Performing a performance audit diagnostic

Sales and revenue management departments

Diagnostic 360 is a Yield Tactics consulting service created to provide general management of travel companies with a complete vision of their organization's abilities to face future challenges. Four angles of analysis are available (organizational transformation, degree of digital transformation, return on investment of commercial expenses, and operational agility) to audit the sales, marketing, distribution, pricing, revenue management and project management departments.

Diagnostic 360 is a Yield Tactics proprietary framework that adapts to the needs, organizations, and budgets of travel companies in order to quickly deliver a comprehensive report on the situation with up to 300 audit points and benchmarks with best practices of the industry and the competition. Our recommendations will allow you to identify the areas of opportunity that offer the greatest potential for return on investment, and the vectors for improvement to make your organization more efficient.

Organizational transformation

Evaluating the organizational transformation capacities of a travel company means above all understanding its culture, mission, and values in the context of a changing market environment.

Then we look at the direction it wants to take, and to what extent this vision is understood and reflected in the departments plans.

With this in mind, we consider the conditions of implementation of the transformation of sales and revenue management entities: How is the vision reflected in the objectives and projects? To what degree are employees adhering to change? Are the people, systems, and resources correctly calibrated? Is there an efficient monitoring system to report on the progress of transformation programs?

Focus is also on the management of internal projects, by analyzing past and current projects, with the objective of proposing a strengthening of governance and management methods aimed at delivering projects on time and according to initial budgets.

At the end of this diagnosis, recommendations are issued by Yield Tactics Senior Consultants, which allow the leaders of travel companies to accelerate their transformation and calmly embark on complex transversal projects.

Degree of digital transformation

The first degree of digital transformation is digitization, and the strict use of paper to legal constraints, to achieve cost reduction targets and simplify archiving.

The second degree is the digitalization of processes, with the objective of improving productivity.

Then comes the third degree, the famous digital transformation, which consists of seizing opportunities using new information technologies. It is a paradigm shift that many companies are struggling to grasp – it is no longer a question of turning to technology to solve a problem or improve a process, but of having a permanent technological watch to identify which competitive advantages can be captured through the use of digital.

The capacity for digital transformation of an organization is the ease with which management and employees can evolve from the first degree to the third degree. If the transition is made possible thanks to software and IT equipment, the real challenges lie in the ability of general management to understand all the strategic opportunities of digital transformation, in the skills of intermediate management levels to propose in-depth evolutions processes, and in the employees’ sensitivity to change.

Through the prisms of the customer experience and the flow of decision-making information, Yield Tactics can provide an exact view of your situation and of the path to be taken to establish a true culture of continuous improvement of your organization's digital experiences.

ROI of commercial expenses

The return on investment (ROI) of commercial expenses component of Yield Tactics Diagnostic 360 framework aims to optimize the expenses and resources allocated to the sales and distribution functions in order to focus them on the sectors where each dollar spent is the most profitable in terms of volume, average price, and conversion rate.

While it is commonly accepted that direct sales on the Internet have the best cost-benefit ratio, it will still be necessary to understand the real sales costs of this channel by integrating technological expenses (systems, service providers) and customer acquisition costs (digital advertising, commissions paid to business providers such as metasearch websites and affiliation partners).

For other distribution channels, and below the level of granularity of a country, the real costs of marketing and distribution are often not well known, which leaves the field open to great optimization opportunities. Obvious distortions can appear when Diagnostic 360 compares the cost of sales to turnover ratio at the level of a market segment or travel agency by integrating components such as commissions, discounts used for margin, incentives, back-ends, allocated marketing funds, etc.

The practical applications of this audit outcomes are generally the reorganization of the portfolios of the sales representatives, the reduction of the level of service in non-priority market segments, the reallocation of expenditure from traditional communication to digital, and more relevant negotiations of the marketing funds given to travel agencies.

Yield Tactics Senior Consultants will offer development opportunities in line with your business strategy and your corporate culture with the aim of achieving an annual increase in turnover of 1% to 3% with constant resources.

Knowing the full costs of sales and distribution enables actions to be taken to reduce them by up to 15% at constant turnover.

Operational agility

Organizational agility is the ability of a business to quickly adapt to changing market conditions.

Counter-intuitively, accessing agility implies having solid foundations, with an efficient organization chart, well-established job descriptions and processes, a PMO (Project Management Office) infrastructure capable of managing cross-functional projects, and scalable technological solutions.

Making your business more agile is above all a matter of mindset: at all hierarchical levels, change should be viewed as an opportunity, not as a threat.

Yield Tactics Diagnostic 360 firstly focuses on auditing the organizational roots of travel companies, and then more concretely on evaluating sales and revenue management critical processes: speed of decision and execution, degree of employee empowerment, technological maturity, level of innovation culture, and scalability of business operations.

Yield Tactics Senior Consultants make recommendations to accelerate the speed at which companies in the travel industry meet consumer expectations, identify market opportunities, innovate, and implement new strategies.

This diagnostic is strongly recommended for organizations facing major changes in market conditions, restructuring, or sizing investments.

The Chord diagram above represents the intensity of interactions within a travel company. It is carried out thanks to the analysis of data collected remotely as part of a hybrid consulting mission (remote and on site). Representation makes it possible to identify the processes and exchanges that consume the most time, the interactions that are under-represented, and even opportunities for digitization. This preliminary study can be the starting point of a discussion to orient the on-site consulting service on processes offering the greatest opportunities for optimization and value creation.

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