What's left of hotel sales: The impossible job at the top

The DOSM is the last generalist in a commercial organization that specialized everywhere else

A search for a Director of Sales and Marketing at a typical full-service hotel takes longer than it used to. The role is often reposted. Shortlists get rejected for not being "the right level." The eventual hire tends to stay for around two years, then leaves — frequently for a different industry or a different function within hospitality. The property runs the same search again.

This is not a recruitment problem. It is a role design problem. The job description being recruited against describes a person who does not exist.

The role as written

Pull up a typical DOSM brief written this year. The candidate is expected to: lead the property's commercial strategy; own the top-line revenue target against the comp set; manage the sales team and the marketing team; run group, transient, and catering forecasting; oversee digital marketing performance and direct-channel growth; manage relationships with key corporate accounts, third-party planners, and OTA partners; collaborate with the revenue management team on pricing strategy; represent the property at trade events; lead the annual sales and marketing plan; align with brand standards and corporate marketing initiatives; develop the team; and deliver the budgeted RevPAR index.

Each of these is a real responsibility somebody at a hotel needs to handle. None of them, taken together, describes a single human role.

The job description has not been rewritten. It has been added to. Each new commercial trend over the past decade — performance marketing, social platforms, OTA strategy, ancillary revenue, loyalty integration, agentic distribution, AI-mediated discovery — has shown up as another bullet on the spec, without anything being removed. The brief is materially longer than it was in 2010, and the underlying market is harder.

What specialized away

The DOSM role made sense when the surrounding commercial organization was less specialized. The DOSM was the commercial brain of the property because there were not many other commercial brains to coordinate with.

That is no longer true.

Revenue management has specialized. Most full-service properties now have a dedicated revenue manager, often part of a regional revenue team, supported by RMS technology and a body of practice that has matured into its own discipline. The DOSM input on pricing is advisory at best.

Distribution has specialized. The decisions about channel mix, OTA contracting, parity management, metasearch participation, and increasingly agentic distribution sit with distribution managers, commercial directors, and chain-level distribution teams. The DOSM is briefed on the strategy. The DOSM does not set it.

Performance marketing has specialized. Paid search, paid social, programmatic display, retargeting, and direct-channel optimization are run by performance marketing specialists, often at the brand or chain level, often with their own budgets and their own metrics. The DOSM is asked to align with the strategy. The DOSM rarely owns the spend.

Loyalty and CRM have specialized. Guest data, lifecycle marketing, recognition programs, and direct-to-guest communication sit with loyalty teams and CRM platforms. The DOSM's relationship with the guest after they have stayed is mediated through systems the DOSM does not control.

Each of these specializations made the commercial function more capable as a whole. Each of them also took a piece of what the DOSM used to own and handed it to someone else.

The DOSM is now the last generalist in a department of specialists. They are expected to coordinate across all of these functions, hold accountability for an outcome that depends on all of them, and lead a team that interfaces with each of them — without owning any of the underlying levers.

What is still inside the role

What remains in the DOSM's actual remit is a difficult mix.

The team. Group sales, sometimes marketing, sometimes catering — each with its own complexity, each fragmenting at the buyer level, each increasingly hard to manage at depth.

The relationships. Key corporate accounts, the largest group buyers, brand-side counterparts, the asset manager, the GM. Each consuming time at a different rhythm.

The plan. The annual sales and marketing plan, the budget input, the forecast against pace. The artifact the DOSM is measured against, even as the levers behind it have moved elsewhere.

The escalations. Whatever the team cannot resolve. Whatever the GM does not want to handle. The catch-all for commercial complexity that does not fit any specialist's box.

This is a serious job. It is also a job that has been quietly redefined as a coordination role with the accountability of a leadership role and the resourcing of neither. The DOSM is held to a strategic outcome with operational tools.

The hiring market

The market reflects the role's impossibility honestly, even if the industry rarely names it.

Tenures have shortened. The DOSM who used to anchor a property for years now often moves within a much shorter window. Cross-property and corporate DOSM roles, where the bundle is even broader, are harder still — and the candidates capable of holding those roles tend to leave hospitality for adjacent industries once they reach senior levels.

Searches take longer. Recruiters describe DOSM briefs as "impossible" in private and as "premium" in public. The candidates who interview successfully are often visibly relieved when the conversation ends. The ones who accept frequently regret it within a year.

The signal that something structural has gone wrong is most visible in the candidate pool. The strongest commercial leaders in hospitality — the people who can actually do the strategic work the role asks for — are increasingly choosing specialist tracks within the function, or leaving altogether for positions that are more clearly defined and where the levers are more clearly held. The DOSM seat is, more and more, filled by candidates who can manage the volume of the role without owning its strategic depth.

This is not a comment on the people in the role. It is a comment on what the role has become.

The verdict

The DOSM job is not failing because the people in it are not good enough. It is failing because everything around the role specialized and the role itself did not.

What the function needs is a redesigned commercial structure — two or three specialized roles where there is now one bundled one, reporting into a single commercial leader whose job is leadership rather than operations.

The DOSM job description is from 2008. The commercial organization is from 2026. The DOSM is the gap between them.

Next in the series: What's left of hotel sales: Selling without sellers.

by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today

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