SalesTrip, a new corporate travel expense management firm, is launching its product this week in the U.K. The company has integrated a travel booking and spend management solution that it says is the first to operate on Salesforce, reports in Realwire said on Wednesday (Feb. 20). Designed for corporate users of Salesforce, the tool targets enhanced spend visibility and analytics.
“With the business travel market set to reach $1.7 trillion by 2023, we want company leaders to have greater visibility of their travel investment, as well as measure its return,” said SalesTrip Founder and CEO Manoj Ganapathy in a statement. “With travel and expense costs typically reaching 10 percent of all operational spend, companies should be managing them as a mechanism to drive business growth, not as an uncontrollable cost or hindrance to business activity.”
Ganapathy is launching SalesTrip after forming InvoiceIT with Richard Goodall, also a co-founder of SalesTrip, reports said.
The company noted in its announcement that it will be focusing on enabling businesses to understand the relationship between business travel and other areas of the enterprise, “especially the cost of acquiring business.” Data within the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform will be used to drive those insights, SalesTrip noted, while the platform also enables real-time budget adjustments for financial professionals to align forecasts and financial goals with business trip expenditure.
“As a finance person, you can not only look at the total cost of the trip, but also the total cost of the sales opportunity,” Ganapathy continued, adding that companies must be able to analyze the cost of meeting a prospective customer with the profit generated from securing that new customer.
“If you aggregate all this data into one central repository, and then introduce machine learning that runs predictive analytics off the data, you can start asking questions like: What is my win ratio? Which stage of opportunity does it make the most sense to spend on travel? How much do I need to spend in oder to win business? Do I want to pursue this customer?” Ganapthy added.