5 Tips to Reduce the Enterprise Sales Cycle with TripActions Liquid GM Michael Sindicich

And participation. Like I said, we have 35 minutes and these sessions are being recorded and will be available post event. So I will drop a link in the chat to our SAS or YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed so you can view the recording afterwards. Michael, back to you. Thanks so much for joining. Take it away.

Great. Thank you very much. And you got my my last name correct during the introduction, which is rare. So major kudos for you. But my name is Michael Cindisich. I'm the General manager of Trip Actions Liquid, which is our new FinTech expense management and payment solution at Trip Actions, more broadly known for corporate travel management. Today I'm going to be walking through five tips to reduce the enterprise sales cycle. And just for some context, I was the crazy person that actually joined Trip Actions five years ago as the first sales hire at the company when we were less than 10 employees and then helped scale the team through commercial mid market and recently was the VP of Enterprise Sales before moving over to build our new product offering and to talk about Trip Action. So we were founded in 2015. We've got just over 1200 employees now finishing out our first major acquisition. We've got 5,000 customers and growing very rapidly. And our customers range from some of the world's biggest Fortune 500 to global enterprises all the way to the smallest, most innovative SMBs across the world. We've been lucky enough to raise about $800 million in venture capital from some of the world's best VCs and recently we've achieved a $5 billion private valuation from our recent round. So today I'll be walking through a few steps. We've definitely made some mistakes at Trip Actions and learned a lot and we've done a few things pretty well and correct as well. But what I'll say is this last year was a very interesting time to sell a travel solution while nobody's traveling and everyone's kind of on lockdown. But leveraging some of these steps and these learnings, we were actually able to grow our book of business by over 80% and we far surpassed our performance from 2019 with 35% less sellers in 2020 and the headwinds of the pandemic resulting in us coming out of this thing pretty strong. So what we'll talk through is actually creating the sales engine. How do you create the engine? What are some things you need to stop doing around selling like a startup, picking your lane, getting higher within the organization, and then of course leveraging executives. So we'll start with the first one, and I think the first major call out is around creating the sales engine and it starts with aligning compensation. So one thing that we've learned is enterprise sales reps are expensive and worth every dollar that you pay for them. The high performing enterprise Reps oftentimes will close 3, 4, 5x the amount of traditional enterprise rep that may be not as high performing and they expect to have aggressive comp plans with really high accelerators. Another thing that's not necessarily around reducing your time to close, but also reducing your time to revenue. As a travel company we make a significant portion of revenue once the adoption happens and once the product is used. And so we've always aligned our comp model to actually having reps be paid off of the success and adoption of the account which reduces our time to revenue because the rep is very focused on the account getting implemented, adopting and I think it's been a big contributor to our really low churn rate at trip actions. The next one is something called pg. And you know this got introduced with Carlos de la Torre, our new CRO who came from MongoDB. He was the CRO there. And traditionally we had a model where we had a lot of SDRs and marketing drumming up a bunch of leads. And our sales executives, our account executives were tasked with joining meetings and closing deals. And I think that works well, especially when you have, you know, you're single threaded on smaller deals and you can close a deal quickly and you've got a big marketing engine that's driving a lot of leads. But PG or pipeline generation really serves as the fuel to the engine for the sales rep for and especially when it gets to the enterprise. Our reps have gotten really good and methodical around PGing, building their own pipeline along with being supported from the SDRs. And when you're selling an enterprise sale, you've gotta be super multi threaded, selling to multiple different people, building champions within an org. And so our reps are pging into the accounts that they're working on selling. Uh, we even have a whole day dedicated to it called PG Tuesday. Don't talk to a salesperson on Tuesdays. They're PGing and you know, as we're all remote, they're even getting on calls together and doing group pgs kind of cycling through cold calls together as a team. And it's been really, really beneficial for building enough fuel for our pipeline. Especially when you're a company that has a green field, you might be a younger company that wants to go and take all the competition and that works really well for building the pipeline. The other big part of the sales engine is sales enablement. And over the years we've learned this. When we were younger, what we would do is we thought, okay, we can just hire a bunch more reps and we'll keep replicating and get the same productivity as we did with our early reps. And that's certainly not the case. I've seen a lot of companies that will hire reps and say, okay, go and go and follow along with the sales rep or listen to gong or chorus calls and you'll pick it up. It does not work like that and that will not scale. Especially if you're hiring, hiring a lot of reps quickly in different regions. You've got to be methodical and build out a very serious sales enablement team with onboarding playbooks, with boot camps, and of course with continuing education as your product evolves. Number two is actually