In the Mind of the Buyer
Most supplier meetings cover the same ground: rates, performance data, a few pleasantries. This session shows you how to have a completely different kind of conversation, one that makes you genuinely useful to a corporate travel team and positions you as a strategic partner rather than just another vendor.
What you'll leave with
A clear picture of the pressures, priorities and politics that shape a travel manager's day
The ability to turn a standard review meeting into a strategic conversation - elevating both sides of the relationship
Practical tools for demonstrating value beyond price
A stronger foundation for growing and protecting revenue with corporate accounts
What we cover
The travel manager's role: key responsibilities, stakeholders and internal pressures
What data matters to them and how they use it to demonstrate their own value
Stakeholder engagement above and beyond the traveller
How suppliers can become genuinely useful to the corporate travel team
Making your meetings worth attending - how to bring insight, not just updates
Beyond price: what else you bring to the relationship, and how to articulate it
Who this is for
Suppliers selling into corporate travel and procurement teams, account managers, sales leads and anyone who holds or wants to grow a corporate relationship.
Meet Your Instructor
Sallyanne Heywood, Kintela Partner and Communications Strategist
Sallyanne has led communications at the highest levels of the global travel industry — formerly Director of Communications & Marketing at HRG and VP of Communications at Amex GBT. She has advised boards and senior leaders through crises, M&A, major product launches and transformation programmes. She knows what it takes to prepare a C-suite executive for the spotlight because she's done it hundreds of times.
Karen Hutchings
Karen has operated at the very top of corporate travel for decades, managing programmes of a scale most people in the industry only read about. As EY's Global Head of Travel, Meetings & Events, she oversaw a $2.1 billion programme and led a global team of 130.
In this session, she brings the buyer's perspective from the inside - what a travel manager actually needs from a supplier relationship, what makes a meeting worth attending, and what separates the suppliers who become strategic partners from the ones who stay transactional.