It’s been a few weeks since the global pandemic of COVID-19 has locked down a majority of the world’s population. As Founder and CEO of SalesTrip, I wish this communication to you was under better circumstances but it’s not. I’m typing this from London, where we’re all saddened by the rising infection and death rates. As a business, we’re trying hard to push on, however that may be.
I’ve thought long and hard about what to say to you as the response to this crisis is personal, emotive and different in every way. So firstly, I want to offer my thoughts to you all and hope that you are able to navigate through this for both your families and companies.
With regards to SalesTrip – as you know – part of what we do is making business travel simple. Trust is our most important value and I will always be honest with you as the leader of this business. The impact for the whole industry, including us, is profound and I appreciate that this could be of concern. But we also help companies to better manage spend. So I wanted to tell you about what we’re doing to ensure continuity for both you, your employees and my incredible team here at SalesTrip.
People first, business second
Customers, partners, colleagues – there is nothing to differentiate you. If our colleagues feel cared for and supported, they will care for and support our customers. The same goes for our partners.
We took the decision in early March to encourage the team to work from home. Being in the SaaS world, we’re used to it. The disruption has been minimal and we’re actively ensuring colleagues don’t feel isolated given the lack of face time with their own teams. We then gave everybody some time off a couple of weeks later before the imminent lockdown in both the UK and Seattle, where our US team is based. We did this to give them the flexibility to prepare but to allow some time to mentally adjust to how quickly the situation unfolded. It was an awful lot to take in – me included.
Our single focus is supporting you
You have a lot to think about right now, managing remote staff, managing potential staff sickness and managing the longer-term threat to business. The last thing you need to worry about is whether your technology systems will continue to support you.
And so I want to assure you that you will not see a disruption to services – our support and customer success teams remain well placed to serve you. Expense management through the system is unaffected. We anticipate that use of SalesTrip for trip bookings will be non-existent for the foreseeable future but the platform is there and ready to scale as and when it’s deemed safe to travel again.
When founding SalesTrip, we decided to build the product on Salesforce for a reason. And that reason is particularly beneficial when faced with this unprecedented crisis. Salesforce is the most robust, enterprise cloud platform. I really encourage you to read Marc Benioff’s note to customers – not only does it provide assurance on the strength of the platform but it also explains what they’re doing to help communities around the world. They really have moved customer care and philanthropy to the next level and we’re proud to be a part of that.
Please, keep in touch
Lastly, know that we are here to support you. We’re focusing on providing you with useful information over the next weeks and months which you’ll find across all our online channels. Our teams will be reaching out individually to offer their support too. We’re making a conscious effort to ensure we don’t overload you at this time but also want to ensure the channels are open should you need them.
Thank you for your understanding and patience during this time. Please know that you can reach out to me directly.
Stay safe, Manoj.
