Grand Hotels International owns and operates ten prestige Hotel Grand Chancellor properties at sites throughout New Zealand and Australia, including Auckland, Auckland Airport, Wellington and Christchurch. As part of fulfilling this growth strategy, the group recognized the need to implement a more efficient system to manage sales activities and communication with existing and prospective customers.
Historically, each local sales team operated in almost complete isolation, with little communication between the teams or sharing of customer or sales opportunity information. This limited interaction lead to a lack of collaboration between the teams, created an administrative burden, and unnecessarily hindered the sales process.
Without a central system for managing sales processes and customer information, senior management were also unable to effectively manage or measure sales activity. Recognizing a strategic opportunity to improve sales performance, the group went to tender, inviting competitive bids from a number of solution providers.
The group chose Sage CRM as the new platform for managing sales and marketing applications, due mostly to its extensive sales support functionality, ease of development and the group’s own familiarity with web-based applications. Knowing that it needed an experienced partner to ensure project success,
The new system needed to meet key objectives which were to operate a consolidated system for managing sales activity from leads to business received and to measure sales activity in terms of actual sales processes and the business derived from that activity.
The project took just six weeks from beginning the installation to going live. After an initial two week period of internal training and development, the new system was implemented state-by-state in Australia, then incorporated into the New Zealand operation. “The biggest challenge was not knowing what we didn’t know,” says group marketing manager David Hancock. “We knew what we needed but with this technology, there’s almost limitless potential for measurement and sales control. Our sales activities and CRM have evolved with the technology available to us. Our current version of CRM looks totally different to the original launch version and the way we use it has changed dramatically,” says Hancock.
Utilizing Sage CRM and mapping workflow and business processes has given management a better understanding of how sales are driven within the organization. This understanding has allowed the group to identify new opportunities, target areas for improvement, and to better manage resources, improve customer service, and enhance sales performance. “Our general managers now have a much better understanding of sales performance due to the ease of reporting on sales activity and outcomes,” says Hancock.
The key benefit delivered by the new system is that it allows Hotel Grand Chancellor to measure the effectiveness of their sales team and bring a greater transparency and accountability across all of the sales teams. “All sales people can see the activity of all other sales people, making everything very transparent.
The system has encouraged communication and collaboration between sales people, and the transparency has promoted collective cross-selling to achieve improved results,” he says. “We’re more focused than ever on results, and our investment in Sage CRM gives us a tremendous tool to better service our customers, and to maximize our sales opportunities right across the region.”
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