My friend and superstar sales event planner Brooke Sommers posted on her blog how frustrated she was with sales people and I had to share it with this community. These are the type of sales people you DON’T want to have on your team.

Brooke is a highly regarded event planner for sales organizations. She works with the sales organizations of Fortune 100 and Fortune 50 companies. She plans some of the industries biggest and best yearly sales summits. She’s kinda like a sales event planner rockstar. But, even if you [a sales person] haven’t heard of her yet, it still makes no sense not to return her call.

I’d be irritated if this happened to me too.

HOTEL SALES OR LACK THERE OF

I continue to be perplexed by hotel sales people and their lack of “selling”. Back in the day when sales people didn’t rely on the internet, social media, and email, I believe that the sales person was just plain better.

I recently sent a lead to multiple high end resorts, it was for short term business, less than 6 months out for a C level executive retreat. Not one of the sales people called me to talk about the program. I don’t expect all hotel sales people to call especially if I go through a national rep who knows the program. HOWEVER, for the hotels that don’t have any idea who I am, who the client is or what the program is about, how hard would it be to pick up the phone and really understand the program before sending your generic proposal.

I completely understand that that there are meeting planners out there who don’t want to be contacted with questions, but a simple email asking if you could call to discuss the program SHOULD be the first response to a lead. Is business really that good on the hotel side? Is all your meeting space booked and are all your rooms blocked for 2013? If not I would suggest that you step out of this century and learn something about relationship sales.

Relationship sales have been put on the back burner and need to be rekindled. Call me old school, but I believe that hotel sales people are two things: Green or Tired. Green and don’t know any better because they don’t have mentors or training in line. Tired because they have been doing it so long they don’t have the passion. There are some awesome hotel sales people out there and those are the ones that have a following from hotel to hotel.

Hotel management, time to get the training ball rolling. Bring the passion back to hotel sales, and educate your new and old sales force on selling in a new era.