to stop selling like a startup. So when you go and sell to the enterprise, they're going to expect things like different compliances. We've got GDPR, we've got PCI, we've got SOC1, type 2, SOC2, type 1 and 2. And all of these different things can drastically slow down your sales process if you don't have them all buttoned up and nice and easy, easily accessible to the sales rep so that at the end of the deal they've done all the work, the company loves the product and they don't get slowed down by some of the things like legal and security. And that's been a big investment that we've made. And I've seen companies make in order to streamline the enterprise sales process. I've also seen it completely slow down deals and even lose deals when you're not ready. And a company might say that we love your product, but you're just not ready for us, that's selling like a startup and you want to avoid that as much as you can. The other piece too is oftentimes when you're a startup or trying to go up market, you oftentimes involve the founders or the CEO and that can totally slow your deal down. And you need to make sure that you're building a sales team that's credible and leadership there, that can get deals done without involving the founder in every single deal process. Obviously early days you're going to need to do that, but you want to scale that over time and not have that become a bottleneck. But in the end, we'll talk about where you can and you should be leveraging your executives. Step three is around picking your lane. So there's different types of models for selling and different types of companies or products that can be bought in a certain way. There's what we call top down which you can see Oracle, netsuite, Trip Actions Workday. We all have a model where we'll go to a CFO or the finance office, we'll sell our product and then they'll launch it and implement it wall to wall. The other type of sales model is a Land and expand or Bottoms up where you might have a slack, a Zoom, a MongoDB, a Dropbox where you might insert yourself into a certain organization or a few people with the org and then spend time building champions and widening that across the board. And I think it's extremely important to understand what's the best way to sell your product. And again, it can vary from commercial to mid market to enterprise segments, but it's important to understand that and then align the entire company, including marketing, around that. When Trip Actions first launched we had, you know, a sexy brand and it was easy to use and travelers love it. And we expected travelers to go and advocate up to their leaders and say we want to use Trip Actions but it doesn't work like that. With our sale and we had to align everything around the top down sale, including our marketing came much more around visibility, around cost savings, around reporting and control for the CFO's office and, and that helped us to really accelerate our sales process versus trying to go after the wrong type of sales model and then it's slowing it down in the future. Step number four is around getting higher within the organization. So part of what we just talked about around aligning marketing onto the narrative that will work with a C level. We've also been expanding our product suite. So in the beginning I mentioned Trip Actions Liquid, that is our expense and payments and corporate card spend management system if you will. And so adding that suite into our travel product already now allows us to have a much more seamless message for the CFO and it gets us higher within deals. And we've seen that there's a 40% faster sales cycle when we have a C level or a VP involved or even if they get involved at first and send us to procurement travel manager, AP manager. The deal cycle is significantly sped up and our chance of getting that first meeting is drastically improved when it comes from a leader. We also saw with our expanded offering, our sales cycle dropped from 40 days to 28 days in the commercial segment. By having this Comprehensive offering. And we expect the same thing to happen as we go up market as well. And lastly, leveraging executives. So I talked about not having a bottleneck and involving your C level or your founder in every single deal. But we found that a big shift toward enterprise sales has occurred at Trip Actions. And we do things like every single estaff meeting that we have every two weeks or every week, we'll talk through the enterprise pipeline, we'll talk through how do we get this deal done, who do we know here? Even at our board meetings, we'll talk through the pipeline and see who our board's connected to at the enterprise's board. And it really can sometimes take a village, but once you have those high level connections and it speeds up the deal drastically. And We've seen a 30% increase in win rate when we're connected through the board or through the sea levels. To sea levels. One of my favorite examples I can share is Trip Actions is extremely focused on our DEI initiatives and we've hired someone named Shaka. And one of our Fortune 500 enterprises that we were selling saw that and mentioned, hey, it would be awesome to connect with them. We connected our two DEI leaders and that ultimately created really strong champions and a bond. And you know, we started talking about how we can work together in the future and it ended up also resulting in a deal. They're leveraging us for travel management. So that's a unique way. But oftentimes what we see is it is important when the time is right to be able to involve and leverage your executives in your toolbox when you're selling to the enterprise. So hopefully those five tips were really helpful. As I said, we've learned a lot at Trip Actions over the last five years. Sold to a lot of companies and scaled our offering and our go to market. But with that, I wanted to open it up to questions and I see a few chats coming in, so I'll try to try to read those. Or if you want to come off mute, feel free to go ahead and ask a question.

