How Tripadvisor Aligned Sales and Marketing Using Allego
When one partner doesn’t know what the other is doing, you’re certain to encounter chaos.
Tripadvisor found that out when its sales and marketing teams were significantly out of alignment. And those are two teams that must be on the same page. If they aren’t, inefficiencies run rampant—and inefficiency equals wasted time, money, and resources.
Those are things Tripadvisor couldn’t afford—especially as a major player in the hospitality market, which has suffered significant drops during the pandemic. Tripadvisor lists over 7 million locations—restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions. As the biggest travel advisor online, Tripadvisor has 490 million monthly active users. The platform continues to rank as number 1 in the Travel and Tourism category in the United States.
The online travel research company helps users plan the ideal trip. It aggregates reviews and opinions of members about destinations, accommodations, restaurants, and activities throughout the world. The company also sells advertising, listing placements, subscription services, and travel insurance in partnership with Alianz Global.
Gerry Hurley, senior director of enablement at Tripadvisor, realized both sales and marketing were facing new challenges and operating inefficiently—in separate silos—leading to significant wasted time and lost revenue.
Sellers Facing New Demands of Virtual Selling
On the sales side, sellers couldn’t find collateral in the content management system. Or if they found content, they would discover it was out of date or it was unclear if it could be shared outside of the company. As a result, sellers spent a lot of time building their own pitch decks, leave-behinds, and other content, Hurley said.
“In addition to taking away from selling time, we also found instances where content created by sellers was incorrect or off brand,” he said.
Selling is complex. And the pandemic created even more challenges. With reps having to sell and engage with buyers virtually, the last thing Tripadvisor wanted to do was create other barriers for them to overcome. Today, it continues to be critical that sellers have up-to-date information about the products they sell and accurate brand messaging, and that they can quickly and easily find content in their moment of need.
“If I need to go to Salesforce to find this piece of information, then 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,” Hurley said. “It’s taking [sellers] away from what they want to do, which is talk to customers and bring value to those customers.”
Marketers Operating in the Dark
On the marketing side, Tripadvisor’s product marketing team devoted considerable time and effort to creating sales collateral. However, the team didn’t have a well-organized content management system or a reliable tool for evaluating ROI. Marketers couldn’t accurately gauge whether sellers were using the collateral, how customers were engaging with it, and if the content helped move the sales process forward.
Without the ability to measure effectiveness, the company’s marketers were operating in the dark. They needed to know which content was being accessed—or not—in order to understand what worked best with sellers and buyers, as well as determine how to improve results of future efforts. They also needed to validate the effectiveness of content, topics, and messages to understand the revenue impact of content.
Aligning Sales and Marketing with Allego
Hurley knew he had to get sales and marketing in alignment. The sales enablement team needed a solution that solved their inefficiency problems and allowed sales and marketing to work with each other. The solution had to provide an easy-to-navigate system for placing—and finding—content. And it had to provide insight into content usage. Allego fit the bill, Hurley said.
“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,” he said.
Not only is it important to have a content management system that’s well-organized and easy to navigate, but marketers must distribute the content, make recommendations, and put the content in context.
A modern sales enablement platform like Allego enables content creators to quickly capture videos of themselves discussing their intent—why they developed the content, when to use it, and how to use it. Not only does that improve content usage, but it helps break down marketing and sales team silos.
And with Allego’s content dashboards, Tripadvisor’s sales enablement team can better understand whether sellers are finding the content, if sellers think the content is useful, and if they’re using the content in their interactions with buyers.
“All of this gave us a really good feedback loop that helped marketing double down on its efforts,” Hurley said. “They could see if and when their work was making a difference. Traditionally, sales is not great at giving feedback, so this was another way to amplify that feedback loop.”
Cost efficiency is also top of mind for Hurley, especially as Tripadvisor continues to navigate the ups and downs of the pandemic.
“So, we looked to consolidate some of that budget, … and we saw an opportunity with Allego to combine our content management,” he said. “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.”
Learn More
Read the Tripadvisor case study to learn how the company uses Allego to improve the efficiency of the sales and marketing teams, saving it time and money.
