Travelocity Leverages Salesforce to Grow Partner Marketing

“Enthusiastic internal advocates drove our decision to deploy Salesforce across the board. Anytime we had an issue as a group, individual users would say, ‘Well, we solved that with Salesforce.’”


Challenge
  • Travelocity—a leading online travel company—required a relationship management system to centralize operations and to accommodate ad selling as well as merchant hotel product negotiations
  • Individual silos of homegrown systems prevented knowledge sharing; when employees left the company, information could not be transferred
  • The Partner Marketing team grew from an ad sales team to a team managing the merchant hotel offering—negotiating hotel rates with 35,000 hotels/partners
  • 35,000 hotels worldwide needed a personal contact, and Travelocity’s market managers needed a CRM system that could support their expanded roles

Solution
  • With help from salesforce.com implementation partner Astadia, the company deployed Salesforce Enterprise Edition with Microsoft Outlook integration to 145 users in the U.S. and Mexico in three months
  • Integration with a hotel contact database populates information into Salesforce, which then becomes the live system of record
  • Ad sales contracts created in AdBook, a third-party workflow automation tool provided by FatTail, are fed into Salesforce to streamline the process
  • Dashboards and real-time reports allow the SVP to monitor sales targets per manager
  • Incentive and performance plans tied to Salesforce data enforce usage

Results
  • A unified location for ad sales and hotel contacts data enables knowledge sharing and streamlined partner relations
  • Ease of use and incentive-based programs increase user adoption
  • Power users share best practices across sales, marketing, and executive-level staff
  • Greater visibility into the sales pipeline allows the company to identify weaknesses and amplify strengths
  • Partner Marketing plans to replace all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for Salesforce real-time reporting
 
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