IHG / Holiday Inn Mobile Sales Enablement
The Challenge
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), parent company of hotel brands such as Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and InterContinental, asked Mirum to solve a range of issues experienced by their commercial sales and investor team.
Could we come up with a solution that enables the highly decentralised sales team to be highly reactive, improving access to the latest versions of all sales material, while ensuring brand consistency for all presentation documents?
The Role
— Concept, Creative & UX Lead, AD
It was my role to meet the client's aspirations, and conceive, outline and communicate the experience direction for the tool to stakeholders.
I felt there was an opportunity to reach beyond the client's requirements, to further empower the sales team. So, I created an expanded feature requirements list, devised the UX and UI, and designed and built a prototype for stakeholder review and buy-in.
The Solution
The solution combines a flexible integrated interface with a re-centralised asset repo giving 'anytime, anywhere' access through a dedicated app. The app will give the sales team a powerful new support tool, enabling them to dynamically create, prepare, present, share and track sales and marketing presentations more easily than ever before.
The solution has been enthusiastically approved by all stakeholders and work will continue as part of upcoming activity.
Raising Aspirations
As part of a kick-off workshop with the client, a baseline of requirements was established. But, through deeper discussion, it became clear that there were other issues beyond the initial scope of the brief, but which could potentially be addressed as part of an expanded solution.
What started as a top-down brief to ensure that the sales material being used was current and on-brand, grew into an opportunity to genuinely empower the sales team while also giving them the new ability to measure the impact of their material and optimise every meeting.
A Single Source of Truth
Marketing and sales assets had become scattered throughout several backend resources, with members of the sales team necessarily keeping local copies. This led to versioning issues, as members of the team, through convenience or by mistake, used out-dated materials.
The solution to this was to switch away from directly shareable assets to a new, online repo, with full content tagging and a dedicated API for remote access. The centralised repo would allow for greater oversight on content updates, and establish a 'single source of truth'.
Team members are able to download assets to their web-connected devices for offline viewing, while push and pull data methods are used to ensure that users are immediately notified if an asset has been updated.
Playlist Maker
It remained a highly desirable benefit for the sales team to create custom presentations.
Research into solutions established that it was possible to parse and digest multi-page documents and reference individual pages.
This led to the concept of the 'Playlist Maker'. Rather than creating unique documents, the app allows users to compile custom presentations by pulling in any page or sequence of pages from a PDF or PPT, as well as still images and video files.
'Playlists' can then be saved back to the repo and made available to the team via the app — and shared with the client via a custom, tracked URL.
Measuring Success
During the initial workshop, I identified the opportunity to start tracking content performance. Through the ratings system, users would be able to directly feed back on how well content assets are meeting their needs.
Additionally, unique URLs shared with clients allows for direct tracking on client engagement. This could be deepened through additional per-page dwell time tracking.
Finally, by associating playlists with Salesforce CRM entries for each meeting, data could then be collated on presentations and assets which are used in meetings with successful business outcomes.
Granular content success tracking allows the team to optimise presentations, messaging and asset creation around content that converts more effectively.
