What Hampton Inn Can Teach You About Sales Planning

Let’s be honest. It can be a lonely world as a sales leader, especially when it comes time to hold the forecast meeting. You often feel like you’re the only one who cares. You’re the only one who’s holding feet to the fire when it comes to making the number.

You’re in the thick of the fourth quarter, and you’re likely scrambling with your own sellers trying to pull out the big wins, or even any piece of business to make your number.

Does it feel like you fall into this fire drill every quarter? Every year?

Why does it seem that you’re the only one who cares about the forecast?

Although it may feel like it, you’re not alone. There are hundreds of sales leaders, just like you, who are in the final stretch of 2014 having the same fire drill mentality.

The reason? 

We fail to build rep accountability into the sales planning process.

Even veteran sales managers sometimes struggle to effectively extend accountability for the forecast to the rep level. As a result, your sales team is one giant ball of stress as the end of the quarter nears. Sellers, plagued with poor planning processes, try to squeeze that revenue number out of opportunities already in the pipeline. They lose “territory perspective” while scrambling to close deals and desperately searching for ways to hit the number by the end of the year. To get customers to move, they resort to discounting their price to get deals through that aren’t fully baked. This means lost margins for the seller and your company, as well as ongoing pressure from the customer to discount even more when it’s time to renew a deal. 

That’s a fundamental problem.

If your sales team follows this practice repeatedly, you’re likely missing your number over and over again. Even if you come close, you’re setting yourself up for a hurricane at the end of every quarter.

Don’t scrape the bottom of the pipeline barrel every quarter to make your number. Shift the mindset of your sales organization to drive a reliable forecast by building pipeline at the territory level. Extend the accountability of the forecast by developing a sales franchise mindset.

The Power of the Franchise

For the past three years, Entrepreneur Magazine has rated Hampton Inn the number one U.S. franchise for its customer loyalty and financial strength, including its ability to increase unit revenue every year. If I buy a Hampton Inn franchise, I can leverage the power of the Hampton Brand to make my business successful. I can take advantage of their corporate marketing, their advertising, and their brand recognition to pull people into my specific location.

Hampton Inn’s franchise model provides me the rights to operate my business under their namesake, and I use their name to drive business. My franchise won’t be successful if I don’t leverage the brand. Similarly, if I don’t do the work necessary to promote my own location, the Hampton Inn brand can’t do much for me. 

As a sales leader, to extend the accountability of the forecast, your salespeople need to view their territories similar to how a franchise owner views his/her business. They need to see “their piece of dirt” as their own business unit, and more importantly understand that they’re responsible for their unit of profit.

The best sellers are the ones who own their territories. They’re accountable for the territory’s revenue. Just like a franchisee, they know how to leverage the power of the company brand to earn revenue.

This sales franchise mindset also drives your sellers to build pipeline at the territory level. If they see their territory as a business unit, they see the big picture. They’re not worried about how many reservations they have for Monday. They’re worried about booking rooms the whole tourist season.

The veteran sales leaders we have at Force Management would say that most selling organizations spend 90% of their time operating around the opportunities, or the Monday night reservation.

That’s a mistake.

When your sales team has a sales franchise mindset, the level of building pipeline is elevated. Your question to reps is, “what is your franchise doing right now to generate pipeline?”
Working smarter means your reps build pipeline at the territory level, and you as a sales leader coach them to focus higher with top-down planning.

Predictability is a key element of effective sales planning. A franchise mindset drives predictability because it 1) promotes reps to focus on the territory to build qualified pipeline and 2) provides managers the line-of-sight they need to:

• Effectively coach their reps to drive revenue
• Mitigate territory risk 
• Identify the gaps that an individual seller may need to address in order to make his/her number each quarter. 

Most importantly, when your sales team views their territory as a franchise, it extends the accountability of the forecast and stops the surprises at the end of the quarter. Learn more about how you can adopt this mindset.