Suppliers can improve the sales process by researching their planner audience, listening to them and planning a strategy to change their approach before they make the sales call and then build on it as they continue the relationship.

This is according to Mike Pusateri and Jonathan Gray with Vantage Strategy, who presented findings of the buyer/seller relationships study sponsored by the MPI Foundation at IMEX America today.

The study looked at how different people want to be communicated to, and much like target groups in consumer marketing surveys, Vantage decided it could approach meeting planners the same way. 

From the supplier side, though, there is not one type of sales person. Working on communication strategies is key, as is getting fundamentals right by learning how to better meet planners' needs.  

Look for the full results of this study on MPIweb.org in November. In the meantime, view the video below to learn more about the five types of meeting planner personas.  

Ted Teng, president and CEO of The Leading Hotels of the World, recently told HotelWorldNetwork that the development of new hotels should be based on consumer demand, not on a company's need to grow (which has been the case the past several decades). Part of what he had to say:

"Sixty new chain brands have been added in the past sixty months, and they all want to have a hotel in key markets to support brand growth. These are the wrong types of ‘demand’ to build new hotels. Hotels developed for the wrong reasons will not only hurt the financial viability of that hotel, it will hurt the entire market due to desperate rate-led competition. Due to the high fixed cost and low incremental cost, perishable inventory, overlapping distribution channels, volume mentality (heads in beds), incidental revenue hope (mostly not profitable) and lack of business acumen, many will resort to discounting in order to attempt to fill the empty hotel rooms. Revenue management is used as a remedy for flawed development. The best remedy for flawed development is to just say no."

Teng also weighed in on synchronized facility and business cycles, as well as controlling distribution.