Tripadvisor’s Enablement Team Drives Sales and Marketing Alignment Using Allego

Improving the Feedback Loop

From the start, Hurley wanted to solve two challenges with one solution. The first challenge concerned sales efficiency, and the second was about marketing efficiency.

“We found that sellers were spending significant time building sales collateral, like pitch decks and leave behinds, because they couldn’t find what they were looking for in our old CMS,” said Hurley. “Or they found it, but it was outdated. Or they found it, but they weren’t sure if they could share it externally.”

Hurley continues, “In addition to taking away from selling time, we also found instances where content created by sellers was incorrect or off brand. By moving the marketing collateral to Allego, we removed some of these inefficiencies, giving sellers clear channels where they could find relevant collateral … by product or audience or language. In addition … we could determine if and how they were using the collateral.”

Tripadvisor’s product marketing team devoted considerable time and effort to creating sales collateral, but lacked a reliable tool for evaluating the ROI. Marketers couldn’t accurately gauge whether sellers were using the collateral, how customers were engaging with it, and if the content was helping to move the sales process forward.

“Allego helped us better understand whether our sellers are finding the content, whether they find that content useful, and whether they’re using the content. We can dig through Allego’s content dashboards and see whether customers are engaging with the content via external sharing reports.

“All of this gave us a really good feedback loop that helped marketing double down on its efforts. They could see if and when their work was making a difference. For a long time, [marketing] had been looking for ways to understand if their collateral was being used and how to improve it. Traditionally, sales is not great at giving feedback, so this was another way to amplify that feedback loop.”

Removing Obstacles for Sellers

Moving forward, Hurley’s strategy is to identify and remove any obstacle that might block the route to higher sales.

“Selling is complex,” said Hurley. “It’s even more complex in the current environment. The last thing you want to be doing is putting barriers and obstacles in front of your own sellers. If I need to go to Salesforce to find this piece of information, I have something over here in Google Drive, and I have something over in a content management system, all of that is creating a distraction for sellers. It’s taking them away from what they want to do, which is talk to customers and bring value to those customers.

“Cost efficiency is always important to us, too. Every industry was hit with the pandemic, but the hospitality industry was particularly challenged. So we looked to consolidate some of that budget … and we saw an opportunity with Allego to combine our content management. Looking to the future, I’m excited about some of the features coming on Allego to support our virtual selling and, equally challenging, onboarding people in a virtual world.”

A Herculean Task Made Easier

Consolidation of all the sales and learning content in a single location could have been an ulcer-inducing Herculean task, but thanks to the Allego customer support team, the process went far more smoothly than it otherwise might have.

“The biggest lesson I could share with everybody is: you have to resource content management. You need somebody to coordinate that effort. It took us a while to figure that out, but for the migration, we worked very closely with Allego to determine the best way to build a taxonomy of tags and a structure of channels that would support the new content. More important, from my side, what’s the easiest way to take the information from our old content management system and upload it to Allego? The team at Allego was really great in helping us and advising us and working with us to build a process. That really helped reduce some of our effort.”

By contrast, the decision to adopt Allego was a relatively easy task. “What really impressed me about Allego is that they’re constantly looking to innovate. So we doubled down with Allego because we felt it served our purpose from a learning platform basis, from a coaching platform basis, and now from a content basis. Allego is well-placed to help our sellers improve their capability and also support our customers in their buying journey.”