Forty people, sometime in March, what are your rates
That is a real enquiry, more or less. It arrives in the general events inbox, or through an agency platform, or as a web form where half the fields were optional. Your sales coordinator replies asking for exact dates, the room layout, whether they need breakouts, lunch or just refreshments, and whether anyone is staying over.
The reply comes two days later with some of the answers. Another email goes out. By the time the brief is complete enough to price, the booker has had proposals from venues that guessed and sent something straight away, even if it was wrong.
Meanwhile the enquiries that did come with a full brief are waiting in the same inbox, in the same queue, behind the vague ones.
Enquiries come in through too many doors
A corporate venue typically receives enquiries by email, phone, website form, venue-finding agencies and repeat clients writing directly to whoever looked after them last time. Each channel captures different fields in a different shape. None of them makes the booker commit to the details that actually determine price and availability.
- Date flexibility is rarely stated, so staff do not know whether to offer alternatives.
- Delegate numbers are given as a range, and room choice depends on which end is right.
- Room style (theatre, cabaret, classroom, boardroom) is left out, and it changes capacity.
- Catering expectations are unclear: a day delegate package or just refreshments.
- Overnight accommodation is mentioned in passing or not at all.
Slow proposals lose to fast wrong ones
Corporate bookers and agents compare venues side by side, often on a deadline set by their own manager. A proposal that arrives late, even a better one, is competing with options already on the shortlist. The venue that asked sensible questions in one message and sent a clear proposal the same day tends to win the conversation.
Inside the venue, the cost is repetition. Coordinators retype the same details from emails into the booking system, then again into a proposal template, and the facts drift between versions.
How we build enquiry intake that gets to a proposal
- All enquiry routes land in one queue: the events inbox, web forms and agency notifications, each parsed into the same enquiry record.
- An extraction step reads the free text and fills in what it can find, such as dates, numbers, layout and catering, marking each field as stated or guessed.
- The record is checked against what your proposal needs. Anything missing becomes one short, friendly question list sent back to the booker in a single message.
- Availability for the likely rooms and dates is checked against your diary so the reply can offer real options, including alternatives if the dates are flexible.
- Once the brief is complete, a draft proposal is built from your packages, room capacities and terms, for the coordinator to review and send.
- Every enquiry has a status and an owner, so none sits unanswered because everyone assumed someone else had it.
| Brief detail | Why it matters | How intake handles it |
|---|---|---|
| Exact dates and flexibility | Availability and alternatives | Asked once, checked against the diary |
| Delegate numbers | Room choice and package price | Range captured, upper figure used for rooms |
| Room layout | Changes capacity per room | Chosen from your layout list |
| Catering and refreshments | Package or per-item pricing | Mapped to your packages |
| Bedrooms needed | Residential rates and room blocks | Flagged for the accommodation team |
The drafting uses a language model only to read the free text and word the questions. Prices, capacities and terms always come from your own data, never from the model.
What a morning in the sales office looks like after
The coordinator opens a queue sorted by readiness. Complete briefs are at the top with draft proposals waiting. Incomplete ones have already had their questions sent. Nobody is scrolling the shared inbox to see what came in overnight.
Proposals quote the right room for the layout and numbers because the capacity table is applied every time, not remembered.
Signs this is happening at your venue
- Most enquiries need at least two emails before you can price them.
- The same brief is typed into the inbox, the booking system and the proposal.
- You find out you lost an enquiry when the booker says they went with somewhere quicker.
- Proposals sometimes quote a room that cannot take the numbers in the requested layout.
- Agency enquiries and direct enquiries are handled in completely different ways.