STAAH turns to Salesforce to connect and scale its global business

STAAH is a global hospitality technology specialist which helps accommodation providers maximise their online reach and revenue. At the core of STAAH’s offering is its Channel Manager which takes customers’ room inventory, rates, and content and distributes it across multiple online travel agents. The business also provides a number of online tools to help customers increase their direct bookings and thereby reduce the amount spent on commissions.

In the wake of COVID-19, which has had a significant impact on the hospitality sector, STAAH’s solutions help customers optimise their bookings and get their businesses back on track. STAAH is similarly using Salesforce to prepare for a return to growth.

“We initiated this project at the start of the pandemic to streamline our business processes and scale more efficiently,” said Tony Howlett, Chief Operating Officer at STAAH. “The timing turned out to be advantageous as everything we’ve done with Salesforce has positioned us to maximise opportunities as things reopen globally. We also have a number of projects underway to sustain that growth.”

STAAH is headquartered in New Zealand and has operations in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Europe. However, the business’ reach is much larger with STAAH solutions used by more than 10,000 properties in over 90 countries.

To continue to grow globally, STAAH had to rethink its operations. Its processes and systems lacked maturity and there was a lot of manual effort required for tasks like onboarding new customers. Information was also siloed across different systems and teams, making it difficult to manage performance and mitigate the risk of revenue leakage.

“We have a very distributed workforce with team members being managed remotely and what we wanted was a solution to connect everyone and make work flow more smoothly,” said Howlett. “Salesforce offered the flexibility we needed to bring everything together and really refine our processes.”

STAAH partnered with GravityLab to implement Salesforce and integrate the platform into its existing systems to create a single source of truth. Results to date include globally consistent processes that help to provide a better experience for customers and employees.

All sales are now managed in Sales Cloud which has brought structure to the sales process and streamlined activities like approvals on pricing. Sales Cloud has also given management complete visibility of opportunities and how they’re progressing through the funnel. This visibility not only helps with forecasting and pipeline management, but provides insights on what drives conversion.

“Conversions can be more difficult in the current environment, so where reps are closing a good volume of deals, it’s good to be able to look at their activities and create a model for others to follow,” said Howlett.

When new customers are ready to come onboard, Salesforce integration with Xero enables the automatic creation of their account and triggers the send of their first invoice. Once the invoice is paid, Xero then sends a message back to Salesforce to kickoff processes for training and activation.

The automated process has reduced manual effort surrounding onboarding, leading to a 40% reduction in time spent by sales and finance teams and making it easier for the business to scale. The automated process has also put a stop to incidents of accounts being activated before payment.

 “The integration between Salesforce and Xero also helps us better analyse performance. We can easily look at metrics like churn vs how many customers we’re onboarding and we know exactly where the business stands,” said Howlett.

Time spent on business reporting has also been reduced by 50%, with STAAH able to access information from one central source.

STAAH has brought on Pardot to automate marketing and nurture relationships with leads and existing customers. One of the key benefits it has delivered so far is visibility of where leads are coming from and how they are interacting with different marketing assets. For example, sales reps can see if a lead has downloaded an ebook or attended a webinar and they can use that information to reach out more personally.

The marketing team is also able to better track campaign performance and uses Pardot to calculate ROI. It’s also building nurture journeys, including one to cross-promote products to existing customers.

So far, the marketing team has experienced a 15% increase in average open rate and average click- through rate with Pardot.

Now, the team is exploring the use of Salesforce Surveys to help the business collect and act on customer feedback.

“In the past, post onboarding customer engagement has been limited to certain touchpoints,” said Edwin Saldanha, Head of Marketing & Regional Manager - Oceania at STAAH. “With Salesforce, we want to increase customer interaction and make sure they’re experiencing the full value we bring.”