Let's see, Michael, if you want to unshare your screen so we can see you a little bigger.

Perfect.

We have some couple questions coming through if you want to start with those.

Great. Let's see. I'm in San Francisco to answer your question, but let's see. How did you get your team so motivated and encouraged last year during a turbulent time? Well, I think that that's a really important point and it's a discussion that we had at the board level. And I think it was Ben Horowitz who was the first one to say, you need to take care of your sales team right now. Especially as I mentioned, Trip Actions has a comp model that's based off consumption. And obviously people weren't traveling as much this last year. And that was the first thing that did is we looked at our comp model for the sales team and we adjusted it to make sure that we're not losing good people. Right. It's always important to keep your top talent and have those success stories. So we altered the way that we paid our reps and we altered the goals that we had for the year. Obviously we've seen a huge improvement in our productivity levels throughout the year. We took some time to build and to scale up on the enterprise side. And so I think comp was a pretty big part of it. We've also done, as I mentioned with dei, we've also done a lot of employee resource groups. We've done a lot of virtual happy hours. We've done a lot of things to kind of bring the teams together and stay connected. I think, you know, we were in the Silicon Valley here, our headquarters, and as a travel company, it was hard to watch the other tech companies all being very, very successful. And we were, you know, are a hot tech company, but we happen to be in the travel space. So we had to spend a lot of time focused on that and making sure that we're continuing to see a lot of wins. When it comes to the next question, what are we seeing for Travel Trends in 2021? We believe that it's obviously very important for sales reps and marketing to get out onto the road to close the deals. I just don't think that you close million dollar deals and you don't want to without traveling there and you don't want your competition to be meeting someone in person with you not there. Obviously, once it's safe and everyone's deemed able to travel, we are seeing travel come back very aggressively. So I think we're seeing a 10% week over week increase since the beginning of the year in travel spend. So our customers are traveling. We had the other Monday, I remember counting, we had 700 unique customers actually book travel with us. So more people are getting back on the road and getting out there in front of customers and teams. And we see that there's a lot of appetite for group travel or off sites. So what we're seeing is there's going to be a new type of traveler where you might have a hybrid work environment. But teams are actually bringing all their teams together once a quarter, once every six months, once a year. And you're going to start to have new types of employees that may have never traveled or submitted expenses, start to submit those expenses and start traveling to meet their teams for off sites. So we're excited for the future. We definitely see a very aggressive rebound in travel and we saw some unique trends on expenses expense management throughout the pandemic where policies were changing to allow from work from home stipends and things like that. Let's see, there's a question here. What are the most effective B2B channels you've utilized? Maybe I can get some clarification there. We have a direct sales channel or team, so we actually don't leverage partners as much. We're focused on direct sellers. So our STRs and our AES are pging into various accounts. We obviously could not do much direct mail campaigns. So a lot of times we were having people, you know, if they want to win something or if they want to. If we wanted to send a handwritten note or postcard or something like that to the office, we didn't have their addresses. So we've done a lot of virtual events and that has been really helpful. We've had, you know, conferences with our CFO speaking with Shaka speaking and we just are doing one with Steve Young as well. Our Fintech Forward conference and those types of virtual conferences are bringing a lot of leads in for us where direct mail campaigns have not been as successful because people are at home and not in the office. So we don't obviously have everybody's address. Let's see, what is the role of marketing when selling top down to executives at Enterprise? What is the best content format and channel to engage with senior executives? So what we found successful at Trip Actions is marketing really understands our buyers. We have an amazing product marketing team and what they do is they'll sit with our buyers that we've sold to, they'll understand how they were drawn in and then they will develop content that resonates with their peers. And so white papers have been really successful. We've seen really successful again on the virtual events when we're talking about topics that are strategic to a CFO because that's the audience that we sell to. We've definitely been talking a lot about budgeting and planning, finances moving forward post 2020. And we really just see them as. When it gets that far and you're within the funnel, it's important to have marketing really help drive the narrative through and give the buyer the ultimate C level. The confidence that what you're selling is somebody who aligns with exactly what their strategic vision is moving forward. So that's kind of how we've been leveraging marketing, especially when we're in a sales cycle, pre sales cycle. It's all about demand gen and pipeline generation. Okay, what are the hurdles or challenges you faced when targeting more C level employees? Excellent to see how much accelerates the deal cycle, but curious to know timelines for prospecting and if that process was significantly slower. That's a great question. So I don't have the exact numbers. I know our sales ops and our analytics team have done a lot of research into this. And part of what I was talking about earlier is what we see is a C level will oftentimes forward the email or forward the message onto somebody. And even that is significantly better than us targeting somebody lower down in the beginning. So we're targeting from all angles. We're not ignoring the ultimate end user, but what we're doing is we're doing significantly more focus and effort into that C level. We haven't as far as hurdles. Right. They're obviously getting much more emails, they're getting much more outreach, they're probably getting a lot more cold calls. And so what we've been doing again around the virtual events, around the white papers, around being present in things like Financial Times or Wall Street Journal and things like that that they're actually reading has been beneficial for us. But I would say, you know, of course they're probably getting prospected to more from everybody. And so, you know, but even if you can capture their attention and they' send your email to the ultimate user of the product, it's still much more helpful. But we're still targeting both, of course.

