As Business Travel News’ Travel Manager of the Year, Salesforce’s Dorian Stonie has succeeded by taking a collaborative approach with suppliers, travelers and peers. In a recent BTN profile, Stonie, senior manager of global travel for the customer relationship management and business-oriented social media company, described the pillars of his success: social, mobile and open.
In the article, BCD Travel senior vice president and Advito Managing Director April Bridgeman described how Stonie worked with BCD and its Advito consultancy to break new ground for business travel. “Salesforce was our first client to embrace the social channel,” Bridgeman said about Salesforce’s adoption of its own Chatter platform as the administrative foundation of its travel program.
Since then, she said, “Salesforce’s program has never reached equilibrium; it’s been so dynamic and growing so fast. Finding a comfort level with that many-to-many communication channel has actually helped them to address that challenge while keeping their employees engaged and educated.
“[BCD and Advito] embraced enterprise social in our own company at about the same time and happened to adopt the Chatter platform,” Bridgeman told BTN. “So we started this journey together in a way and together developed a unique partnership in leveraging traveler feedback to improve the program.” The partnership “helped BCD to develop our enterprise social methodologies that we now share with other customers.”
Bridgeman said the “measured risks” that Stonie has taken with Salesforce’s travel program “legitimized concepts that otherwise might only be concepts, and that’s what makes him a true pioneer for our industry.”
