To help bring more conventions and meetings to Denver, the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau has hired five convention sales managers as part of a new incremental sales team called BEST (the Bureau�s Extra Sales Team). The five new sales managers will work out of their homes, developing convention sales leads by telemarketing and e-mail sales efforts. Four of them will focus on single hotel pieces of business, while the fifth develops leads for the new convention center expansion. Denver hotels will pay a membership assessment to the Bureau for any business developed as a result of these new sales efforts; this membership assessment will help defer some of the cost to run the sales program.

�Traditionally, convention bureaus concentrate on booking what the industry calls �city-wide� conventions. These are conventions that use three or more hotels and require the convention center and are usually booked three to seven years in advance,� states Bureau president & CEO Richard W. Scharf.

�At the current time, business travel is down and there is more competition than ever for corporate business meetings. To stay competitive in this market and help Denver hotels right now, this new BEST sales program will concentrate on uncovering smaller meetings that will be held within the next six months to a year, � Scharf said.

The five new sales managers will almost double the number of meeting sales people for the Bureau. �We will have five new people out beating the bushes for new meeting business for Denver, and yet the program won�t take any funds away from our core mission of marketing Denver for major city-wide conventions,� Scharf says.

The five new sales people are:

Kristen House, regional vice president of ConferenceDirect, will supervise the new sales team. Ms. House worked for the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau as a convention sales manager and was the east coast sales manager for the San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Other members of the sales team include Allison Harden, formerly with the Denver Merchandise Mart; Tessa Taufen, formerly national sales manager for Vail Resorts and for the Adam�s Mark Hotel Denver; Jean Hartnett, formerly of the Palm Beach Florida Convention & Visitors Bureau; and Janette Armitage, who has worked for the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau for three years as a sales contractor.

### Jill Strunk Public Relations Manager Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau 1555 California St., Suite 300 Denver, CO 80202 Phone: 303.571.9451 Fax: 303.892.1636 jstrunk@dmcvb.org Web site: www.denver.org Celebrating our 95th Year of Promoting Denver, the Mile High City