4 ways to increase ROI from Airline Corporate Sales

Adopt AI-fueled tech to effectively manage the highly profitable business travel segment, delivering exceptional customer experiences that drive loyalty and revenue.

Business travelers are a major revenue stream. They are high-yield customers with lower price sensitivity who fly more often, book closer to departure, choose more expensive seats, and pay more. Corporate travel will continue to be a critical source of revenue, especially as external factors are pressing airlines to be cost-cautious and embrace every opportunity to grow revenue.

The key to increasing ROI from corporate sales is to rethink and transform your sales process:

• Adopt guided automation of the entire proposal to contract workflow and achieve employee and process efficiencies across internal, joint venture and alliance partners;
• Digitize corporate sales contracting and gain better control over account management with AI-powered discount recommendations and a high degree of configurability;
• And finally, bring more transparency and better analytics on contract performance to maximize the revenue potential of your corporate buyers.
  
  

1. Reduce quote turnaround time from days to minutes
   Corporate sales teams spend a significant amount of time putting together proposals, negotiating, contracting, and filing private fares. Sales managers should be spending their time building relationships with their key accounts and making sure corporate accounts are engaged and happy.
   Automate corporate sales contracting, so the entire business process is more efficient and managed seamlessly by sales managers:
   • Generate quotes and contracts in minutes, not days or weeks, through guided workflows
   • Integrate fully with backend applications like Salesforce for an in-app end-to-end contracting or renewal workflow
   • Skip the private fare filing hassle by full automation through ATPCO Express Contracts
2. Customize contracts to capture, grow and keep corporate accounts
   Sales teams need a single unified solution that helps them manage corporate buyers from start to finish. The right digital solution enables sales reps to design corporate sales strategies by tailoring discounts, amenities, and benefits according to each corporate account’s travel patterns. This can be standardized across similar accounts to simplify and speed up the quoting process while being customized to reflect regional or other account specifics. The granularity in configuration allows sales managers to have vast flexibility to better respond to their account needs. This enables them to not only enhance the offering by customer segment by defining the discount levels, but also design soft credit offers such as upgrades, FFP status for C-level executives, waiver of rules, lounge access, baggage, and more. And the advantage is that turning a proposal into a contract is just a seamless step in the entire workflow.
    
3. Enable integrated collaboration on corporate deals for joint venture and alliance partners
   By adopting an end-to-end solution for managing corporate sales, airlines can speed-up quote turnaround times, break siloes, and facilitate collaboration across their joint venture or alliance partners. Streamline collaboration with a single tool across corporate sales so each partner has access to the information they need and can easily manage their portion of the contract. Centralized discount rules allow all parties to maintain, manage, and manipulate all contract rates within specifications.
    
4. Gain visibility over performance with AI-fueled sales intelligence
   To design a winning sales strategy for both the airline and the corporate buyer, sales managers need a data-driven approach. Gain access to actionable data and insights to negotiate deals as well as measure contract performance against negotiated thresholds. Powerful analytics and AI guide your sales teams in designing proposals that take into consideration the buyer’s specific needs without diluting the value for your airline through unreasonable discounts and offers. In addition, account managers are empowered to take timely actions by having full visibility into an accounts’ performance: they can decide how to best maximize revenues and share and adjust go-to-market strategies accordingly.

As a result, your sales staff are equipped with what they need to deliver optimal customer experiences and build a data-driven, futureproof sales process for corporate sales powered by next-generation artificial intelligence.

To learn more about PROS Airline Corporate Sales, please contact us at airlines@pros.com.