--- title: "How we moved 24 corporate travel programmes onto a client's book in six months, worth $2,108,280 in annual management fee. | Stone Haven Capital Group" description: "An average of $87,845 a programme, in a market where most of the people we wrote to were legally unable to buy on the day we wrote to them." canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/corporate-travel-management" last-updated: "2026-08-22" --- > An average of $87,845 a programme, in a market where most of the people we wrote to were legally unable to buy on the day we wrote to them. Stone Haven Capital Group Schedule a Call Case study · Corporate Travel Management # How we moved 24 corporate travel programmes onto a client's book in six months, worth $2,108,280 in annual management fee. An average of $87,845 a programme, in a market where most of the people we wrote to were legally unable to buy on the day we wrote to them. Six months. A corporate travel management company selling negotiated supplier rates and duty-of-care reporting on a per-trip management fee. No RFP invitations, no trade stands, no new sales hires. The defining feature of this engagement is that the majority of the addressable market was mid-contract throughout it. - $2,108,280 generated in 6 months, from 24 travel programmes at an average of $87,845. - 598,736 emails to 149,684 companies, producing 1,048 replies at 0.7%. - 262 interested conversations became 89 held meetings and 24 signed programmes. - What did most of the work: we built the list around when contracts come up, and around what a company spends. - What went wrong: the duty-of-care angle put us in front of legal instead of procurement. 01 ## Did they get a good result? Yes, and the shape of it matters as much as the total. New programmes had been arriving through broker referrals and the occasional invitation to tender, worth $602,366 in annual management fee when we arrived. Six months later the client had signed 24 programmes worth $2,108,280, a 3.5x increase, with 89 qualified opportunities worth $5,989,700 still open behind them. What happenedThe number Travel programmes closed24 Annual management fee generated$2,108,280 Average annual management fee$87,845 Qualified opportunities89, worth $5,989,700 Interested conversations262, worth $11,816,200 Emails sent598,736 Companies contacted149,684 Replies1,048, a 0.7% reply rate Positive replies262, 25.0% of all replies Bounces13,172, a 2.2% bounce rate The whole six months of travel outbound, in the sending dashboard. 02 ## Did you get them in front of the right people? Send count settles nothing. 598,736 emails is a figure anyone can reach the moment they stop caring who is on the other end of them. 24 companies handed their travel programme over at an average annual management fee of $87,845. Behind them sit 89 qualified opportunities worth $5,989,700 and 262 interested conversations worth $11,816,200. Targeting shows itself in the conversion rather than the volume. 1,048 replies produced 262 positive ones, 89 of those cleared qualification and 24 signed. Roughly a third of the positive replies reached a real evaluation, which is a high ratio for any market and an unusual one for a market where most readers were two years from being allowed to move. The travel pipeline the client worked from, with the incumbent's renewal month on every card. 03 ## What worked, and why ### We built the list around when contracts come up, and around what a company spends. A travel programme changes hands at renewal and almost never between renewals, so the leading field on every record was the month the incumbent agreement expires. That came from published tender histories, procurement notices, supplier announcements and the client's own memory of which competitor had won what and when. The second field was annual travel spend, banded from $2M to $40M, because below that band there is no programme worth managing and above it the buying goes to a global network. The working pool came to 174,051 records and 149,684 companies were contacted across the window, 148,500 of them entering the sequence for the first time and 136,212 completing all four touches. Order of entry was driven by the renewal date, so a company nine to twelve months out was reached ahead of one that had signed a three-year agreement the previous quarter. A reply from a travel manager fourteen months out from renewal, which is the shape most of the useful conversations took. This holds because the spend band tells you whether a company is worth managing and the renewal date tells you whether it can act. Firmographics on their own produce a list of perfectly qualified companies, most of whom are contractually incapable of saying yes to anything for another two years. ### We put the offer in the first three lines and let the wrong-timing replies come back. There is no greeting. The first line is a question about when the current agreement runs out, which a procurement director can answer in four words. The offer sits directly under it, the recipient's own role and spend band appear midway down so the email reads as addressed rather than broadcast, and it is signed with initials. A large share of the positive replies came back as a date rather than as a meeting request, and those were the ones worth having. Every send was plain text with spintax across every line, so no two emails left identical. All of the cold volume ran on a separate estate of 151 domains carrying 454 mailboxes, with nothing at all on the domain the client uses to talk to travellers and suppliers. This holds because a buyer who cannot act this year will still tell you when they can, provided the question is cheap enough to answer. An email that opens by asking for thirty minutes gets silence from that person, and that person is most of the market. ### We ran four touches across sixteen days and then stopped writing. Four steps with gaps of three, five and eight days, five variations on the opener and two on each follow-up, all running against each other from the first week. Nothing after the fourth email. A company that has stayed quiet four times inside a fortnight is one to re-enter in a later window with the renewal date closer, and the pool was wide enough to keep doing exactly that. Each mailbox was held at 20 sends a day across 454 mailboxes, which is what makes 598,736 sends in six months arithmetically