Is GTM taking over Revenue Management?

In the STR world, the term “hands-on” takes on a whole new meaning. With lighter team structures and hugely variable volume, it’s not always possible to hire a specialist for each role. That being said, there are often literally two options — do it yourself or automate it.

This in turn creates extremely well-rounded professionals by default. This concept led me to think that revenue management is quickly becoming more and more like a go-to-market strategy every day. But what the heck does “go-to-market” even mean?

Generally speaking, coming from the startup world, it’s about designing products based on indicative data from a variety of sources, then creating unique sales funnels to test against each other, rather than just optimizing variables within a single funnel.

We’re starting to see how this can be leveraged to maximize profitability in hospitality. Of course, we need to be dissecting our KPI’s and “tokenmaxxing” dynamic pricing.

But we also need to be creating products our customers actually want to buy. If you had told me a year ago that we could pre-sell fully paid packages of 100 nights to a customer base that averaged 1.3-night stays two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. It was only by looking at comments flagged in our CRM data that we moved in that direction — and even then, it took a year to refine the offering. (It still doesn’t fit neatly into our accouting, but hey — it’s 100 nights, so…)

In marketing, how can we copy-test new product offerings?

CRM / Guest Lifecycle — what are guests saying when they leave that might help structure better upsells?

Operations — what does the cleaning staff know about the customer profile that you might not?

These are simple examples, but the idea is to take a broader approach — creating useful data from multiple points across the customer journey, and actually applying it.

This GTM layer can be extremely gratifying for anyone looking to move the needle on KPI’s without relying exclusively on the SaaS playbook. No stone should go unturned.

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