Katie, do you have a question?

No, sorry. That's okay.

Just making sure you got tons of more questions coming through. So keep, continue to ask questions.

This is a good one. Are there ways to reduce the POC pilot stage of a sales process? So we struggled with this in the beginning when we were figuring our stuff out. So when we were first selling, especially as a small startup, everybody asked for a POC or a pilot. And you know, we did a few. We had, we had to, in order to get our first deals, we would launch our travel solution to a few people or for a team and then they would use it and things like that. We eventually, probably a year after starting the company, came and said, we don't do pilots, we don't do POCs, we don't, that's not something that we participate in. And if you want to use our solution, we've got case studies, we've got references you can talk to, we're happy to come to your room, to your office. And we said, we called it a conference room pilot. So we would actually have the C level in there. We would be in there and we would have the admins or travelers come in and touch and feel and play with the product while we were there watching them. But we made a hard stand not to do POCs once we had traction because what we realized is that POCs oftentimes were not well defined. The metrics for success, they're definitely subjective and some people can have strong influence. If you're launching a travel product to, you know, 20 people and 10 people sign up, five people create a profile and two people make a booking and one person doesn't like the hotel they ended up staying at, it could ruin the whole thing. And so we actually made the stance to completely remove POCs, especially because we're a top down sale. So having multiple people like that use the product was not in our best interest or in the customer's best interest. And so being able to build that validation and also be accommodating to test and be there with them while they're checking out the product to make sure we're getting the best prices, we're getting all the inventory, that's what we found. Very successful. Okay. How can C suite executives remove themselves from the sales cycle without being too far out of reach? How can founders encourage an employer, their sales team to lead the function? You know, I think this one is about, you know, understanding if you have the right sales leadership in place. Right. If you're very serious about going into selling to the enterprise, it's going to take a high powered executive to go and lead that team. And I think that's one of the first ways to understand how you can remove yourself if you have to. If you're a founder and your team's growing, right, and you've sold already a bunch of companies and you find yourself being pulled into every single deal to close a deal, that's just evidence that your sales team isn't scaled. So it's about training, enabling that team, making sure you have the right leadership in place and then being used when it makes sense or when you're going to the next bigger deal or the next bigger deal or one that's very difficult. But I, you know, one of our, one of our competitors early on at Trip Actions, part of their sales process, we learned was actually to schedule a call with the CEO and founder with the company that they were selling and that company is not in business anymore. And part of, part of what I think the reason why is that that team just never scaled. The founder cannot be the single salesperson for the. Is there merit in investing resources to scale inbound when selling to C level and senior executives or their outbound typically is the best way to scale. So it's a matter of understanding how your customers buy and if you have a product that you're selling it to commercial or mid market, what we found is in those segments we don't need to travel as much. So we've scaled our inside sales team. What we also found though is the enterprises, if they're holding an RFP and having a presentation and every single one of your competition is going there to show up in person and to sell the deal, that's clear evidence that you need to also be out there traveling. And then in our mid market segment, we've learned when it makes sense to go and travel there and to do the presentation and close the deal. And we allow our mid market teams to travel when you're having inside sales. In the beginning we were selling all of our commercial segments. That's we'll call it 50 to 500 or so employees. We found that we don't need to travel as much. But as we've scaled and built more offices around the US We've got New York, we've got San Francisco, Palo Alto, Austin and Dallas. And so if there are deals that are close to those hubs, our sales team is more than welcome to do that. But it's a matter of how your buyers actually buy the product. And if your competition's getting out there in front of them, then it's crucial to be there. And we believe in the face to face connection at Trip Actions. So you know, I'm always a big fan of traveling to meet prospects. Okay. Does Trip Actions leverage automation or related tools to help streamline the sales process and enterprise sales cycle? If so, any tools that you'd recommend? Great question. We I've been amazed at how sales tools have evolved over the years. And you know, you see companies revolutionizing industries because of new sales tools. So you know, early days at Trip Actions there was competitors like Amex Travel or BCD or Carlson Wagon. It was remarkably easy for us to call a travel manager and they would pick up the phone because they weren't used to the competition. Cold Calling and using these automation tools. So we use tools. I'm a big fan of outreach, of Sales loft, of obviously we use Zoom internally. We use Slack and it's been interesting to create actually slack groups with some of our enterprises to have even during the sales cycle just to have faster communication and keep things online. You can create separate Slack