WHITBREAD HOTELS & RESTAURANTS
Going For Gold
An innovative training and incentive programme

Whitbread Hotels and Restaurants (WHR) is the largest company of its kind in the UK. It's brands, like Premier Inn, Brewers Fayre, Beefeater and Costa Coffee, are household names.

However, even the biggest and the best are affected by the recession. Which is why WHR called in MG Sales Performance. We were tasked with creating a company-wide cultural change programme to build a world-class sales culture and help them remain competitive in tough times.

The result was Going For Gold - an innovative training and incentive programme that gave operators the sales behaviours and skills to sell their businesses out of the recession.

Investing in the future

This programme was a major investment for Whitbread. In 2009 they spent more than £2 million on a blend of incentives and training for 36 area managers and 1,800 operational managers from Premier Inn. In 2010 they invested a further £1 million+ on incentives, creating a sales competency framework for the business and providing ongoing coaching and support for management.

MG has also devised and carried out a UK-wide programme of 900 Mystery Customer Experience telephone enquiries per month to the hotels and restaurants. This has created awareness for everyday sales opportunities, measured sales effectiveness at each site and improved sales performance.

Boosting business

Did the investment pay off? The results speak for themselves:

• 1048 new business accounts gained between May 2009 and April 2010
• Total sales from brand restaurants up by 6%.
• Revenue per room is up 7.9% - compared to a drop of 11.1% over the whole sector.
• Mystery Customer Experience call results increased across the company from 35% to 62%

Our client, John Kerslake, Director of WHR Sales was certainly pleased.

"MG Sales Performance has helped develop and execute a comprehensive, large-scale and compelling sales training programme. No compromise has been made in terms of content development, delivery, review and follow-up. Our financial results are a credit to the excellence with which this project was executed."

Ongoing benefits

The programme is designed to provide benefits for years to come. All operational and multi site managers have participated in a programme of self-assessment against the WHR sales competency framework. This provides a record of the levels of sales skills throughout the business, and will help WHR create tailored training and coaching programmes for the continuing development of their people.