Travelocity Leverages Salesforce CRM to Grow Partner Marketing

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 CRM 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 CRM, 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM real-time reporting