ordinary rather than reckless. Inbox placement held at 92.0% across the estate, with zero accounts in an error state and 8 alerts raised across the entire engagement. The four-step travel sequence and the opener variations that ran against each other. The opener, short enough to finish above the fold on a phone. This holds because the second and third touches are where a mid-contract buyer volunteers the date. The opener gets read by people who have nothing to say yet; the follow-ups are what they answer once they have decided the sender is worth a sentence. ### We treated a renewal date as an outcome and filed it. Any reply carrying a date was written into the CRM as a dated record and scheduled to resurface in the month it named. Some of those records will produce nothing for another two years, and that is the correct expectation to hold. Several of the programmes that signed inside this window began as a month-one reply explaining that the company was locked in until the following spring. This holds because storing a date costs nothing and re-finding that person cold in eighteen months costs the entire acquisition a second time. Most programmes throw this reply away as a rejection, which is the single most expensive habit in a market that renews on a cycle. ### We reviewed the angles weekly and judged them on the quality of what came back. Angles were assessed every week on the share of replies that were usable rather than on how many arrived. Against 1,048 replies across six months there is no room to spend a month waiting for significance, so weak angles were withdrawn within days and their contacts went to the ones that were working. That discipline is what carried the positive share to 25.0%. 04 ## The five angles we test, in every market Markets differ on which framing they answer, and the difference is not something you can reason your way to from outside. So we stop reasoning and measure. Five angles go out at once against a split pool and the replies decide. This market added a condition the others do not have: an angle here also has to be worth answering by somebody with two years left on their contract, because that is who most of the readers are. 05 ## 1. The benchmark Put a number in front of them that describes their own situation, drawn from companies of the same size and spend. They cannot confirm it without engaging and they cannot comfortably ignore it either. Strongest where the buyer suspects the incumbent arrangement is average and has no way of checking. Companies booking around $8M a year are typically paying between 3% and 9% over negotiated rates on hotel spend. Do you know where yours sits? 06 ## 2. The direct pitch State what you do, roughly what it costs and who it is for, then ask one question. No setup and no story. A meaningful share of senior buyers reply to nothing else and quietly resent being warmed up. We manage corporate travel on a per-trip fee with negotiated rates and duty-of-care reporting included. When is your current agreement up? 07 ## 3. Risk reversal Move the risk to your side of the table. Nothing to sign and nothing owed if the numbers fail to appear. Lands hardest in categories where the buyer has already been promised savings by a supplier and did not see them. Send us last year's booking file and we will show you what our rates would have done to it. If the saving is not there, you have lost an afternoon and nothing else. 08 ## 4. The status quo challenge Question the thing they have stopped questioning. Done clumsily it reads as an accusation about their own judgement. Done properly it makes an arrangement that has become invisible visible again, which is the whole job when the incumbent is not doing anything obviously wrong. Most programmes get renewed on the incumbent's own savings report. Has anyone outside the agreement looked at your booking data since it was signed? 09 ## 5. The soft ask Lower the bar until agreeing costs nothing at all. No meeting, no commitment, just permission to send something across. The only angle that reliably gets an answer from a reader who is contractually unable to buy for another two years. Would a one-page read on where mid-size programmes leak spend be useful? Happy to send it over and leave it there. 10 ## How we use them The five go live in the same week, divided across the pool so each one gets a fair share of it. Within a few weeks the reply data has named one or two, the rest are switched off before they consume more contacts, and the winners take the volume. Here the split was decided by timing: the angles that invited a date beat the angles that invited a conversation. The same five carry to LinkedIn with shorter wording and unchanged logic. 11 ## What did not work, and what we did about it Three of them. Printing them here is cheaper for both of us than you meeting them yourself in month two of your own programme. ### The duty-of-care angle put us in front of legal instead of procurement. Duty of care is the part of this offer with the cleanest compliance story, so early messaging led with it and the list was allowed to follow the message. That pulled general counsel, compliance managers and risk officers into the pool alongside procurement, and the first pull came out at 435,128 records. Legal replied, thoughtfully and at length. Legal also holds no travel budget, owns no renewal date and works to no deadline. Those threads absorbed reply-handling capacity for weeks and produced qualified opportunities at a small fraction of the rate the buying titles did, which is the actual damage: every hour and every send spent there was an hour and a send not spent on somebody with signing authority and a contract running out. The targeting profile behind the programme: buying titles, spend band and geography, before the legal and compliance roles came ou The targeting profile behind the programme: buying titles, spend band and geography, before the legal and compliance roles came out. What we changed: compliance and legal roles came out of the pool, the spend band and the renewal-date requirement went on, and the list closed to 174,051. Duty of care stayed in the offer as a supporting line and stopped being the thing the first email led with. ### For three weeks the sends ran on European mornings against a United States list. The schedule was configured in the estate's own local time and nobody held it up against the