This is Part 2 of my interview with Wendy White, chief marketer at Egencia (Expedia’s corporate travel arm).
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Transcript
Edward: This is part 2 of my interview with Wendy White. Today, we are going to dive into her experience as a chief marketer at Egencia. Wendy, for those not familiar, can you start up by explaining what Egencia does, and how it's different from Expedia.com?
Wendy: Expedia Group is one of the world's largest travel brands. Brands you might be familiar with including Expedia, Orbitz, Hotwire, hotels.com, and then, of course, there's Egencia. One of these things is not like the other, and it's definitely Egencia. That's because we are the corporate travel arm. We do corporate travel management, so we are a company that supports brands. Some of the small, fast-growing, and very cool unicorn startups all the way up to the world's largest brands that you're familiar with, that you can see on the TV advertising screen every night.
We run their corporate travel program, which includes the software, by which employees buy travel, and the software by which companies set a policy. The negotiated rates they have, the HR system connections, etcetera. And then, of course, we provide all the great travel inventory that goes into those—the hotels, the airlines, the cars, et cetera, which is why it's a great connection with Expedia.
Edward: How is Egencia different from all the other corporate travel companies out there like American Express Travel?
Wendy: Like American Express, we're global. We operate in 65 markets, but unlike them, we’re what would be called the original disruptor in corporate travel. Corporate travel, for the longest time—and I think all of us who are probably listening and have been around for a while—remember that corporate travel was to get on the phone with a travel agent, explain your long itinerary. I want to go to London, I want to go to Paris, and I come home. That person goes off and searches for flights, sends it to you in your email, and then you send it to your boss for approval, and you send it back. I mean, who has time for that?
What we've done over the lifespan of our company is really modernized travel. Bring that consumer-like online booking experience to corporate travel, but also create for companies a single place where they can manage their travel program and all their markets at once. Set their policy once and have it be online in every market through the same experiences that you called in. Most of the larger competitors just can't do that. They don’t own their own technology, it's not integrated, so we have a real differentiator.
Edward: Is your customer base significantly different from the other players? Do you deal with smaller companies than they have, bigger companies, or different industries?
Wendy: Yeah, we're lucky to serve companies of all sizes. Our smallest customer is still relatively large. They have several $100,000 of travel spend, and then, of course, we have the largest companies in the world as well. So we uniquely position our ability to do that around the globe, and we're very proud of that.
Edward: But what type of company chooses Egencia versus choosing a more traditional, old-school travel provider? Are there any characteristics? Is it the type of CEO? Who comes to you and compares like, you know what, we're going to win this one for sure.
Wendy: The culture of the company has to be aligned with wanting to drive a modern travel program experience for employees. Companies who really care about that employee experience as part of their travel program, and not just our cost savings. Obviously, we can deliver the cost savings, but as a traveler, I want to feel like my travel management company is with me. From the moment I want to get in my app, book really quickly, and in a matter of minutes know where my colleagues have stayed so I can book a hotel I feel safe at. Get in, book, get out, and then have the information at my fingertips, and my app the whole way through.
We care a lot about that traveler experience and companies who really want to drive high online adoption where their travelers are self-serving. Their policy is easily implemented, and yet still want to have a great experience for the travel manager, in procurement, and the finance teams in terms of accounting, reporting, and the easy policy management. Even now, the duty of care, which is so important during the time of COVID, companies don’t want to do that. They're really culturally aligned with us.
Edward: I want to dive into some of your marketing channels. One of your more successful channels is paid search. I understand how that works for Expedia because if someone is searching for hotels in Seattle, likely wants to book a hotel in Seattle. How does that work for signing large corporate deals? Are a lot of travel planners searching for things like corporate travel solutions?
Wendy: That's different, again, I think by the size of the company, and are they already with a travel management company, or are they moving to a managed travel program for the first time? Paid search is great for us in that more unmanaged to managed space, or companies who don't have an existing travel manager in place. Somebody who really thinks about this, and it's not in that travel management ecosystem.
Obviously, larger companies, they've got travel, no programs in place, they have a professional travel manager, who attends the big industry conferences, et cetera. They know us already, but it's the folks that don't that are searching for managed travel, or business travel management that we capture through our search networks very well for us. The brands aren't that well-known outside of that industry player.
Edward: If you have your large companies to small companies that you serve, paid search is the way you get the smaller companies, and you use other techniques to get the bigger ones?
Wendy: Yeah, definitely paid search. I mean it definitely pulls in larger whales. I think the reason why a search can pay for itself—even for smaller clients that maybe your CAC to LTV ratio, wouldn't make sense to spend a significant dollar on it in terms of the acquisition. But the way whales covered the cost of that channel. Really for us in the up-market space, we're really focused on using more ABM techniques to go after that known target list of known accounts. The paid search really takes us all the way up to the commercial mid-market. It does really well for us.
