures and inspection protocols, simplifying quality assurance and brand standard adherence across individual properties and entire portfolios.

The system’s PM and work order tools ensure your maintenance team has everything they need to track fixes on the go and log asset information for a clear understanding of asset health.

Plus the software features all the internal communication features you could need to encourage collaboration, increase autonomy, and decrease miscommunication.

Managers are able to message team members one on one, create chat groups for departments and teams, and even announce organization-wide news and updates via a public feed, anywhere, anytime.

With Xenia, you and your team will be able to track and manage property assets and analyze detailed analytics reports on everything from inspections and maintenance to room cleanings and task assignments, allowing you to spot patterns quickly and make long-term improvements. And to top it all off, Xenia is fully flexible and customizable, so you can tailor your digital experience to fit the way you work.

To learn more about how Xenia can help streamline operations at your hotel, check out our website and schedule a free demo.

Our solutions can help you set up and maintain clear SOPs, improve accountability and team management, increase visibility into day-to-day work, and more. We’re here to make your hotel the best, most optimized property it can be!