The Portal was created as a tool for Sealed Air Sales Representatives. Their goal was to increase the amount of products their current customers bought from Sealed Air and/or obtain new customers. Portal was created to allow the reps to easily look up products, access images and quick facts about the product to ascertain whether it would be a good fit for the customer.
Objective:
Increase sales on Sealed Air Product Care products by empowering Sealed Air Sales Representatives when they meet with existing or potential clients.
Goals:
- Make the sales rep sound like an expert, fast.
- Break down information so it’s easy to understand and remember.
- Allow products to speak for themselves using videos, images and customer testaments.
- Categorize products so they are easy to find.
- Create accessibility for the products, reps can easily download/share this information with clients.
- Build for mobility, reps should be able to access the Portal on their laptop, tablet or phone.
What I did:
- Interviewed sales reps to build up personas.
- Visited factories to experience the kind of environment the reps were walking into.
- Took all the Sealed Air products and organized them into categories that resonated with sales reps.
- Worked with copy-writing and product experts to give each product quick, digestible “elevator pitches,” facts, videos and imagery.
- Built the interaction design and the UI, working closely with branding and marketing.
- Built process flows and journey maps to illustrate a scenario where the portal would be useful.
- Checked in regularly with sales reps to understand where the Portal was working and where it could be improved.
We started off with 3 primary personas:
- The Distributor Sales Rep (DSR). We called him Justin. Justin had not been a sales rep for long. He didn’t have a huge book of business and was grinding it out to find more. He did not have a great understanding of Sealed Air products but wanted to sound like he did.
- The Distributor Buyer (DB). We called her Linda. Once the business transaction got to the point of making an order, it was Linda who handled it. They needed to know what the product was (were they already buying that from us? Or something similar?) and the cost (Did this product already have a price in their system?).
- The Distributor Owner (DB). We called him Marco. Marco wasn’t feet on the floor at these factories but he had great say in what his clients used and what Linda could pay for.
The MVP of Portal was well received
After the initial launch, we received a lot of feedback about two things:
1. Because some product information is customer specific, we had to put Portal behind a login. We experienced growing pains with the company we partnered with to provide this security service and our users sometimes had trouble logging in.
2. The portal was a great tool if the sales rep knew what product they wanted to find. Sometimes, however, the rep knew the problem the customer was trying to solve, but still didn’t know enough about the wide range of products to comfortably recommend one.
To help with the login struggles, I made a process flow showing the current login struggles to help us understand where the customer was getting frustrated and where to focus our energy on process improvement.
And then to help the reps further with problem solving with customers, we began to put thought to a tool called a Solution Finder or Product Recommender (we bounced between the two names often during design). The sales rep could enter a variety of parameters on the product and what the customer was trying to achieve. This would then take the information and put out recommended products the sales rep should look further into.
Our initial design used range sliders to input the information. We did this because we assumed most reps didn’t know the exact details of the product they were trying to solve for.
We did several rounds of testing with a prototype and discovered our initial assumption was, in fact, incorrect. Many reps declared the desire to be able to input numbers rather than messing with clunky sliders.
So we iterated and tested again and our next designs tested with much more positive feedback.
You can see I was also playing around with how to display the recommended products so the sales rep could understand more fully what each product was before navigating away from the page.
Here my journey with the Portal ended. We never got to build the product recommender as priorities shifted to building a full e-commerce experience.
Hali Diaz 