Best Practices: The Centralized Events Dept. (Part 2)
This is the second post in a two-part series on the organizational structure of event sales at large and/or growing hospitality groups. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.
In Part 1 I talked about why centralizing your event sales is a good idea as your hospitality group grows. In this post, I want to talk about how to actually organize your operations. For the record, the model I outline below isn’t the only way to successfully run your events operations. But it is the most widely used model we’ve seen used.
Groups with successful event operations at scale tend to organize their operations similarly:
- Oversight: This can come from the COO, Director of Operations, Director of Sales, or simply the most senior Sales Coordinator. Regardless of who takes this role, we’ve always see that someone within the organization is setting goals for the entire Sales Team on a monthly and quarterly basis.
- Sales team: Usually 1 sales coordinator per 2-3 restaurants, with the entire team sitting in the main office (either a separate office, or office at one restaurant location). Because coordinators may want to meet prospective customers for walkthroughs from time to time, it’s best to choose a central location for this team.
- “Day of” team: Each restaurant should have 1-2 staff members designated to be responsible for day-of events responsibilities (on top of their normal responsibilities). This includes greeting customers, managing staff working the event, and generally making sure the event goes smoothly. This is generally an AGM or someone with a lot of experience in the good title we’ve come across for this role is ‘Event Captain.’
As an aside, it’s tough to coordinate among all these stakeholders without a system like Gather - a system all your salespeople can access that holds all your key events information in one place.
Groups with successful event operations also share some other key similarities around the incentives they put in place to reward their people for their accomplishments:
- Sales commissions: Your sales team deserves to share in the business they build for you, especially if they’re proactively selling. 3-5% of F&B is the usual band, but we’ve seen up to 8-10%.
- ‘Day of’ Team compensation: These folks are taking on additional responsibility - compensate them for doing so! We’ve seen a small % of F&B or a reasonable salary bump, and both seem to work well.
- Overall team incentives: Did you team just beat their monthly sales goal? You should celebrate! Make sure they have something they’re working towards. At Gather, we try to celebrate with a team activity when we beat a sales goal or hit a new development milestone. For example, we got some royal feet treatment after beating last month’s sales goal.
As I mentioned, this is simply advice; I have no doubt that there are other ways to organize and motivate your team. But, these are some best practices we’ve come across.
As always, feel free to reach out as your business starts growing or if you’re considering an organizational change. We’re here to help in any way we can!
