A sales team that books its own customer visits

Ostra sells scheduling software to regional freight carriers, and its customers would rather meet in a dispatch office than on a video call. Its nine account executives cover nine states from Chicago, and in a normal quarter they make thirty or forty visits between them.

A login nobody used

Sam Okoye, Ostra's founder, had bought a corporate travel tool the year before. "It needed a login, a policy PDF and a lot of patience," he says. Reps booked on their own cards instead, then submitted a pile of receipts every Friday. Sam approved them on Sunday nights, mostly without reading them.

The trouble was not the money. It was that nobody knew what a visit cost until weeks after it happened, and the quarter's budget was a guess.

Policy, written once

Sam wrote Ostra's policy in Pioneer in about fifteen minutes:

• Hotels up to $175 a night, $210 in Minneapolis and Kansas City.
• Economy for anything under five hours, and rail for Milwaukee and St. Louis.
• A $60 meal per diem, on the trip card, every travel day.
• Anything over a visit's budget goes to the regional lead, not to Sam.

Now a rep posts "Des Moines Tuesday, back Wednesday, visiting Prairie Line" in the sales channel. Pioneer books inside those lines, puts the visit on a card of its own and posts the confirmation. The median, across the third quarter, was eleven minutes.

Budgets that hold

Because every visit has a budget before it has a booking, the quarter's travel spend is visible the moment a trip is booked rather than when the receipts land. In the third quarter, Ostra's reps made thirty-eight visits and finished $9,140 under budget, mostly by taking the rail options Pioneer offered first.

I approve maybe two things a month now. Both are good reasons, and both come with a cheaper option attached.

Fridays back

The Friday receipt pile is gone. Charges are matched as they happen and sent to Ostra's books every evening. Sam's Sunday nights are his own again, which he says was not the goal, but which he would not give back.