Create bookings from RFP inquiries
With the Salesforce Lightning experience, the Open Activities and Activity History sections of a record are combined into one Activity timeline. With this change, Open Activities is now called Upcoming & Overdue, and Activity History displays by date. The steps below might vary based on the experience you are using.
When you are ready to bid on the business that is sent to your property from MeetingBroker, you can create a booking from the RFP inquiry. After you detail the booking, you can upload your rates to a proposal. As you update the booking details, those changes are sent back to MeetingBroker as business data.
Depending on your MeetingBroker policy, creating a booking and sending a proposal can satisfy escalation on the inquiry.
To create a booking from an RFP inquiry
- Open the RFP inquiry.
- MeetingBroker provides more information than you can see on the inquiry page, so make sure you do the following to review all the RFP requirements:
- Click View Recap. The RFP Recap window is where you can view details about the group's guestroom and event requirements. You can also see who was notified about the RFP based on the MeetingBroker assignment rules.
- In the RFP History section, open any attachments that were sent with the RFP. Meeting planners sometimes detail their room and event requirements in external documents and attach them to the RFP.
- In the Open Activities and Activity History sections, review any tasks that were created from MeetingBroker notifications. Your property needs to use the RFP activities feature to see these notification tasks.
- Click Create Booking. The Create Booking from Inquiry page displays.
If you need more time to evaluate the inquiry before creating a booking, click Confirm Receipt. This changes the RFP Milestone from Published to Viewed, which can satisfy escalation on the inquiry depending on your property's MeetingBroker policy.
- Use the following options to manage the inquiry's activities:
Copy all activities from the inquiry to the booking - Select this checkbox if you want to copy all activities from the inquiry to the new booking. Pending activities display in the Open Activities section and completed activities display in the Activity History section on the booking.
Open activities also display as two separate tasks on your Home page, one for the inquiry and one for the booking. This can be an important consideration if your tasks queue is already lengthy.
Mark all existing inquiry activities completed - Select this checkbox if you want to close all open activities on the inquiry. This removes those tasks from your Home page and moves them to the Activity History section of the inquiry record.
This option does not close the inquiry's activities before they are copied to the booking. Activities are copied in their current state and then they are marked complete on the inquiry only.
- Review the account, contact, agency, and agent information. Using the information from the MeetingBroker RFP, a search is made for a matching account, contact, agency, and agent.
- If at least one matching record is found, the related fields begin with 'Select Existing.' Click the arrow to see if multiple matches are available. To open the record, to verify a match, click View.
- If no match is found, the related fields begin with 'Create New.' Leave this default to create a new record.
- If you want to put the booking in an umbrella account, search for and select an existing account in the Account field. An account is required to convert an inquiry to a booking. After an account is selected, you can only select contacts that already exist on that account, or create a new contact. If necessary, you can select a contact from a different account on the booking record after the booking is created.
- If needed, select a different owner for the booking.
- Under Room Type Allocation, each of the room types selected by the sender map to the corresponding room types at your property. If those room types are not available, change them using the Lowest Group Available numbers and the Availability button to decide which rooms to select.
- Click Create Booking. The new booking opens in Prospect status, and the status of the inquiry changes to Qualified.
- Go to the Guestroom section of the Booking page and click Details. A room block is created based on the guestroom requirements specified in MeetingBroker.
- Update the room counts as needed and enter the appropriate rates. See Block guestrooms.
- Click Save.
- Click Function Diary at the top of the Booking page. The booking events specified in the RFP details are created and placed in the Unassigned room.
- Drag each event to an available function room.
- Double-click each event to open the Quick Create window.
If you see 'unknown' in your RFP Recap, or your events are created with blank event classifications or function room setups, see your administrator. Your administrator needs to update the mapping of your setup values in MeetingBroker. See MeetingBroker Help.
- Update the default event name and enter the event's forecast and rental information, as needed. See Create events in the Function Diary.
- Click Save. The Quick Create window closes and the name of the event displays on the space block in the Function Diary.
- When you are ready to bid on the business, send a proposal.
Make sure the booking is fully detailed before you click Send Proposal. Most of the booking data only uploads the first time you click Send Proposal. Any updates you make to the booking after that require you to manually enter them in both your booking and your proposal.