How to sell to Founders at Hospitality companies
Founders in the hospitality industry are primarily measured on customer satisfaction scores, which directly impact their brand reputation and profitability. They respond to outreach that demonstrates a deep understanding of their unique challenges, such as managing guest experiences while optimizing operational efficiency. Highlighting how your solution can enhance guest satisfaction or streamline processes will capture their attention.
Written and maintained by the SoloRiff team, who build outbound software and run outbound with it. The figures below are our own: we measured 548 hospitality company domains over public DNS on 2026-09-03. Last updated 2026-09-03.
What actually hurts
- staff turnover issues
- guest experience complaints
- inefficient booking systems
- high operational costs
The playbook
- 01
Identify recent customer satisfaction drops
Use review platforms like TripAdvisor or Yelp to find hospitality businesses that have received lower ratings recently. Filter for hotels or restaurants with at least a 10% drop in their scores over the past quarter. This indicates potential pain points that your solution could address.
- 02
Research local competitors' offerings
Look for hospitality businesses in the same area that have recently upgraded their services or technology. Check industry news or local business journals for announcements. This can provide insight into what innovations are attracting customers and how your solution can help the founder stay competitive.
- 03
Connect via industry-specific events
Identify upcoming hospitality trade shows or networking events where founders are likely to attend. Use platforms like Eventbrite to filter for relevant events in the hospitality sector. Personalizing your outreach based on the event will increase the likelihood of a response.
- 04
Address common operational inefficiencies
Craft your message around specific pain points like staff turnover or booking system failures that are prevalent in hospitality. Reference case studies or examples of how your solution has helped similar businesses reduce these inefficiencies. Founders appreciate practical solutions to their everyday challenges.
- 05
Follow up with insights from recent trends
After your initial outreach, send a follow-up email that includes insights on recent hospitality trends, such as the rise of contactless services. This demonstrates your ongoing interest and positions you as a knowledgeable partner. Timing your follow-up within a week of your initial contact can keep the conversation fresh.
Can hospitality companies even receive your mail?
We measured the DNS of 548 hospitality companies, sampled evenly across company sizes, to see how many authenticate their own email. It matters in both directions: a domain that does not authenticate is a domain whose team is used to mail going missing — and if your own domain is in the gap, yours is the mail going missing.
Publishes a DMARC policy of quarantine or reject — the domain actually asks receivers to act on failures.
The gap is the finding: 15.6% of 1–10-person companies against 73% of the largest — 57 points apart. Small companies are where the unauthenticated domains are, and small companies are who most cold outreach is aimed at.
Where does your domain sit?
Same three lookups, run live against your domain. Nothing is stored and nothing is emailed to you.
How this was measured
Company domains were sampled within employee-count bands, then queried over public DNS for SPF (TXT at the apex), DMARC (TXT at _dmarc.) and MX. One domain per company, deduplicated. Anyone can reproduce any single row of this with dig.
DKIM is deliberately absent. A DKIM key lives under a selector that cannot be enumerated from outside the domain, so a company with flawless DKIM under a name we did not guess would be counted as having none. That would measure our guess list, not the industry.
Domains with no MX record are excluded rather than counted as failures — parked and redirect-only domains would otherwise drag every figure down and make the result an artefact of the sample.
Sampled within bands, so this describes the population of companies, not of employees: a 10-person company counts once, as does a 10,000-person one. Each band is at least 60 domains; bands below that are not published. Figures are percentages of the sample, not of the whole industry, and we publish no company names — only counts.
Measured 2026-09-03. Re-measured monthly.
The full census across every industry — sortable, with sample sizes, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
Subject lines that fit
- Improving guest satisfaction
- Streamlining your booking process
- Addressing staff turnover
Questions
- Why do founders in hospitality overlook cold outreach?
- Founders often receive a high volume of sales pitches and may prioritize immediate operational challenges over unsolicited offers. They are more likely to engage when outreach is personalized and directly addresses their current pain points, such as guest satisfaction or operational efficiency.
- What common objections do hospitality founders have?
- Founders may object based on budget constraints, especially in a fluctuating market. They might also express concerns about the time needed to implement new solutions or the potential disruption to their current operations. Addressing these objections proactively in your outreach can improve your chances of engagement.
- How can I demonstrate value to hospitality founders?
- To demonstrate value, focus on quantifiable benefits that directly impact their bottom line, such as reducing costs or improving customer satisfaction scores. Sharing testimonials or case studies from similar businesses can also help establish credibility and relevance.
- What role does technology play in hospitality founders' decisions?
- Technology is increasingly central to hospitality operations, influencing everything from guest interactions to backend processes. Founders are often looking for solutions that enhance efficiency and improve the guest experience, making it crucial to highlight how your offering aligns with these goals.
Or have it run itself
SoloRiff does every step above on its own — finds the companies, finds the people, writes each of them individually, and handles the replies. Drop your URL and watch it work before you sign up for anything.
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