A revenue manager can be a critical hire, but the pool of qualified candidates is small. With the right evaluation criteria, you can find the right fit.
Qualifications
Two qualities matter most. The first is deep curiosity — much of the job is understanding human behavior, and curiosity is what stops a hire from settling for weak answers (we value it so much we coined “Quriosity”). The second is a deep understanding of probability: decisions should be probability-based, and a good manager communicates in those terms to cut through the fear, greed, and pride that destroy pricing strategies.
Full-time or consultant
Revenue-management consultants have proliferated, targeting smaller and mid-sized managers who want the skill but can’t justify a full-time hire — and larger managers who struggle to find candidates. Full-timers usually fit larger companies with enough work to justify the expense. Since this is a revenue-generating role, the decision comes down to value added versus cost.
Expectations and software
Hold expectations high for either path; a 30% revenue improvement is extremely rare, so hold anyone claiming it to that promise. More important than the software they prefer is its underlying pricing model — base price or optimization. Optimization uses more advanced science and produces better results, so expect a seasoned manager to prefer it; a base-price user will need to run forecasting separately, since base-price models don’t forecast.
Meetings, experience, and performance
Expect weekly revenue meetings that communicate the current and expected position and any strategy changes from the forecast. Adjacent-industry experience helps, because revenue management is more developed in fields like airlines — though the STR talent pool stays thin until pricing science advances. Evaluating performance is then straightforward: a manager providing weekly updates is largely evaluating themselves, and the RevPAR trend before and after they start should show a change in slope.