Breaking Down the Cvent Hospitality Product Portfolio
Breaking Down the Cvent Hospitality Product Portfolio
The transition from in-person events to virtual events has been quick — and transformational. While event management and event planning will likely remain a core part of your hotel’s business, it likely will have morphed into a hybrid model that includes smaller onsite events with fewer people, augmented by remote options.
On its face, this seems like a threat to the event-driven business model of many hotels. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll see an opportunity for your hotel to position itself as a knowledgeable advisor to event managers navigating this new reality. Things are definitely different — and those changes bring opportunities as well. Here’s how Cvent’s hospitality product suite can enable your pivot and position you for success as you sell a new type of hybrid event model to event planners with its full end to end event management platform and marketing solutions.
Capture Leads with Group Marketing Solutions
In an environment with fewer events, leads are even more precious. There’s less business floating around, so it’s essential to give your team the tools and features to capture and nurture leads. And it’s not just filling the top of the funnel with leads for your sales team; you also want quality leads. Your group business can only grow by attracting quality leads that are well-suited for your venue — and thus primed to convert.
Group Marketing Solutions helps you identify, acquire, and convert leads with three core offerings:
Sourcing network. The Cvent Supplier Network reaches over 92,000 event planners representing more than $19 billion in RFP value. The global reach of its venue sourcing platform means that you have more opportunities to find the ideal events for your venue. Planners turn to Cvent as the pathway to secure venues and so your presence on this platform is critical for driving new leads.
Increased visibility. To make your venue stand out, your team benefits from a multimedia-rich marketing environment that puts your venue front and center. With tools to showcase what makes your venue unique, you can do a better job at differentiating your offering and landing the right leads.
To further engage with the planners using Cvent, you have a few other tools: the Cvent Audience Network, where you can reach event planners all over the web; self-serve, multimedia custom microsites to showcase your property to event planners searching for venues; and Search Ads so you can advertise to event planners researching venues like yours to augment email marketing to your existing database.
These value-added visibility tools maximize engagement and give you targeted ways to speak directly to the right planners — and increase your odds of success. It’s all about capturing quality leads for your sales team to work their magic.
Your team can create custom microsites to engage planners with images, videos and content about your venues and the surrounding destination.
Streamlined RFPs. Turn your website into a lead generation machine by streamlining how event planners submit RFPs. Event planners are busy; so it’s especially important to make it easy for them to submit their group requests. If you make it difficult, they will simply go elsewhere! The SpeedRFP White Label solution streamlines this workflow, enabling planners to submit complete requests right from your website so that you can quickly respond with a winning proposal. Speed, convenience, and accuracy increase the quantity and quality of RFPs. Planners will love it — and so will your sales team, as they can manage leads from a centralized portal, spend less time chasing down details. and leverage integrations with sales and catering software.
Streamline your RFPs and make it easier for everyone by embedding RFP submissions in your website.
Boost Profitability with Group Operations Solutions
Once you’ve captured the leads and turned them into closed business, the next step is to effectively deliver a top-notch experience. By providing planners and attendees the tools and platforms to make life easier, you’ll increase the odds of future business.
Cvent’s solutions for Group Operations focus on collaboration, transparency, and incremental revenue, plugged right into your CRS, PMS, revenue management, distribution, sales, and catering systems:
Custom event websites. Promote and manage your group hotel reservations with Passkey, a centralized system that integrates sensible upsells right into the booking flow so attendees can easily personalize their experience from prearrival to check-in. This is one of those win-win situations: the guest enjoys more control over their experience, which makes the event planner and their client/organization look better — and gives everyone an opportunity to capture more incremental revenue that makes the event more financially successful. Dynamic reporting tools also keep everyone informed with the latest event registrations and hotel bookings.
