How it works, in practice
Not the technical version. This is what you actually do — the first morning, the first email, and what twenty minutes a day looks like once it is running.
What you need before you start
The name of your hotel, and an email address you already send from. That is the whole list. There is nothing to install, nothing to export from your PMS, nobody from IT to book, and no card until you decide to keep it. If you can log in, you can be looking at real companies around your hotel before your coffee goes cold.
The first morning: about ten minutes
Setup takes four short steps, and the product will not let you skip past a missing answer, because every one of them changes what comes back.
- 1
Find your hotel
Type its name. You get a short list of matches with addresses, you pick yours, and a pin drops on a map. If the pin is a street off, drag it. Everything the product does afterwards is measured from that pin, so it is the one thing worth being fussy about — thirty seconds here, and you are done with it for good.
- 2
Draw the area you actually sell to
A slider from one kilometre to fifty, with a circle on the map that grows as you drag it. Most hotels start too wide. A useful test: how far would someone drive to you rather than stay somewhere closer to their meeting? In a city that is often three to five kilometres. Beside a motorway junction it can be thirty. You can change it whenever you like and rescan, so the first guess does not have to be right. If you think in miles, switch the unit in Settings and the whole product follows.
- 3
Say what kind of business you want
Pick the sectors that put heads in your beds — construction, energy, healthcare, public sector, manufacturing, whatever your market runs on. This ranks the results rather than filtering them, so an obvious employer in a sector you did not tick still appears. You are steering, not excluding.
- 4
Run the first scan
About a minute. It searches Google's record of businesses and OpenStreetMap, and — in supported markets — official company-register data, then reconciles the sources into one list with duplicates merged. Norway is currently supported for register data, with additional markets planned. When it finishes you are looking at the companies identified within your selected radius from the data sources available in that market.
What comes back, and how to read it
You get a list of companies, ranked, with the near and the substantial at the top. Each row carries the same few things: what the company is called, what it does, how far away it is, roughly how many people work there, and — the part that matters — where that came from.
That last bit is a small label on every row saying company register, Google, OpenStreetMap or demand signal. It is there so you can tell a legally registered employer with a filed headcount from a name somebody once added to a map. Both are worth having. They are not worth the same amount of your morning, and no list that hides the difference is doing you a favour.
Some fields will be empty, and they stay empty. Headcount comes from official registers, which exist market by market — Norway today, with more being added. Outside a supported register you still get the company, the location and the contacts, with less detail on its size. Where we cannot confirm something the row says so rather than filling the gap with a guess, which is the behaviour you want the first time you are about to phone somebody.
Turning a list into a week of work
Two hundred companies is not a plan. The usual first move is to sort by size or distance, take the top twenty, and put them in a list — “October push”, “within 5 km”, “construction”, whatever you will recognise in a fortnight. Lists are just saved groups; a company can sit in several at once, and its profile shows which.
Anything you already know about belongs here too. Add companies by hand and they behave exactly like discovered ones — marked as added manually, so when you later look at what is working you can tell your own hunches apart from what the product found.
Finding the person who books the rooms
This is where hotel outreach usually dies. You have the company, you phone the switchboard, and you get somebody whose job is to stop calls like yours.
Ask for contacts on a company and you get named people with roles — the office manager, the travel or events coordinator, the HR manager who handles relocation, the site manager housing a crew — with a work email address and the company’s own phone number. Not necessarily the CEO, because the CEO is rarely the person who books eleven rooms in March.
You will not get personal mobile numbers or personal email addresses. That is deliberate and it stays that way. Approaching somebody’s private phone with a corporate rate pitch is how a hotel gets a reputation it cannot undo, and in most of Europe it is also how it gets a complaint.
Sending the first email
Before anything sends, you connect a mailbox. Gmail or Outlook is a few clicks; any other provider takes an address, a password and about a minute. This matters more than it sounds: messages are sent using your connected mailbox or mail provider, and replies are delivered to your normal inbox, so the conversation is afterwards yours.
Write once, in Templates, using the placeholders for the company name, the contact’s first name, the distance, your hotel. Then a Sequence puts your messages in order — an email, a wait of a few days, a second email, a call put on your task list. You decide the steps and the gaps. You can send the whole thing to yourself first, and you should.
Then you enrol companies. Twenty at a time is a normal week.
What happens when somebody replies
The sequence stops. Immediately, for that person, whether they said yes, no, or “not until spring”. Nobody who has answered you gets the follow-up that begins “just checking you saw this”, because that single mistake undoes the good the first email did.
The reply is in your inbox, where you would expect it. In Room Radius the company moves to replied and a task appears telling you it is waiting on you.
Twenty minutes a day, after the first week
- 1
Open Tasks
It tells you what to do today in order: the three follow-up calls that are due, the two replies waiting for an answer, the sequence that has finished and left four companies needing a decision. When there is nothing to do it says so instead of inventing work.
- 2
Look at what the crawler found
Five companies a day from beyond your radius, each with the reason it was surfaced — a headcount, a register match, a demand signal. Accept the ones worth having and they join your list with all their evidence. Dismiss the rest. It takes a minute and it is the closest thing here to somebody handing you leads.
- 3
Move what has moved
Pipeline is a board: prospect, contacted, replied, qualified, meeting, offer, won. Drag a card when something changes. This is the only part that needs your honesty, because everything the product tells you about what is working is built from it.
Keeping the ones who said “not now”
Most of the value in local B2B is in companies that were not ready the first time. Newsletters exist for exactly that: a short note to a chosen group — everyone within five kilometres, everyone in construction, everyone who replied but did not book — a few times a year. Every one carries a working unsubscribe link, and anyone who uses it is suppressed everywhere, permanently, including from sequences. You cannot accidentally email them again, and you should not want to.
What this will not do for you
It will not invent demand. If there are forty companies around your hotel, you will see forty companies, not a padded list.
It will not send anything on its own. Until you connect a mailbox and switch sending on, it is a research tool that mails nobody.
It will not close the account for you. It gets you to the right person with something true to say, at the moment they are worth saying it to. The phone call is still yours to make — and honestly, that part was never the bottleneck.
An honest word on effort
The first morning is about an hour: ten minutes of setup, and then fifty spent reading a list of your own neighbourhood, which most people find more interesting than they expect. After that it is twenty minutes a day, most days. Many B2B opportunities require more than one follow-up, and the reason hotels do not win more of them is rarely the pitch. It is that the follow-up did not get sent in a busy week.