channels with people outside of your organization. Leadiq is another one that we use pretty religiously to be able to pull emails from LinkedIn's pretty quickly and get them into our sales loft. What else? We used to reuse Sendoso for sending direct mail and tchotchkes and things like that to people's offices. I think that's a good portion of our stack. And then we use Salesforce internally for our CRM. Oh, and we use Chorus as well. But I'm a big fan of both Chorus and Gong. I think it's an amazing tool to be able to capture notes, next steps and also for training and scaling. While you shouldn't have your teams just listen to Chorus or Gong calls to ramp up, I think it is really valuable to be able to capture those. Okay, are there any tips for sales or pre sales to keep C level prospect engaged between appointment setting and actual demo meeting? Assuming the demo meeting could be a couple weeks away. That's a great question. What we found is we typically will align at the various levels. So you might have a C level with a sales executive, maybe it's the CRO, maybe it's a VP or a director. Then you might have the sales manager with, let's call it a director of procurement. And then you might have the champion and the sales rep that are working well together. And we found that those touch points are crucial. So the salesperson's job is to basically map every interaction and when they want it to be and then the salesperson needs to be the quarterback to say, okay, CRO, please set up a meeting here, you know, to talk about this or please invite this person to dinner at this date and do that. And then, you know, sales manager, please send this article that we just launched to the procurement person because that's going to resonate when we had this on the deal. And by the way, I'm talking to this champion and I'm trying to build champions and this department and that department, that department. So we found that building those connections at those various levels keeps them engaged and it really is the sales account executive's job to be the quarterback and coordinate all of these different touch points throughout the sales process. Curious now that things are starting to come back. Have you adjusted your sales team's incentives again? We have. We have done some major shifts at Trip Actions. Before we were more so selling a product where we were generating all the revenue off of usage launching liquid, our expense management platform and corporate card and payments. We've now made it so that every commercial seller is selling both a travel and expense platform together. We've changed our model so we're charging much more ACV up front, especially with the introduction of all of our new products and offerings and the tools that we've been building throughout the last year and even since inception at Trip Actions. And we obviously are still focused on the post sale type revenue through usage as well. So we've changed our quotas multiple times. Our sales teams have been amazing to be able to take all the different things we're throwing at them and adapt and apply it. And yeah, we've started to change it as things come back as well. So kudos to our sales team that's been super flexible. It takes some warriors obviously to sell travel during 2020 and you know, they've done a great job. It's pretty incredible to watch. Okay, would you have specific different recommendations to sell a product to data or development teams up to CIOs? That's. That's a good question. I've never sold to a CIO segment. I guess I'd need to understand a little bit more whether the first question I'd have is are you top down or bottoms up. A lot of the IT or products that I've seen for data, they're also on the go. Sell to a certain segment, get a few users and try to expand the use case very opposite to what Trip Actions is doing. So if you've got a product that goes to the C level and then that C level will go and launch it to the entire team and that's what we're. Then I would say the same types of rules that we've been talking about today totally apply. Do you have any advice around implementing or investing in sales enablement? How have you prioritized sales enablement and how has it been valuable? That's a good question. You know, I think that when we were scaling Trip Actions, you know, as I mentioned during the talk, we thought it was okay, just hire more bodies and then those bodies will go and work with the early salespeople that have all of the institutional knowledge and they'll go shadow a bunch of calls and they'll figure it out far, far, far from the truth. And you know, you don't have the time to have those new salespeople go through the entire journey of those salespeople that were there since the beginning to learn the industry, to learn the ins and outs, to learn the language of how to speak to your buyers. That will take forever and it won't scale and it's just often not possible because you're not going to have the same experiences of building that early product with the team. And so we've grown our sales enablement team very aggressively. We've got multiple, multiple heads in that org in there, in various regions. We've got somebody in Europe, we've got somebody in apac, we've got teams across the US and the various offices. And it's really been about documenting playbooks. Um, we brought in a company, by the way, called Force Management. And those guys have been incredible for us to actually build our sales playbook and to be able to define what our differentiators are, how we differentiate from the competition, what the before state is when you're using the competition versus what the after state is when you use trip actions and what the metrics should be that should drive your success. So if you haven't brought in a specific company or consultancy to think through your entire playbook and you can do so, I definitely would. And talking about, you know, our sales stack, Force Management has been a really, really big part of that.

