GBT Invests in SME-Oriented Leadership: Here’s the Vision

Becky Power is American Express Global Business Travel’s new
VP for global client management for Select and Ovation, SME. She sat down with BTN Group VP
of content Elizabeth West at the tail end of the Global Business Travel
Association convention in Denver. Power talked about the new role at GBT, how
she has approached her leadership role in travel and how her previous tech-centered
positions at Google and Accenture inform her vision of what the SME travel program
should be and why SMEs should be managing travel in the first place. Below is
an excerpted and edited transcript. 

Business Travel News: You have a new job—and it’s an entirely new role at
American Express Global Business Travel. Tell us about that.

Becky Power: I may have the longest job title in the world. I’m vice
president for global client management for Select and Ovation, SME. For
context, [American Express Global Business Travel has three product solutions:
Egencia, Select and Ovation. I’m overseeing all of the client management for
both Select and Ovation. Essentially that involves working with the clients …
to implement those products. Then, when they have those products implemented,
helping them to get the very best of the GBT marketplace and solution to help
them grow their businesses and just have seamless travel experiences.

BTN: You have a long background with Google and a few years at a large
consulting firm before that. How did you land with GBT and what is exciting you
most about the new role?

Power: For me, it’s always been about how technology helps businesses
achieve their goals and help them grow. I worked with some of their largest
brands in travel and retail, helping them get the best out of Google’s products
when it came to digital marketing cloud or devices. There were two reasons
really why I was really excited about joining the GBT team in this moment. The
first one was I really loved the travel industry. The second is that Amex GBT
has a really unique recipe when it comes to excellence in service and then
really strong software and product solutions. And when I thought about what I
could bring to the table coming from that technology background—in this moment
where technology and AI that is evolving so quickly—I wanted to participate in
that journey.

BTN: Egencia product for SME is well known, and many people understand
Ovation’s reputation and specialization in high-touch law firms and often
private equity and other firms like that. Tell me more about Select for SME.

Power: Select gives SME clients the ability to plug and play and mix and
match what they need. So the marketplace is the GBT marketplace. So the content
is the content that GBT provides. And then when they think about their booking
tool, they actually have choice. They could use GBT’s booking tool, which is
called Neo, or they could use a proprietary booking tool like Concur. There are
lots of other ‘local’ ones. But Select gives clients the ability to plug and
play both the content that we provide from a marketplace experience with their
booking tool, with their expense tool. While you have Ovation and a Egencia,
which you could say are both “package solutions,” Select offers a more
plug-and-play design.

BTN: Tell me about the opportunity Amex GBT is seeing in the SME
market. To bring on someone like you is an investment in that market, so what’s
the green field that you are working toward?

Power: When you look at the SME pie, I think it was a [Global Business
Travel Association] stat that said there was $1.4 trillion in global business
travel spend overall, and about 950 billion of that was from SMEs. So first of
all, it’s an enormous amount of opportunity, an enormous amount of people
booking travel within that segment. But only about 20 percent of that is
managed, so there’s a huge amount that is unmanaged.

[Travelers at these companies are] probably booking
through whatever platform they want. It’s probably very hard to get a full
picture of what’s happening with their spend, how they think about their travel
policies. So when I go back to [what I mentioned earlier about] how technology
helps businesses grow, that’s the thing I find really exciting. Especially when
you’ve got macroeconomic conditions—and SMEs are not immune to them—we tend to
be see companies really focusing on how to drive top line growth, but also how
do we think about our bottom line as well?

That bottom line can be things like how do you make sure
your employees are as efficient as possible? If you’ve got a central
marketplace tool that they’re booking through as opposed to searching on
various different websites, you’re driving an efficiency gain there. It can
also be the content and the discounts that are available to them. About 40
percent of our SMEs on average are tapping into GBT’s discounted rates. There’s
immediate savings there. One of the things we [report] on a regular basis is the
value of the savings that our SME clients have realized through the program,
which in this environment, is incredibly important to them. … I can understand
the pressure they’re under in terms of understanding their spend, driving
strategic decisions on how they manage their travel programs, driving
efficiencies with their users, understanding where they are and really being
able to bring the magic of GBT’s best-in-class products and also the services
to be able to help them.

