GCS Sales Tool (Google, 2019)

 Position: Designer, Global Sales Assets (GSA) team, Google Customer Solutions (GCS) group

(NOTE: Final product and modules are proprietary to Google and not externally shareable. The following outlines the ideas behind the design of the tool and how I solved the problem at hand.)

Annually, the global Google Ads (formerly AdWords) organization decides on priority growth areas (PGA) - products and offerings the global sales team will focus on when interfacing with clients. In the past, this was a disjointed and cumbersome process, culminating in a lengthy sales deck that was ultimately overwhelming to both the sales team and customer base. This resulted in team members developing piecemeal tools, with varying degrees of success, which were neither consistent nor properly branded.

The challenge was to create a new, engaging sales tool for the global team, something that was useful, adaptable and adhered to Google brand standards.

The solution was a modular approach - breaking down the PGA offerings into digestible blocks of content, utilizing visuals and animations to further explain the complexities of Google Ads, without bombarding the customers with content.

Inspired by the simple idea of LEGO building blocks - which go together as a kit but can also be molded into a variety of structures - I created a tool that sellers could take and apply a similar “mix-n-match” approach. As a whole, the tool is a comprehensive overview of the 2019 PGAs, but, individually, the modules can stand alone to explain a specific product. Additionally, asking the question, “What works for this customer?”, the teams can take pieces (modules) and put them together in different ways to suit their target audience.

From a design perspective, the Google Ads product offerings presented another challenge. The documentation and specifications are dense and difficult to understand at first.

Focusing on the primary component of these products, machine learning (the application of AI that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience), I distilled each product offering into simple, animated visuals to explain the particular features.

Each visual follows the same process - customer assets + machine learning = a tailored ad for their target audience. The type of ad is dependent upon the client need. The result was an easy to understand visual, tweaked for every product offering.

Modules also included newly developed infographics, icons and other imagery to further flesh out product details and important takeaways for the customer base.

Development of this tool required collaboration with a large pool of stakeholders from around the world, 4 rounds of edits and review and months of refinement before its release on January 1, 2019. The tool was translated into 16 languages and used throughout 2019.