How to Make Effective Upselling Part of Your Hotel’s Culture?

In hospitality, you’re always trying to do just a little bit better, both in terms of the experience you offer guests and the revenue you generate. Implementing new ideas and making them part of your property’s culture can seem challenging. But with the right training, it’s easier than you may think. In this piece, you’ll learn how to use a modern approach to staff development to encourage your team to tap into new incremental revenue streams.

Proper Onboarding: Setting Your Team Up for Success

Completely overhauling your processes demands a lot of time and effort. Nonetheless, it may become necessary from time to time. However, you’ll have to do a lot less of that if you commit to promoting best practices and high standards from your staff’s first working day,

One area this rings most true for is upselling. Whether you do it at the front desk, via a digital upselling platform, or combine both approaches, getting your team on board immediately makes a big difference to your success. Promote the right mindset, soft skills, and creativity needed in upselling; your staff is on the best way to mastering this important art.

An online course is a great way to do this for your existing team and new members. Employees can go through the material at their own pace, enjoy the learning experience and acquire new skills they’ll be eager to test at work.

How Solid Training can Improve Your Upselling and Benefit Your Entire Operation

When done right, upselling goes way beyond just generating some ancillary revenue. Its primary purpose should be to delight your guests and empower them to personalize their stay. With the help of the right approach, upselling can even reduce your staff’s workload and boost your brand image. All you need to do to get these benefits? Solid training and onboarding for your staff. Here’s why.

Training to Promote Ownership

Even if you already have a dedicated team, there’s a chance you could get them even more involved. The more staff understand their actions’ greater impact, the more likely they will take ownership and go the extra mile. Thorough training is one way to encourage this. With a high-trust environment at work, it builds accountability and helps you get closer to achieving your KPIs, Warren Tanner writes on the Modern Manager blog.

When it comes to upselling, proper training will help your team see that, for example, a digital upselling tool is not meant to replace but to support them. Provide in-depth training or a course on the topic to deepen their understanding. This underscores that they remain an integral part of this process.

Boosting Motivation Through Education

Many managers struggle with keeping staff motivated in the long run. While recognition and good working conditions play a huge role, there’s another piece to the puzzle. A recent study in human resources management showed that training could play a massive part in improving and maintaining employee motivation. The takeaway: invest in building your staff’s knowledge and skills to see them and your business thrive.

For the best results, your training should be of high quality. That includes both how it’s delivered and by whom. One study shows that if different experts each host sessions on a specific topic, hotels see better results than if the same person hosts all training. It’s also important to note that today, many staff prefer ‘modern ways of training’, which can include interactive online courses and workshops rather than traditional classroom settings. Finally, the content must offer facts and insights and relevant, actionable tips on how to put the newfound knowledge into practice.

You probably already have training and onboarding procedures, but when was the last time you reviewed them? Now might be a good time to review these processes, especially in light of recent events.

How Some Hotels Are Already Using Online Courses to Teach Upselling

The team at Elite Hotels believes that combining service and sales is the best way to increase total revenue. One way to do that is to implement upselling. Education on the topic has been one of the key ways for Elite Hotels to get their teams to participate and take ownership of the upselling initiative. An online course on upselling has made it easy for them to scale this effort and drive home the point that staff should take every chance to provide better service and boost revenue.

Lopesan Hotel Group has been using an e-learning platform for some time now. It has brought great results by making staff training and onboarding more efficient and scalable. Their idea was to create a flexible, intuitive, and accessible platform that caters to their staff’s needs and preferences. Recently, they added a course on upselling to their platform. The goal is to make it part of their onboarding process, so new team members learn how to generate revenue and guest experience with upselling from day one.

If you’re already upselling at your hotel, there’s probably already a degree of training associated with the practice at your hotel. You could standardize the extent of your knowledge, but the time and effort needed to offer comprehensive training that covers all bases is something few of us can afford.

Free Benchmark Report: Learn What Fellow Hotels Earn with Upselling