Great. At the last question you got there, Mike, I don't know if you answered this one or not. I came through quickly, so apologies if I missed it. But also to kind of summarize and recap in our last minute, obviously, as we all hope, or some of us, probably most of us are still sitting at home, but things are starting to reopen. And the lights at the end of the tunnel. What are you seeing for Travel Trends in 2021? Can you kind of wrap us up, give us something hopeful that we can look forward to and just kind of give us a little bit insight into the future?

Yeah, yeah, no, I mentioned it quickly, but we see a, a really aggressive bounce back in corporate travel. Obviously personal travel is coming back aggressively too. There's a lot of pent up demand, but what we're seeing is travel's returning. Our numbers are growing by 10% week over week since the beginning of the year. And so we see more people traveling, more companies starting to start traveling. And then people within companies that have been traveling are traveling more times than they were before. So we see travel to come back pretty aggressively. We see that there's a big appetite for bringing teams together for off sites. So when you have that hybrid environment, we think that there's going to be a lot more newer travelers. Maybe the engineer that wasn't typically traveling is now coming once a quarter, once a month, once a, you know, once a year to meet their team. So exciting stuff. We've built tons of, tons of integrations so you can load your vaccines. We've got, you know, the passport stuff and we have a lot of tools for our travel managers to be able to understand rfactor to limit routes to certain areas and yeah, 45% increase in travel bookings in the past four weeks. So very, very aggressive bounce back, which is awesome. I hope everyone's excited to get back out and travel and meet their prospects.

We certainly are. So thank you so much. Last question that just came through and we've got time to answer it. If you do, can you please repeat the name of the consultancy firm you mentioned?

Yeah, it's Force Management. Feel free to reach out to me. It's michaelbactions.com if you've got any other questions. By the way and punit, I can, I can send over the name to you as well.

Really appreciate it, Michael. Thank you so much for your time. Hope you all enjoyed the session. There are more sessions going on, so head to sastrenterprise.com to view the agenda and join your next one. Thanks so much.

Great. Thank you.