Telling the SME Story with Data

"When you go in with bad data, leadership immediately will question the integrity of a travel program end to end,” Chevalier told BTN. “You have to take the time to build the right systems and processes because everything else you do can be challenged due to one data point.”

Walking into Pretium Partners as the private equity firm’s first dedicated travel manager, Chevalier had her work cut out for her. The company’s portfolio runs the gamut from U.S. residential real estate to residential credit and corporate credit. While Pretium has more than $57 billion in total assets under management, its individual companies, which independently had been managing—or not managing—travel, fit squarely in the small and midsize market in terms of their travel volume and budgets.

Being an SME travel manager, Chevalier discovered, was very different from what she experienced in her previous roles at Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson. While the travel management pillars are the same, the way suppliers viewed the program was not.

“Suppliers sort of throw SME into one bucket,” said Chevalier. “I would actually categorize SME in three categories: There’s the startup environment, where they are unmanaged and they travel a lot like leisure travelers with very few restrictions, policies, etc. Once you get above what I call that startup and you start growing up, you shift, into small, then midmarket. … Their travel programs are very different, and as long as the supplier community keeps lumping them in one—so-called SME—they'll never be able to accurately support them.”

Pretium has been a fast-growing company and Chevalier has positioned travel as an enabler to strategic business growth for the firm. To get beyond suppliers' one-size-fits-all approach to the midmarket, she would have to create the data story that demonstrated to the market how they should be looking at Pretium differently.

Looking Into the Future

“Suppliers struggle when you are a growth company,” said Chevalier during a Global Business Travel Association event last month. “Suppliers look at the historical aspect of you—what have you done lately. They don’t look at [your potential value] as an algorithm of who are you going to be. All their formulas are based on the past.”

Chevalier worked with Cornerstone Systems to pull 18 different data sources together into a centralized platform. “It was very patchy,” she said about how a number of portfolio companies might each use the Concur platform for expense, but they might also have disparate travel management companies and credit card providers or no partners at all when it came to the smaller companies that weren’t yet managing travel.

“Even with the holes in there, we could start to see a story developing,” she said. “We then started to fill in the gaps with insights that we got from other sources.” She brought in additional financial data and human resources data. “We had to take all that and model it in a predictive way that showed the pace of growth based on what we knew was going on—like active investments or other acquisitions—that fit into the larger picture.”

Suppliers can also be narrow in the scope of what they look at, Chevalier added. Hoteliers, for example, look at room nights, but there are many other ways in which business travelers represent revenue streams for a property. Getting hotel folio data and ancillary revenue data via expense reports and credit cards armed her with more a more robust picture of value for the SME.

“I don’t see even our largest customers taking the data that far,” said Cornerstone CEO Mat Orrego. “What I also find really interesting about what Maria has done is that Cornerstone was not tasked with creating any reports.” Instead, Cornerstone provides the centralized platform and provide reports about data anomalies and gaps, but once the data quality and models were set, Pretium has taken over the report creation and applies their own strategic knowledge. Those are the insights that live inside Maria’s head, and a tool isn’t going to deliver that—you need the institutional knowledge and strategic knowledge to go that far.”

Chevalier has demonstrated to the marketplace that Pretium companies are bringing the right value to the table to have negotiated contracts—instead of defaulting to pre-set discount programs. 

“I’m confident with my data,” said Chevalier, and that has translated into respect for her program, both internally and externally. “Suppliers can come to quarterly business reviews with traveler experience and program innovation in mind, rather than wasting time arguing about data. That part is off the table,” she said.

She’s gained momentum internally as well.

“Senior management knows they can trust my data,” she said. “I can accurately predict if they are going to make their budget or not, based on trends and histories. When there’s an issue, I can say why they’re not going to make it and can [advise] them about the three things they can do to make [the budget],” if that’s the most important piece, but also give them insights into the delta of the budget versus. the business opportunity.  

That kind of conversation exhibits command of the program and command of the marketplace.

“That’s what you need to build trust in the program in any scenario, and to get the buy-in you need from leadership. It’s totally doable in an SME environment. It can be done quickly. It can be done with limited resources. It can be done—I think that’s what I’m most proud of,” said Chevalier.