Edward: Yeah, I often call it hunting rabbits. You go out, you hunt rabbits every day, and you make sure you get enough calories in your rabbits. But every now and then, an elephant comes along, and the elephant is a bonus.
Wendy: The elephant is the bonus, and it probably pays for the whole channel for the year for all those rabbits.
Edward: Egencia is like software, and you've had a lot of success with software evaluation sites like Trustpilot and G2. How do you optimize those channels? Or is it just a matter of being there, and then make sure you can monetize enough?
Wendy: We try to be there. We are not a company that has yet turned on paid promotion, or paid referrals through those sites. Some of our competitors have. You go on to one of those sites, you might see they have a lot more reviews because they have a paid program going, but so far we rely on the advocates that we've built in our customer base to put reviews out there for us and be PR advocates in a way that it isn't about giving them a reward, like a gift card, etcetera. I think that's the difference between us and a few of the competitors that we deal with within that space. We try to shoot our authentic relationships with our clients.
We really focus on client engagements. We have both a strong account management team. We have a customer community that we really engage with, educational sessions, training sessions, and peer-to-peer networking. When we see that those clients are high NPS, we ask them to leave us a review. I think it's a virtuous circle for us to make sure that we're taking our applicants, and making them aware that we’d appreciate their support on those sites.
Edward: Who does the asking? Is it the marketing team or the account management team?
Wendy: Both. That works best when you're both asking. You want to ask at the point of a quarterly business review where it goes very well. The account manager can certainly say, we love your feedback. But as the marketing team sends out NPS service and we get a high response or great comments, we absolutely want to ask. And then we have asks that we put in our community. We used to run it on Influitive, I don't know if anybody here knows Influitive, but it’s got a lot of Gamification in it where you can ask customers to do a thing and they could earn a point, get badges, and show off grades against their peers, and people love that.
Why not ask them a reference activity could update your review on G2, and you get a badge to go on your profile in the community? People love it, I love it, and the customers feel good. They're doing something for us, we're doing something for them, and we have that wonderful symbiotic relationship.
Edward: Do you have a similar toy for the account managers? How do you influence account managers to make sure they're doing the asking? I'm sure account managers are so focused on doing things for the customers. Sometimes they are like go away marketing, we want to do our thing.
Wendy: Wendy takes a note about fun badging for account managers. I just wrote that in my notebook while you say that. I love that. Yes, I need to do that now.
Edward: How do you influence the account manager? Is it just a matter of having good relationships with them? Is there anything you do to make sure that the marketing account manager relationship is good?
Wendy: We talked to our account managers through enablement training every single week. We're constantly educating them. We’re very visible in front of them. The fun thing that I think has happened over the last 18 months since we adopted Slack is celebrating each other's success visibly, and having really open and transparent lines of communications through our Slack channels. There's a lot of emojis flying, over-celebrating each other's successes, and sharing the good news. I think that builds a lot of trust, support, and rapport. I think that makes it a lot easier than when we have asked them to support those activities because they know it's important to us.
Edward: Another big channel for you is events. How do you measure the success of event marketing?
Wendy: I think for marketers, the number one measure of success is ROI in terms of either new logos and revenue created or existing customer engagement. On the acquisition and prospecting side, we absolutely do attribution for both marketing-created revenue, as well as marketing influenced revenue. We track it across all of our channels. We look at the success of our channels, and we're constantly optimizing. Events are a really strong channel for us.
Business travel is about people. It’s about people meeting face-to-face. For our travel managers, the procurement teams that work on travel, they want to have a trusted relationship. We do an incredible amount of meetings pre-COVID, especially at some of the most important business travel trade shows.
Post-COVID, we're taking all of that online. We're continuing to do virtual events. Third-party events like CareCon or other things where we can meet new clients, but also our own events where we’re highly engaging, and educating our clients. A huge thirst for information right now about travel advisories, how borders are opening and closing, and how companies are modifying their travel programs. We want to be at the forefront of helping our clients understand that. We're really leveraging events right now.
Edward: What's the relative value of events for existing customers and keeping the engagement up and reducing churn versus going and acquiring new customers? How do you think of the events along those two lines?
Wendy: We try to kill two birds with one stone (so to speak) all the time when we do educational events and invite prospects and customers. Last year, we did a roadshow in 53 cities and brought prospects and customers together. Bringing prospects and customers together should be a great thing for your company if your customers love the services you provide because they can be your best evangelists.