Planning tools. Event planners have a lot on their plate. It all comes down to managing the smallest details to deliver an exceptional event experience. Cvent event management makes their jobs easier with a drag-and-drop event diagramming tool. With this easy and self-serve solution, planners can diagram tables, seating and trade show floors, as well as plan food and beverage, stage, audio/visual, and entertainment. The tool enables enhanced collaboration between planner and client as well, so there’s less back-and-forth via emails and attachments. Fewer surprises and greater control make for a better experience — and a more successful event for planners and their clients.
Detailed reports. Out-of-block room bookings are stressful. These castaways could potentially mean that the group is on the hook for added expenses. Reduce out of block castaways with detailed reporting around room reservations to identify rogue reservations and bring them back into the room block. Reports also show real-time pick-up, pace, and room list data. Reports also include analysis of event data around attendee engagement, event marketing efficiency, and other key data points throughout the life-cycle of an event.
Close More Business with Group Sales Solutions
In addition to marketing and operations, sales can benefit greatly from tools to help them work smarter and close deals more quickly.
Manual data entry is a drain on sales team morale and effectiveness.
For your group sales team, Cvent offers:
RFP prioritization. An abundance of RFPs is a great problem to have. But it can also be overwhelming, leading sales teams to respond in a haphazard way. Cvent’s Lead Scoring eliminates doubt and sorts all incoming leads by score so sales managers focus on the right opportunities first. These machine-assisted intelligent lead scoring tools align timeframe, season, business mix and profitability to make your events business as lucrative as possible. The tool even evaluates planners’ alternative dates to find the best match for your property!
RFP operations. Sales managers spend a lot of time responding to requests. Manually managing this process is not just a headache but it drastically limits productivity. Reduce the burden on sales (and make their lives easier) with RFP management software that automates manual tasks and improves the quality of responses. For instance, you can easily see scheduled events across the property to avoid wasting precious response time on internal coordination. Sales teams can also generate custom contracts and banquet event orders so they can push less paper and close more business.
Real-time dashboard. Chasing group business is a daily battle. So you need up-to-date analytics to shape your day-to-day. Cvent’s analytics dashboard simplifies your workflow so you can provide the most accurate proposals quickly, and monitor your progress. Integrated metrics, such as response time, decline rate, and insights into declined bids, align property, regional, and national sales teams around the current state of affairs. The CSN business intelligence tool can also benchmark performance and expand on market-level insights to strengthen your hotel’s competitive positioning.
Grow Your Corporate Business with Transient Sales Solutions
Especially in the current climate, scaling your corporate travel business is a challenge. Securing more business means that you must discover transient demand and then move quickly and efficiently to close the best customers for your property. You’ll also want to leverage market intelligence so that you outsmart the competition.
To boost your transient business, Cvent keeps your property visible and nimble, so that you’re well-positioned to find and respond to corporate RFPs. Here’s how:
Enhanced visibility. Thanks to Cvent’s global sourcing network, you’ll learn when new accounts are soliciting hotels in your area so that you can pitch for their business. Coupled with the ability to quickly respond to inbound market leads, this enhanced visibility gives your property a leg up when it comes to transient business.
Digital tools. Marketing to corporate buyers requires consistency. You’ll also benefit from RFP scoring and lead visibility to keep your team on track when pursuing transient demand.
Market intelligence. With GDS access and comp set benchmarking, you’ll have a direct line to transient pricing trends — and see your rejection metrics compared to others for detailed bid loss analysis. Armed with these insights, you can create quality responses that convert more often.
Bringing it All Together
Trust and transparency. Control and collaboration. These are the blocks of success when it comes to group business. Your chosen event management software and group sales software solutions should make it easy for meeting planners engaging in venue selection and attendees who only engage with event technology upon arrival, which positions your property for repeat business as a valuable partner. And, with full real-time sync to your property’s core systems, you’ll avoid tedious data entry and costly availability errors. There are many moving parts, changing conditions, and competing priorities when it comes to group sales; your technology should harness that energy and help your property live up to its full group potential!