geography of the list. Emails were released at around nine in the morning in Central Europe, which lands them in an American inbox somewhere between two and four in the morning. By the time the recipient sat down at a desk, the message was already underneath everything that had arrived during their working day. What we changed: the schedule was rebuilt around the recipient's clock, with each region released at the start of its own working day. The fix took an afternoon and belonged in the build from week one. ### The offer sat below the fold on a phone. The opener spent two lines on context before it said what the client actually does. On a laptop that reads as courtesy. This audience reads standing up, between meetings, on a phone, where a preview shows roughly three lines, and the sentence carrying the offer and the fee was not among them. Early reply volume skewed towards the small part of the list reading on a desktop client, which is what gave the problem away. What we changed: the offer moved into the first three lines and everything explanatory moved beneath it. The follow-ups were rewritten on the same principle, and every variant since is drafted to survive being read as a notification. Every engagement has a section like this one. Most of them are removed before the document reaches a reader, which is the only reason case studies in this category read as smoothly as they do. 12 ## Why this works for corporate travel specifically The travel management companies we talk to are stuck in the same place. The service is good, clients stay for years, and every programme on the book arrived because somebody remembered to send an invitation to tender. Waiting to be invited is a perfectly good acquisition strategy until the year you decide to grow on purpose. Three features of this market do the heavy lifting: - The buying moment carries a date. Almost no market tells you in advance when a company is allowed to act. This one does, because the incumbent agreement has an expiry and the people inside it will hand you that expiry if the question is cheap enough to answer. - The fee recurs. At an average annual management fee of $87,845, a handful of programmes covers the cost of the entire engagement and then bills again the following year without anybody sending another email. - The first question commits them to nothing. Telling a supplier when your contract runs out is not a decision, which is why 25.0% of replies came back positive from a market in which most readers were locked in at the time of reading. 13 ## Why would this work for your business? There is a real chance it would not. Two columns below, and the honest answer is usually obvious by the third row. This works ifThis does not work if What you sell is bought on a contract with a known end dateBuying in your category is impulsive and never comes round again There are tens of thousands of companies that could plausibly buy from youYour entire addressable market is a few hundred named accounts One account is worth five figures a year or more once it is signedA single sale is worth less than what it costs to find the buyer Somebody internally can own replies and keep a dated conversation alive for monthsNobody has time to carry a conversation past the first exchange You can wait two quarters for the slower half of the pipeline to matureThe number has to be hit this month or the programme is judged a failure If the left-hand column describes you, what transfers is the process, because this client had no advantage worth copying. A mid-size travel management company with good service, long retention and no route at all to anybody who had not already invited it into a tender. The result came out of the method, and the method runs the same way against your market as it did against theirs. 14 ## One more thing worth understanding A travel programme is not bought when it is needed. It is bought when the existing contract runs out, and those contracts run two or three years. Work the arithmetic on that and the market looks different: across a three-year cycle roughly one company in three is within a year of its renewal at any given moment, and the other two cannot move regardless of how good the offer in front of them is. So a programme like this one is not really buying meetings in its first month. It is buying position in a queue. A large share of the 262 interested conversations amount to somebody saying ask me in nineteen months, and a dated record of that is worth more than a meeting with a person who has no authority to change anything today. That is also why the volume looks the way it does. 598,736 sends against 149,684 companies is four touches each, spread across a pool wide enough that the third of it inside a buying window is still a serious number of buyers. Narrow the list to only the companies renewing this quarter and the programme exhausts its market in about six weeks. The 24 programmes that closed inside six months came out of the part of the pool that was free to act. The rest of that pool is the asset this engagement actually built, and unlike most pipeline it matures on a schedule that is already written down. 15 ## Before and after What changedBefore After Where new programmes came fromBroker referrals and invitations to tender 149,684 companies contacted directly Annual management fee on the book$602,366 $2,108,280 Programmes closed in the windowNot counted separately 24 Growth on the baselineFlat year on year 3.5x Renewal dates on target accountsUnknown until a tender arrived Recorded across a pool of 174,051 contacts 16 ## If you want to know whether your market has this in it One conversation is normally enough to settle it. Tell us the size of company you want on your book, what one programme is worth across a year, and how long agreements in your category tend to run. We come back with how many of those companies are reachable, how many of them are inside a buying window at any one time, and what conversation volume is realistic against that number. If outbound is the wrong instrument for you, that is what you will hear on the call. Finding that out now is worth considerably more to you than finding it out in month four. ## Want to know whether your market has this in it? The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all. If we think it is not, we will say so. 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