Educational events, where we bring prospects and customers together, have been a big part of our strategy and continue to be even with small group roundtables that we're doing. Enabling our account managers to host 5, 8, or 10 customers and a few prospects in a small roundtable, giving them some content to let them do that.
We've also really focused on user groups that are private to our existing clients, and letting them facilitate those conversations themselves. Even if they're going to share something they're unhappy with, I think it's still important to facilitate those conversations. We learn from them, they learn from each other, and it gives us a good understanding of where to focus next in terms of improving an experience. Be it a support experience or a product experience.
Edward: These events are generally very high touch then. You know the sales that you get or the new customers you get from the events, you can tie directly back to the event. Attribution is not a problem.
Wendy: Yeah, we do multi-touch attribution. We track everything so we can absolutely measure the ROI of our events. What I would say is before this year they were small. We knew it was on those events. Even if it was just a couple of 100-person webinars, but COVID changes everything. A lot of our events, recently 1500, 1700, and 2000 folks attending because their thirst for knowledge is just so strong in the industry.
I think also, we probably got ahead of most of the competition in terms of being out with information, webinars, and events. I feel really proud of the work my team did there. Through March through June period of just being visible, being out in front of customers almost every single week with more information on small virtual events, webinar, etcetera to share information.
Edward: That's incredible. You have 1500 people attending the event. You get their email addresses, presumably at the event. You know what companies were there. If one of those companies turns into a customer three months later, do you attribute it back to the event?
Wendy: You bet. We absolutely look at the first touch. We actually look at the whole journey that the customer went on. Yeah, we absolutely attribute it. What I would say is you're not going to be surprised to know that the landscape of business travel is dramatically changed right now because of COVID. All of our acquisition channels are not performing like we expected them to during this period. That doesn't mean you give up on any of them.
It means you're constantly testing and learning. You're looking at the data, trying to make some decisions about where to move money, or where to move resources and time. It's no different than we do in normal times, but right now, it's even more important for us because nothing is behaving like we expect. For example, 1700 or 2000 people showing up to a webinar.
Edward: Yeah, that's amazing, especially when you have a long sales cycle. For you guys, I imagine—from the time you first touch a potential customer to the time they become an actual customer—must be months if not a year, sometimes between when you first initiate contact, when they sign their whole company over to you.
Wendy: Sure, I mean, the larger clients are on a 3-5 year contract, so it could be a 3-5 year sales cycle. We’re very much an enterprise style. Even if it's a contract that is coming up for renewal and they're issuing an RSP, it’s still several months. We really focus on nurturing and engaging that prospect all the way through that sales cycle.
Edward: When you're writing your ROI calculations—generally look back historically—you can be like, hey, we got these leads in January and by December, this many teams turned into sales, so we know if our spending was effective or not. But if your sales cycle is two years long, and then all of a sudden COVID happens and everything changes.
Wendy: Welcome to my world.
Edward: All your historical data doesn't mean anything anymore. How do you know what's working?
Wendy: It doesn't mean anything, and believe me, we’ve had that same discussion every few weeks for six months. And you start to look at the new patterns that are emerging. Our organic traffic dropped off about 75% and hasn't returned. If you watch our marketing mix month over month to look where our acquisition is coming from, the profile of that mix looks dramatically different today than it did six months ago. A lot of that is just a shared force of will of the team saying, we're not going to wait for the organic traffic to recover. We're going to go out and seek out clients who made the profile, or people who need to think about this. We've just been very lucky to have gotten smart, to do some smart experimenting, and we continue to do that now.
Edward: Wendy, thank you so much for being here today. I like to end these interviews by asking about your quake book, but for you, it's more of a genre than an individual book. Can you explain it?
Wendy: You ask me that question ahead of this. I was a little prepared. What I said is, probably like the rest of the world, or at least the rest of America. I've been heavily influenced by the black lives matter movement to think differently about my approach to that topic. How To Be An Anti Racist is a great book that has come to my attention, but it's not just that. I mean, it could be something as simple as Ben and Jerry's anti-racism website, which is really quite amazing. If you haven't looked at it, I'd encourage you to do that.
I'm reading a lot right now. I'm learning a lot, and I'm happy to be really engaging in that conversation.
Edward: How have these books changed your view of the world? Did they solidify what you believe before, or do they change things pretty dramatically?
Wendy: I think they solidified when I believed before, but they deepened my understanding of the systematic nature. The problems that we face and racism in America, from financial institutions to gerrymandering to how neighborhoods are designed and developed. We just have so much opportunity to make a change in how we attack these issues.
Edward: Thank you, Wendy. That's a great note to end on. I really appreciate your time here today.
Wendy: Thank you.
Wendy White, Egencia, Part 2