PayPal App

overview

By 2016 a predicted 96.3 million tablets will be in use within the enterprise sector. Whilst the appetite for tablet adoption has never been in question the role and value that tablets bring to our business culture and practices has. In recent years we've seen a plethora of business to business apps wash through without any compelling or commercial reason for their creation - they simply exist to serve the corporate vanity of 'having an app'. In 2013/4 this trend was well and truly bucked as PayPal and Purestone set about creating 'PayPal Connect', a breakthrough in B2B app development, one that has defined and reshaped an entire organisations approach to selling.

Innovation and a challenger mentality are two qualities engrained within the PayPal culture that have helped it to become the leading provider in the global payments industry. Therefore when the UK sales team felt they needed to 'change up' its sales approach it wasn't simply a case of building a new deck of PowerPoint slides. Through working closely with Purestone they carried out a comprehensive 'ground up' analysis of their own and the wider industry's selling practices.

This formed a platform to entirely re-engineer how PayPal told its story. With an emphasis on placing the needs and wants of the customer at the heart of the sales engagement, 'PayPal Connect' was born as not only a slick, immersive and memorable app experience but a sea change in how the UK sales operation engaged with and sold to its customers.

research & planning

re-engineering the PayPal story
- 'Mystery shopper’ presentation workshops across PayPal and competitors
- Interrogation and analysis of existing materials and approaches
- Identify and understand the key ‘moments of truth’ in a successful sales engagement
- Research sales approaches taken by other organisations within the financial services and IT sector
-‘Fly on the wall’ meetings with prospective customers and PayPal sales team members

objectives

challenge the status quo
- Evaluate current presentation approaches, styles and methodology
- Review existing sales presentation content and materials
- Determine effectiveness of current sales tools and applications
- Deliver something entirely fresh and unique

give the sales team some teeth

- Create an approach that embodies PayPal’s innovative spirit
- Clearly differentiate PayPal in a competitive pitch situation
- Develop a solution that works in harmony and compliments PayPal’s consultative sales culture and approach
- Improve meeting to sale conversion rate by 10% or more - Increase the volume of meaningful sales engagements taking place

brand & proposition

- Provide marketing with the ability to easily control how both brand and messaging are represented throughout the sales cycle
- Give sales quick, easy and up to date access to impactful and relevant presentation content
- Tailor content to the unique needs of the individual customers for each and every presentation
- Develop a solution that can scale above and beyond the UK market

creativity & innovation

a pioneering technical solution to drive and control the conversation

The user interface and experience was based around a series of highly tactile and immersive content templates which act as the stimulus for customer conversation and engagement:

- Conception of a unique design and animation scheme to shape look, feel and experience
- Advanced HTML 5 canvas techniques
- Ground breaking use of CSS3
- Suite of advanced jquery libraries
- Extensive testing to ensure application remains performant across iPad 3, 4 and Air

Admin / publishing engine:

- Based on Sitefinity CMS and Kendo UI for data visualisation
- Granular roles and responsibilities module for access and rights i.e. your job function dictates what you can or can’t do
-Simplified design to the presentation editor in order to improve usability

strategy & implementation

changing up the customer conversation

- Presentation narrative to allow for freeform, multidirectional journey through content as opposed to the traditional linear journeys served up by PowerPoint
- The flow of the presentation is built around a customer ‘first’ principle allowing the conversational direction to be dictated and controlled by the needs and wants of the customer (historically PayPal had dedicated the first 30% of the presentation to themselves)
- The presentation is about the individuals in the room, first and foremost, PayPal Connect brings them together through the presentation narrative and this unique app/tablet experience

creating ‘moments of truth’
- Development of an in-app business case and break-even calculator to facilitate an ‘on the fly’ exchange of real and meaningful data. This significantly increases the value of the engagement and fast tracks the sales cycle.
- PayPal have access to comScore data which allows them to provide tailored and powerful insight and analytics on any potential customer. At source this information is flat and dry so a data visualisation module was integrated to serve this impactful information in an interactive and engaging way.
- ‘Next Steps’ data capture functionality was built into the final phase of Connect to help accelerate the post meeting follow up. Customers would be automatically emailed next steps, actions and a web link to the presentation by the time they’d returned to their desk.

results

the proof in the pudding
The following metrics have been calculated by using outputs from Salesforce.com since PayPal Connect went live.

- Deliver more meaningful presentations: 64% more presentations being delivered by the sales team due to ease of use and 'fit' with selling practice, style and culture
- Increase close rate: 21% increase in close rate
- Deliver adoption and change: Due to be rolled out to 3 additional international territories in 2015

from the horse’s mouth
“Without wishing to sound too dramatic this project has become the catalyst for a complete step change in how we go about doing what we do. It’s a fantastic example of how technology can augment, compliment and evolve the art of selling. The most important thing to come out of this is that our customers find it an entirely refreshing and altogether more rewarding experience.”

Mike Davies, UK & Ireland Sales Director, PayPal