It’s no secret that as a result of the pandemic, there will be a more stringent focus on the value businesses get from employee travel, rather than just the cost of any trip itself. Those who do travel will be required to maximize trip value by meeting more than one customer or prospect.
What’s needed in this dramatically different business travel world is technology that not only allows your employees to book travel but allows them to assess the potential value in real-time and ties any spend to specific business outcomes. By making expense claims and travel bookings directly against sales opportunities, customer accounts, contacts, marketing campaigns and projects typically held in your CRM, employees benefit from a significantly more automated expense management process.
VP of Product at SalesTrip
Now you no longer need to spend days on submitting monthly expenses. Businesses benefit from instant visibility into the ROI of spend and easily understand which trips deliver revenue to the business – and which don’t.
SourceForge recently caught up with business travel industry veteran, Eoin Landers, to find out more.
Eoin is VP of Product at SalesTrip, a travel and expense management system built directly on the world’s largest CRM system, Salesforce. With customers such as Condeco, Embody, Vestiaire Collective and VRP Consulting, SalesTrip is transforming the way businesses manage and justify employee travel spend. A stalwart of the travel industry, Eoin has worked in almost every aspect of travel in his 20 year career including stints at Amadeus, US Airways, BCD Travel and SAP Concur.
What is SalesTrip and what inspired its creation?
SalesTrip is a travel booking and expense management system on Salesforce, the #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Customers use SalesTrip for either expense management or travel booking but in many cases, they use the fully integrated systems together.
At his previous company, our CEO Manoj Ganapathy, found business travel exasperating. He was unable to assess the value of his team’s travel. Some months his team would be spending 100k on travel, the next 150k. He had no clue what the reasons were for that. Were they meeting more customers? Had airfares increased? Were they booking flights too late?
It was these frustrations that led to SalesTrip.
What problem does SalesTrip solve?
Business travel expenses are often seen as a back office operation – essential expenditure that finance teams could never directly attribute to sales or company growth. SalesTrip was driven to change that by tying expense spend to tangible business outcomes like revenue or customer satisfaction. What better way to do it than building on the largest CRM platform in the world: Salesforce.
Our customers ask questions like: ‘How much do my employees spend on average to win a new customer?’, ‘How is the win ratio affected by face-to-face meetings vs virtual?’
SalesTrip enables organizations to use their CRM data to determine how much spend is necessary for a given opportunity, project or campaign and at what point in the sales or project cycle it’s important to spend to win that business or maintain a strong project outcome. Without this “science of spending”, organizations are in the dark about whether they’re spending money on the wrong prospects and, ultimately, costs remain largely unpredictable at a time when cost-savings are key.
Why is it important to add expense management on Salesforce?
It’s hugely important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, in research we conducted, the greatest amount of an organization’s travel spend is incurred by sales, marketing and customer success teams. And what’s the system of record for those teams? Salesforce. So there’s no more obvious place to have expenses than on the same system these teams are using day-in-day-out. With the Salesforce mobile app, it’s easy to submit expenses on the go.
The same research also found that half of the 500 finance leaders questioned couldn’t tie back expense spend to specific revenue outcomes. But with SalesTrip, because expenses are submitted against a customer account, project or sales opportunity, approval of spend is informed by real-time data. SalesTrip also helps prevent expense fraud by automatically detecting duplicate expenses and invalid claims. It allows finance to budget and forecast more accurately, boosts productivity across the organization and improves workforce experiences.
If you want even more reasons, read our recent blog, “22 reasons to put your expense data on Salesforce.”
What are the main challenges that companies will face when business travel increases?
Let’s imagine some of the different scenarios in which your teams would incur expenses. A salesperson taking a customer or prospect out for dinner, a marketing team travelling to participate in an industry trade show, a project consultant visiting a client to fulfil a project or an executive travelling to another site for their organization’s annual kick off. One can argue that all of these scenarios either directly or indirectly generate revenue.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, business travel was always a target for finance when it came to cost-saving measures. We’ve no doubt experienced company-wide travel bans to cut costs. And realistically, post-pandemic it’ll be even harder to get travel approved, because every trip is going to need to demonstrate the value it will deliver to the business.
