I’m not new to Salesforce. When I moved to the UK during the 2008 recession, I taught myself Salesforce in the absence of a job. Then with my newly acquired skills, worked for companies to optimise their investment in the platform. I realised many companies were struggling with this same challenge, so co-founded Tquila which ended up as the largest Salesforce consultancy in Europe. I’m also one of twenty Certified Technical Architects in Europe. It’s fair to say I’m well entrenched in their 10 million strong ‘Trailblazer’ community.
As a result, I’ve been to many Salesforce customer and developer events. However, this year I attended my first one as CTO of SalesTrip. At SalesTrip we’ve spent the last two years building our travel and expenses system on Salesforce and launched in February with great reaction from the travel industry. Salesforce London World Tour and the tech industry were up next.
Salesforce events are still like no other
We’ve talked about Salesforce events in a previous blog. Cue over 10,000 people making the trek to London ExCel to find out how to better “connect with customers”, with a high-energy keynote, super-sized mascots and cuddly toy versions (my daughter loves them) thrown in. This was SalesTrip’s first public outing amongst the Salesforce community and a great opportunity for us to showcase how we’re changing business travel one step at a time.
Managing business travel is a very real pain from start-up to enterprise
We spoke to so many people who were experiencing this pain and with the global travel market set to reach $1.7 trillion by 2023, it’s a very expensive business pain to have. We want company leaders to have greater visibility of their travel investment by putting travel data within their CRM, alongside using it to better inform and then forecast spend by tracking this travel throughout the sales cycle.
Travel and expense costs typically reach 10% of all operational spend, so organisations of all sizes came to us to understand how we’re helping customers become more profitable. Only SalesTrip can tell you why to spend money, and then when, in order to win business.
What it meant to win Salesforce’s renowned DemoJam
We were invited to demonstrate our travel and expenses system alongside four other great AppExchange solutions at the event. The AppExchange is Salesforce’s app store and the leading enterprise cloud marketplace. It’s where you can find over 5,000 solutions with more than 80,000 customer reviews. So, to be invited to demo SalesTrip and then be voted as winner was a great endorsement of how we’re impacting business travel together with our customers.
Three minutes. No slides. One winner. Voted for by a live audience. I can think of less pressured ways to get feedback on a product or solution – but what validation when you win! Thank you Trailblazers.
Until next time
We had a great time at Salesforce London World Tour and will travel across the Atlantic in September for the Atlanta World Tour. Until then, if you didn’t get a chance to talk to us and would like to see exactly what SalesTrip could do for your business, why not book a personal demo to find out more.
