The hotel has also created a special team from within the food and beverage department. With an specific orientation towards sales, the team targets prospective customers for not only the food and beverage services offered by the hotel, but also tries to develop various packages and promotions and even collates feedback from customers.

Le Meridien, New Delhi, a five-star deluxe hotel, has a franchise agreement with Le Meridien Hotels and Resorts, a division of UK-based Forte Hotels, which has over 100 upscale Le Meridien hotels worldwide.

What made the hotel go all out and suddenly recast each employee as a salesperson? Explains LeMeridien New Delhi's general manager Tarun Thakral: ``In view of the current market situation and the growing competition, new and innovative measures need to be taken in order to sustain one's market share.''

Such measures also become necessary to create differentiation, as all hotels have a similar product to offer and claim to match it up with ``high quality'' service, according to Thakral.

So, Le Meridien now believes that the ``cutting edge'' can only be achieved by looking inwards-at its employees, who can create pull for the hotel and its services.

Here is how it works: employees are constantly reminded that their prime function is sales and on a regular basis, each employee is expected to chip in with names of possible clients, who could be friends or acquaintances.

The leads thus generated are used to make a database of contacts-which can then be converted by the Meridien sales teams.

In addition, the 15 department heads at the hotel -- from housekeeping to engineering-are expectedto dedicate one day of the week to the sales function alone.

Armed with special rates and packages, each of the department heads makes sales calls to corporates they interact with during the course of their duty, asking them to try out the hotel and the range of services it offers. For example, the housekeeping manager may `sell' the hotel's services to a utilities company that she frequently interacts with. Depending upon clients and their arrangement with the hotel, further discounts are also considered,according to the Le Meridien director (sales and marketing) Meena Bhatia. ``There is a daily meeting of all the department heads and once a week, we make a presentation to them about the response their efforts have generated,'' she adds.

For a hotel which generates almost 35 percent of its total revenue from food & beverage sales (including banquets), it makes sense to go all out and sell even each restaurant separately. ``The target audience here is high-spending clients, who are perhaps not familiarwith allthe restaurants that we have to offer,'' says Thakral.

So far, the hotel has desisted from offering any monetary reward to its employees if they are successful in bringing in a client. However employees do enjoy the limelight for their contribution, through recognition schemes. Though it may be a little early to judge if all the efforts have borne fruit, Takral and Bhatia say that ``things are better than before.'' From internal customers, Meridien has clearly turned its employees into external ambassadors.