CFOs and business leaders are shifting to understand what the tangible outcome of travel spend is, what the real impact a trip will have on the company’s bottom line, what future revenue can be expected as a result, and more.
Business travel will return. Face-to-face or in-person time is crucial for sales and customer success teams in particular. And by adding travel and expenses on Salesforce, companies will be able to focus on approving only travel that contributes to business growth.
Adding expenses on Salesforce obviously delivers value in the ability to tie expenses back to specific business outcomes, but are there any other advantages?
Salesforce is of course a SaaS platform. So our customers benefit from the predictability of subscription pricing. Also, unlike other travel management providers we don’t charge transaction fees on travel. A relief for customers faced with fluctuating costs depending on their volumes of travel.
We also don’t charge for reporting. Some expense and travel management providers will actually make you buy back your data in the form of reports, months after you’ve spent it.
And as I’ve mentioned before, the benefits to your colleagues are huge. One system of record where they can manage opportunities or clients plus do their expenses. And being built on Salesforce means SalesTrip benefits from the best-of-breed enterprise cloud security that Salesforce already has in place.
Do you have to use Salesforce to use SalesTrip?
Even if you have some employees who don’t have a Salesforce licence, you can still use SalesTrip. We have flexible licensing in place for customers who have some users on Salesforce and some not. We have some customers that don’t use Salesforce at all but they do use SalesTrip. Similarly, it can be used for permanent and non-permanent employees such as freelancers, contractors and more.
Is business travel ROI really possible?
We absolutely know it is. With SalesTrip, you can measure the direct ROI of every single trip, against each customer or sales opportunity. In order to do this, you need a single system, not separate systems for travel, expenses, customers, business intelligence etc. SalesTrip does this seamlessly, leveraging the power of Salesforce’s extensive reporting capabilities that enable decision making based on real-time, actionable insights – not gut instinct.
Tell us more about SalesTrip. What are the key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other travel and expense solutions on the market?
Key features for SalesTrip’s expense management functionality are:
- OCR receipt scanning so you can capture and submit receipts on the go, straight from your mobile phone
- Corporate and personal card feeds so you can automatically create expense claims from selected transactions made on your company credit card or your personal card
- Multi-attribution of expenses so that if you have large expenses such as a flight and accommodation that’s relevant to more than one business outcome (i.e. you’re flying to New York to meet 3 clients/prospects) you can attribute that expense equally across those business reasons
- Thanks to the power of the CRM, the expense process is simplified for end users who only need to work one screen and a handful of fields to do all of their expenses. We like to think it is the quickest expense process in the world.
- End-to-end expense accounting, automating the entire process from submission to reimbursement to reporting
Key features for our travel management functionality are:
- Broad travel inventory meaning that you won’t have to spend hours researching and booking your travel
- Intelligent trip request for pre-trip approvals – all done in the same place that managers review, approve or reject spend
- Instant travel insights with Salesforce reporting and dashboards
- Integration to your Travel Management Company (TMC) of choice. We understand some want to retain their TMC services and so we’re able to facilitate this without the customer losing the power of SalesTrip.
Why did your customers select SalesTrip for their expense and travel management?
Some of our customers sought to consolidate their tech systems on the Salesforce platform for a single source of truth and to eliminate employee frustration with legacy or siloed systems.
Some have wanted to eliminate expense fraud and ensure business travel decisions are made based on data not instinct.
A particularly interesting use case this past year has been a number of health device manufacturers who have chosen to use SalesTrip to help with Sunshine Act compliance. They use SalesTrip on the move so expenses can be captured against specific healthcare professionals or companies so that they can be easily reported to the CMS under the Sunshine Act.
How can companies get in touch with SalesTrip?
You can contact us via our website to find out more information or why not check out our new guide: “Spend an inch to go the mile: a guide to converting expenses into business growth”?
If you’re ready to see the product, request a demo or even take out a free trial.
Related Categories