BTN: SME business looks more profitable for TMCs. GBT has delineated
this in its earnings calls: SMEs don’t often have their own negotiated rates,
so they use the GBT Marketplace. They don’t necessarily have the volume to
negotiate for TMC services either. As such, there’s lots of competition for SME
business, but SMEs have told BTN they are nervous that they are going to get
pushed to all automated, digital solutions and won’t be able to access program
customization or great account management support.

Power: First, if that competition for the SME market wasn’t
happening, I’d be a bit worried as to whether GBT was pursuing the right
questions. So the competition itself is kind of comforting in some ways.

Second, though, SMEs behave in a really big range. Some
might have tech at the heart of their business and that may be how they want to
interact with a TMC primarily online. But that’s not always the case. Often
within SMEs there are different portfolios of travelers with different needs.
Some with very complex, multidestination trips that require changes on a
regular basis. Others, are much more straightforward. Some need best-in-class
content for rail service or data about sustainability. The numbers are vast and
theirs a lot of variability in there. So the GBT proposition for that market is
really interesting because we do have the breadth of Egencia being a very
strong digital proposition and Select has a particularly strong travel
specialist community. We been very deliberate about building out the range of
how SMEs may want to work with GBT. And we listen.

BTN: But you do have this deep technological background with Google
and retailing. Where is that going to be applied to the SME corporate travel
process?

Power: If you think not just about GBT, but many of the providers out
there, you’re starting to work with agents or bots for query answering. People who
book business travel are the same consumers that shop on the weekends and book
their own personal travel. In that consumer behavior, people are looking for
more personalization and more recommendations. When you think about how you add
technology into [business travel processes], it can be to align with those
consumer preferences and trends. We want to provide recommendations in corporate
travel tools based on what you’ve previously traveled. Or, when you’re working
with travel agents, technology should support them in being effective and
efficient by prioritizing and stack ranking what they should be working on. I’m
not sure anyone knows what the end point is, honestly. It’s a journey right now,
and I’m excited not just to build platforms for now but for two or three years
from now. What we need to be building towards, however, is not not full tech
automation. It’s personalization, it’s great range of content, it’s a simple
efficient process.

BTN: How is GBT reaching out to the SME market now and how is the ‘pitch’
different to SMEs than it is with large enterprises?

Power: It’s not necessarily the same conversation that someone
would have with a very large enterprise client. You are looking at what are the
types of businesses, the types of travel behavior that they have that tend to
get the most value out of the program, and also what their growth moments are
and what’s driving them to want to have a travel program. For many, actually,
it’s the ability to understand the data and what’s happening with their travelers.
And honestly, it’s a real moment of joy when the program is live and you can
sit down and have a strategic conversation with the travel manager: the
individuals traveling, what they are spending and other data insights. They are
suddenly in the position to have strategic conversations with the business
around what do we do about our travel program? Where are we investing more?
What should we doing if we’re going to expand into a country and what does this
mean for us? There’s obviously more of an education element with an unmanaged
business than with a large enterprise. Obviously, one conversation is more of a
‘why GBT versus someone else?’ And the other conversation often is, ‘why manage
travel at all?’

BTN: How are your structuring and possibly training the sales team to
go after that business and connect with potential SME customers?

Power: A lot of people are used to talking to travel managers or procurement
people when it comes to engaging with a potential customer. But these roles
don’t necessarily exist in small businesses and their level of awareness around
travel is very different.

I think teaching people to be able to go and have those
conversations with people that quite frankly might be a finance director or a
CFO or it’s business development or even maybe a CEO or it could be HR. Really,
it could be anybody. And to that degree, the language you have to use and how
you explain the program needs to be different. One of the things I’ve done in
the past—and it really goes back to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes—you
have to help them have enough knowledge and awareness of what that CFO or HR executive
is thinking about on a daily basis. How do you get to the right level with them
and use language and metrics that connect with them. What data do they look at?
What’s their mindset for their small business? Often, in a business like this,
the knowledge runs deep but we also need to diversify and broaden our language
and knowledge so we can adapt to all the different types of people in roles
that would have reasons to manage a travel program.