The Hospitality Sales Trust Signals Brands Can't Afford to Ignore
Some of the best salespeople in hospitality are sitting at home right now, unseen and unused, costing their companies real revenue.
Not because they lack skill.
Not because the product isn't good.
But because the buyers they're trying to reach have already done their homework, formed an opinion, and quietly moved on, all without ever sending a single reply.
That's the uncomfortable reality Cory Falter, host of the InnSync Show, is determined to surface.
He recently sat down with Byron Bunda, Sales Manager at RoomMaster, to dig into why online presence has become the most under-leveraged sales asset in the hospitality industry, and what brands need to do before they become invisible.
The Decision Happens Long Before the Demo
Imagine a hotel group is evaluating a new property management system. Before their VP of Operations books a single demo, they've watched an unedited training video on YouTube made by a guesthouse owner in Wales. They've read through Reddit threads where hoteliers give their unfiltered take on every platform they've used. They've cross-referenced Hotel Tech Report, skimmed Capterra reviews, and quietly formed a shortlist.
By the time a salesperson gets on a discovery call, that buyer is already 80 percent of the way to a decision.
"By the time they actually get into the traditional sales process, the discovery call, the demo, they've already really formed such a strong impression," says Byron. "It's just about solidifying whatever research they've gathered on their own."
This isn't a new phenomenon; it's an accelerated one.
The information asymmetry that once gave salespeople their edge, being the primary guide through a complex buying process, has largely eroded. Today's hospitality buyer has access to infinite resources before they ever engage with sales. The salesperson who assumes they're still the main source of information is playing a game that already ended.
Marcus Sheridan, who literally wrote the book on content-driven sales, They Ask, You Answer, has tracked this shift for years. The companies that win aren't the ones with the slickest pitch decks. They're the ones who answered the buyer's questions before the buyer even thought to ask.
Trust Isn't Built in the Inbox Anymore
Referrals still matter. Word of mouth still matters. But what's changed is what happens after the referral.
Cory says, "If someone says, 'Hey, Byron's fantastic, I met him at a trade show, product seems fantastic,' that sounds amazing. But I'm finding myself going home, doing my due diligence, and vetting Byron and RoomMaster online to find out if he checks off on that conversation we had in person."
That vetting happens on LinkedIn, on Google, on review platforms, and increasingly through AI tools that aggregate and synthesize everything a brand has put into the world. Or failed to.
This is where EEAT comes in: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Originally a Google framework for evaluating content quality, EEAT has quietly become the invisible scorecard buyers apply to every brand and salesperson they research. They may not know the acronym. But they immediately feel its absence.
"It used to be that you had a lot more success getting people to respond to your email or pick up the phone," Byron explains. "But nowadays, as technology advances, people are just getting more and more inundated with outbound messaging. So when it comes time to actually engage, one of the most important things is not just who is showing up in my inbox. It's who do I already know is trustworthy and reputable."
That opinion forms passively. Every time a potential buyer scrolls LinkedIn during a coffee break and sees your name, reads your take on a topic, or notices that you haven't posted in three months, a judgment is being filed away. Subconsciously. Quietly. Permanently.
Hiding Your Pricing Is No Longer a Strategy
Few things expose a brand's trust deficit faster than refusing to talk about price.
The old logic made sense: complex, enterprise-level deals require custom quotes, and putting numbers online invites misinterpretation.
Fair enough.
But the response to that complexity has often been to provide nothing at all, forcing every prospect onto a Zoom call before they get a single data point. Buyers have noticed, and they've found workarounds.
"If you're just trying to force everybody onto a Zoom meeting before you give them a single number, they're not gonna be pushed around like that," Byron says. "They're just gonna go to whatever ChatGPT told them, whatever they saw in a Reddit post that's eight years old, and they're gonna use that information because you weren't helpful."
The irony is that the vacuum a brand creates by staying silent gets filled anyway, just not by the brand. AI tools will surface a number. Reddit threads will surface a number. A SaaS product now exists specifically to help buyers figure out what other buyers are actually paying for competing SaaS products. That's not speculation. It's already happening.
"I've seen companies get themselves in trouble where somebody says, 'Wait a second. I was online and found out that this other hotel has half as many rooms as we do and they're getting a way better price,'" Byron recounts. "'What's up with that?'"
