How CIENCE Secured a Constant Flow of Leads for Rocketrip's TripPlanet Platform

Sales Development

Rocketrip Case Study

About Rocketrip

Rocketrip is a cost-saving travel platform that has a proven track record of helping businesses reduce their travel expenses. Whenever business travelers save the company money, either by booking in advance, downgrading a flight, staying with friends or family, or choosing more cost-effective accommodations, they are rewarded for their choices. These incentives motivate employees to spend less while helping companies to cut down on travel costs. 

Rocketrip's platform is a behavioral change tool. A unique approach to business travel, the platform can be easily adopted by all types of businesses, best suited for enterprise corporations with a travel spend of more than $10 million annually. Among Rocketrip’s clientele are such companies as Twitter, IBM, and Whirlpool.

Founded in New York in 2013, Rocketrip’s innovative solutions propelled the company to success in the business travel world. The company has been named among the Top 100 places to work in New York City and twice awarded the Concur App Center Partner of the Year.

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Kim Andreello
Senior Vice President & General Manager
Industry
Internet
Website
rocketrip.com

The Story of Rocketrip

With such a strong product offering, Rocketrip has found it relatively easy to win new clients. Large organizations that spend massive amounts of money on business travel were quick to realize the value of Rocketrip’s platform. Rocketrip can point to travel cost reduction of up to 20%, a broad selection of discounted flights, a modern user interface, in-house customer service, and an analytics dashboard that gives managers insights into the company’s savings.

Rocketrip’s business trajectory was going very well, until the moment the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. In a short space of time, business travel collapsed. This caused major disruptions not just for Rocketrip but also for the entire business travel industry. Despite the hardships, Rocketrip made it through this crisis and started looking to rebuild. 

As the COVID pandemic was gradually being brought under control, Rocketrip felt it was time to try something new. Anticipating the business travel market opening back up but slower than leisure, Rocketrip decided to search for the optimal way to reach out to the leisure market.

Although Rocketrip had its own highly experienced team members, it was not particularly familiar with lead generation services in the leisure travel world, nor did the circumstances warrant hiring a large SDR force. Rocketrip had not tried to outsource lead generation in the past, so deciding to work with CIENCE was a relatively new foray for the organization. 

Challenges & Scope

Besides the many difficulties created by the COVID pandemic, there were other business challenges that Rocketrip needed to address. Overcoming these obstacles could bring considerable benefits, such as improving the company’s market visibility and profit margins in the leisure travel segment.

Challenges

Because of the broad appeal of its new platform TripPlanet, which is best suited for large membership organizations, non-profits, and small to medium-size businesses, Rocketrip had an enormous number of potential clients it wanted to reach out to. These prospects came from many different industries, from construction to biotechnology. This deep pool of potential prospects, encompassing alumni, trade, and professional membership organizations, chambers of commerce, non-profit entities, universities, and research institutions, posed a challenge: What was the most effective direction to direct Rocketrip’s outbound efforts? This was admittedly a good problem to have, but it nevertheless required careful consideration.

Rocketrip needed to decide how best to proceed, what strategy to adopt, and whether to deploy a highly targeted approach or conduct outreach more broadly. Another issue that demanded attention was the fact that large organizations tend to have a considerable level of personnel turnover and internal churn, making it taxing to find up-to-date contact information for outreach. 

Need

To make the best decisions about what methodology to use and which prospects to target, Rocketrip needed the help of an accomplished lead generation company. In order to achieve outstanding results, this company had to have a deep understanding of Rocketrip’s ideal customer persona (ICP) and knowledge of the leisure and small business travel industry. It would also need experienced sales development representatives (SDRs) who could explain to prospects the value of channeling travel expenditures through TripPlanet's platform. 

Opportunity

Rocketrip saw a promising opportunity in CIENCE to increase brand awareness and market visibility. Furthermore, because of Rocketrip’s business model, whereby revenue is directly tied to organizations actively using the platform, getting more clients would result in an enormous boost to the company’s revenue.

Rocketrip’s thousands of potential new clients presented an amazing opportunity: By implementing a highly targeted orchestrated outbound strategy and optimizing all the parts of the sales pipeline, Rocketrip stood to benefit greatly from increased margins and a sizable ROI.



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Why CIENCE?

It was CIENCE’s unique approach to lead generation that ultimately convinced Rocketrip to collaborate with the team.

“I saw lightbulbs go off when I was taking Rocketrip through our process for outreach,” said Michael Rouse, sales executive at CIENCE. “The omnichannel approach we offered was definitely something a little bit different for them. I explained how we would take prospects through a coherent and cohesive journey, giving them the best chance to properly present their brand.”

The omnichannel strategy that CIENCE created for Rocketrip consisted of emailing and phone calls, supplemented by banner advertisements and social media outreach. 

Drawing heavily from its human-curated data, CIENCE’s experts carefully orchestrated these different outreach channels, determining the optimal moment to reach out to each prospect.

Another reason for choosing to outsource lead generation to CIENCE was that Rocketrip’s sales team was able to better concentrate their efforts on closing sales. Sophisticated outbound marketing demands a large amount of a sales manager's time. By working with CIENCE’s specialists, Rocketrip’s sales team was better able to focus on closing deals. 



Results

Since beginning their partnership in July 2021, the number of qualified leads flowing into Rocketrip’s sales pipeline has increased considerably. The initial campaign was so successful that Rocketrip added a second team for outreach. The methodology CIENCE adopted—the three B’s (Brief, Blunt, Basic)—yielded impressive results.

In just three months, CIENCE brought over 2,500 leads to Rocketrip’s landing page. Additionally, CIENCE secured an average of fifteen qualified appointments per month for Rocketrip and achieved a formidable positive to negative response ratio of 1:1. The email channel was particularly effective.

One of the most beneficial results of the partnership was that Rocketrip’s sales team was able to double down on converting prospects, instead of training new staff.

 

“By utilizing CIENCE, we did not have to go through the lengthy process of recruiting, hiring, and training SDRs,” said Kim Andreello, senior vice president and general manager at Rocketrip.

Given the possibility that there could be a resurgence in COVID cases, which would once again disrupt business travel, high-quality lead generation is at this moment critically important.

“Rocketrip has always been a bit wary of COVID and its potential to come back and play another role in a potential travel shutdown if the numbers were to spike again,” said Matt Jonson, account manager at CIENCE. “With the scare of COVID looming, having established a funnel that is constantly flowing and creating new opportunities is crucial.”

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Partnership Success

The high number of qualified appointments generated by CIENCE’s omnichannel lead generation campaign exceeded Rocketrip’s expectations. “Rocketrip’s team is really pleased with the work we’ve done,” said Carolina Nava Richardson, project manager at CIENCE. “They were expecting a high volume of appointments, anticipating around eight or ten per month. Sometimes we delivered twenty! We ramped up quickly and found signal fast.“

A large part of this success was in large part due to the excellent communication between the two companies. “Our SDRs use a shared slack channel with Rocketrip and are great with daily communication,” said Jonson. “I say daily because we average around four appointments per week, which is really high. Rocketrip always gave us quick feedback and has remained involved in the process.” 

“The communication is very open and transparent,” Andreello agreed. “It feels like we have our own in-house SDR team.”

The business partnership between CIENCE and Rocketrip has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for both companies.

CIENCE’s professional approach to lead generation has helped Rocketrip achieve its business goals, including quickly rebuilding from the COVID crisis. Both teams are looking forward to continuing this successful relationship into the future.