Orbitz for Business Shortens Sales Cycles with TinderBox

Orbitz for Business, the corporate division of Orbitz.com, offers a portfolio of travel products and services to companies, including tools to help them book transportation and hotels as well as manage trip budgets and expenses. The company's sales organization is made up of 18 representatives, seven of whom regularly reach out to new prospects in the small- and medium-size-business market. On its Web site, the brand boasts a 98 percent customer retention rate to the "hundreds of companies" it serves, which is to say that it has no problem keeping customers once they're on board. But according to Dave Chookaszian, inside sales manager at Orbitz for Business, the tools they were using to close deals were behind the times.

"The way that we were passing contracts and getting payments from customers—especially at the small-business level—was not very good," Chookaszian says. While the company was promising advanced and high-tech products, the customer's interaction with the brand was being impeded at the moment of truth. "We'd pitch ourselves as this cutting-edge technology company, and demo our services and get our customers pumped and going, 'Wow, I’m really getting something that's top of the line.' But then when it came time for them to sign the contract, we'd send them a Word document through email," Chookaszian says.

The major problem with Word documents was that once they were sent out, sales reps had no way of tracking what prospects actually did with them. "The only way we could find out if someone engaged with us was by asking them—and oftentimes, it's hard to get ahold of people," Chookaszian says. Nor did the organization have an efficient way of monitoring the analytics associated with those interactions, to get a sense of the amount of time people spent with contracts and the percentage of contracts submitted. "This made it much harder as a team manager to coach on areas that we needed to improve, or to celebrate team members if they did [something] really well."

The company sought a more sophisticated technology that could tie a number of elements of the process together into one seamless workflow. "We not only wanted to have the contracts signed, we also wanted to allow the customer to make a payment within that same workflow and fill out a form with basic information about their travel programs," Chookaszian says.

Having evaluated a number of vendors in the document maintenance space, Orbitz for Business settled on TinderBox, whose solution is designed to help sales professionals streamline the process of creating, sending, and tracking contracts directly from the cloud. The program pulls any relevant customer info stored within the CRM system and fills in the corresponding spaces, prepping it for a mobile-friendly contract that customers can fill out and send back quickly. Companies can look at dashboards to monitor how customers are interacting with the documents.

One reason Orbitz for Business took to TinderBox was its quick deployment. Since the company had no one on its team dedicated to overseeing sales operations, it required a product that could get up and running quickly, with little supervision.

"As a manager, it makes me feel good knowing that we are using templates and not a document that can be edited or deleted," Chookaszian says. And the templates brought an efficiency boost: New contracts could be created in six minutes, down from 10.

Chookaszian considers the deployment a success. In the year since the company deployed the technology, it has seen a 25 to 30 percent reduction in the length of its sales cycle. A "significant portion of that decrease came from that period of time when the proposal was with a prospect," Chookaszian says.

Orbitz for Business has since rolled out the solution to its account management team, and Chookaszian notes that while his team hasn't had much cause yet to use TinderBox’s contract amendment tools, he's impressed by them, and with its presentation features.

The Payoff

Since deploying Tinderbox's contract managment tools, Orbitz for Business has seen:

• a 25 to 30 percent reduction in the length of an average sales cycle;
• a 40 percent reduction in the time it takes to create a contract (from 10 minutes to six); and
• greater visibility into the contract-signing process.

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