To evaluate your property’s current player development efforts
- Do you have a PD function in your casino designed to not only love your best players one-on-one (instead of through the mail), but also to find and create more new best players for your organization? YES or NO?
- Does your PD function offer a bonus and/or incentive program for your hosts (salespeople) that allows them to earn a significant part of their pay through the meeting and exceeding of specific sales targets and goals? YES or NO?
- Does your PD function have a support staff of VIP Reps, Ambassadors, Call-Center hosts, PD coordinators, or what-have-you to ensure your top tier players are properly spoiled while your sales hosts are freed up to go after new sales leads? YES or NO?
- Does your PD function have a career path component that at the very least identifies likely hosts from among your workforce, sets them on a training path towards an executive host, sales or business development position, and includes training and achievement benchmarks to keep them firmly going down the path? YES or NO?
- Does your PD function have a math-based methodology for finding sales leads from among the thousands upon thousands of players in your database and does this methodology end in the depositing of these sales leads into your hosts’ list of daily tasks? YES or NO?
- Does your PD function measure every important metric involved in the development and retention of the best players in your organization, including everything a host does to drive that business and the results achieved by their doing it? YES or NO?
- Does your PD function provide for the easy and efficient method of both taking care of the problems of, and comping to, low to mid-value guests so that your hosts are freed up from these tasks in order to focus on business development of new and unrecognized players? YES or NO?
- Is the comp rate in your hotel (the percent of booked rooms being occupied by a comped player of appropriate worth on the casino floor) routinely in excess of 50%? YES or NO?
- Are your VIP event participation rates routinely above 75%? YES or NO?
- Is your PD function autonomous and focused solely on players of highvalue and potential high-value (rather than being lumped in with other player direct mail programs, promotional programs, coupon programs, etc.)? YES or NO?
Okay, how’d you do? If you scored 80% or higher in YES answers then congratulations, you have a sales-focused and powerful revenue-driving PD function. From 50% to 80%, please feel free to pat yourself on the back for just a moment and then start crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s because you still have some work to do.
And if your YES answers fall below 50% then you need to get to work and look at how you sell to high-value players in your marketplace.
Why?
Because everyone else in your market is either trying to steal those players from you or keep you from stealing theirs. And within the ten questions listed above are the key critical issues we find when evaluating a property’s current PD efforts. Service-based PD is very effective at keeping your best players happy, but it does little in terms of driving incremental or new revenues, developing new players of high-worth, and counteracting player defections to other properties and markets. And if you have a service-based PD function, then most likely your standard answer to the questions above was No.
So take a good hard look at your PD function and measure it to these questions. How does it stack up? It should give you a good idea of what and where to focus your efforts on improving and perfecting your sales efforts against the players most able to move your numbers and achieve the sales goals you have set for your property.
Good luck with this, and remember, if you need help with the above, give us a call… that’s why we’re here.
