Startup travel and expense system provider SalesTrip enlisted U.K.-based travel management company Fello for service and en-route support.

A “fully bonded” agency fulfilling online transactions, SalesTrip is “concentrating on the software part,” according to VP of product Eoin Landers during an interview this week. “We’ll use partners for VIPs, consulting and answering the phones. There’s always that last 20 percent where the human touch is involved.”

For clients that want to use a different TMC, Landers said there were “many ways” to import offline bookings. Those include API connectivity into global distribution systems, data capture through the expense component and OCR technology for reading confirmation emails.

In addition to picking up leads via the Salesforce client community, SalesTrip has a sales team in London. It plans to expand it into the United States.

CEO and co-founder Manoj Ganapathy said he expected some newly managed clients and some to switch from other providers. He mentioned SAP Concur.

Ganapathy acknowledged that SalesTrip and competing systems had many common features. He pointed to the “platform model” as the differentiator. By integrating “siloed data” and putting it all “under the same umbrella” within the Salesforce ecosystem, SalesTrip presents a “single source of truth,” he said.

Though built natively on the Salesforce platform, SalesTrip’s long-term goal is to work with other CRM systems. “Each is different,” Ganapathy said. “The way you calculate ROI in Salesforce is not the same as in other CRMs. A few years down the line, we’ll reengineer the ROI interface for those platforms.”

This is part of an overarching strategy to “go to the tools that business travelers use on a daily basis and originate travel data from those systems,” Ganapathy said.

He and former Salesforce leader Richard Goodall together invested 2 million pounds. They are the current owners of SalesTrip.


Related
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• Chrome River Closing CRM Loop
• Counting The Ways To Integrate Travel And Expense, Authorized Or Otherwise
• Teleconference 19: Business Travel Startups

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