The answer isn't to pretend pricing doesn't exist. It's about leading the conversation rather than getting caught avoiding it. A starting range, a tiered framework, and a clear explanation of what drives cost variability: these aren't concessions; they're trust signals. Brands that publish them own the narrative. Brands that don't hand it to a 2017 Reddit thread.
Consistency Is the Compound Interest of Credibility
Even the best content strategy falls apart without consistency. And in hospitality sales, inconsistency is everywhere.
Pull up the LinkedIn profile of the average hotel tech sales rep, and you’ll likely see the same pattern: long gaps between posts, occasional company resharing, and very little original perspective.
"Most of the time when I look at another rep's LinkedIn profile, the last time they posted was over a month ago, and most of the time it was just a repost of something from the company's own page," Byron observes. "Even if you just get into a cadence of having a post once a week, that's a good place to start."
The temptation for salespeople new to content creation is to chase engagement, the selfies, the shout-outs, the posts that get thirty-seven likes and feel validating. But that engagement is largely coming from other salespeople, not from the VP of Revenue Management at a regional hotel group who is quietly deciding whether to put your product on their shortlist.
"My highest performing posts were the ones about being an AE in tech sales," Byron admits. "But then I came to this realization: I'm not selling to other reps. That water cooler banter may be good for likes, but it's not helping position me as an expert to the VP of revenue management with a hotel group."
The lurkers are real. They just don't announce themselves. Byron received a detailed direct message from a VP of IT who had read an article he'd written, told him it was insightful, said it reflected his own experience, and then went on to buy. The public reaction to that article had looked like a dud.
"Don't stop just because you didn't get the dopamine rush of a lot of likes on your posts," he says. "You don't know what actual signal is being received on the other end."
What Hospitality Salespeople Can Actually Do Right Now
None of this requires becoming a full-time content creator or hiring a production crew. It requires specificity and a willingness to be useful in public.
Cory's recommendation is simple: write down the top five questions your prospects ask, or the five problems they keep describing, and start creating content around those.
A LinkedIn article that answers one of those questions in depth, published once a month, becomes a searchable, credible signal of expertise.
Each article can be broken into shorter weekly posts. A short video walking through one key point, filmed on a phone while walking, adds the human layer that written content alone can't replicate.
"There's a psychological element," Cory notes. "People tend to trust people more when they put themselves out there on video. Your audience begins to know you and recognize you as an authority in that space."
Byron's approach for the upcoming HITEC conference in San Antonio illustrates the principle well. Rather than simply sharing an invite to the Lone Star Social, an event RoomMaster is hosting for independent hoteliers, the more powerful move is to answer what independent hospitality actually means to you. What have independent hotels taught you? What does it feel like to stay in one versus a branded chain? The event gets promoted, but the content comes from a real place.
"Rather than some scripted marketing message, it's something you can speak from the heart," Byron says.
That distinction, scripted versus genuine, is exactly what buyers are scanning for. Regurgitated press releases get scrolled past. Actual opinions from someone with skin in the game get read, shared, and remembered.
When Two Products Are Equal, Trust Wins
Here's the scenario that ties everything together. A hotel group has narrowed their search to two PMS platforms. Similar pricing. Similar feature sets. Both have decent reviews. Both have responsive sales teams.
What tips it?
"When they get down to those two options that are priced similarly and can largely give them the same functionality, what ends up tipping the scales is that trust signal, that authenticity," Byron says. "To the salesperson, the contract is the end. But to the customer, that's only the beginning."
That last line is worth sitting with. The buyer knows that signing a contract starts a relationship, not ends one. They're evaluating whether they believe the salesperson will still be there, still be honest, still follow through once the commission is paid. Online trust signals are the only preview of that future relationship available before the contract is signed.
"You can tell somebody till you're blue in the face that if you sign the contract, I'm gonna stick with you and we're gonna accomplish all these things," Byron continues. "But it's actually the trust you've built up with those signals that's gonna make the person either believe you or not."
Cory's own results back this up. Speaking invitations from the San Diego County Lodging Association and HSMAI LA came directly from his content output. New client conversations are now arriving via DM, with prospects citing specific videos or articles as the reason they reached out. The pipeline isn't coming from cold outreach. It's the cumulative weight of showing up consistently, saying something worth reading, and letting buyers find their way into the conversation on their own terms.
That's not a marketing strategy. It's a long game. And in hospitality, where relationships have always been the currency, it turns out the internet is just a bigger room.
