Imagine a distributor that has a great purchasing portal but no way to get people to it. Or a distributor that is entering a new business vertical, but has no place to put product and company documentation. That’s situation I found myself in.

The Challenge

Create a missing piece of the customer journey and marketing funnel to be rolled out on a global scale. Arrow Cloud had the purchasing capability in place, but no way to educate customers or draw them in regarding either Arrow Cloud or the cloud suppliers. We had 15-20 suppliers on board and nowhere to feature them.

The Actions

This was a cross-functional effort that included Arrow product and sales, along with individual supplier marketing teams and SMEs. Additionally, we brought in an agency to assist with back-end website development.

Initial steps included selecting the technology stack and collaboration with Arrow Sales to ensure we were in alignment with the purpose, goals and audience of the portal as well as building out the project timeline. I also worked with them to refine or redefine buyer personas as needed to better inform the journey and types of collateral we would be creating.

I provided the information architecture/sitemap as well as working with the agency to develop the wire frames, all of which were provided to the stakeholders for review and approval prior to moving into design work. I also spearheaded the drive to define collateral necessary for launch of a supplier as well as the design of the collateral, building information gathering templates to send out to the suppliers, and getting that information back in a timely manner.

Simultaneously, the agency and I began work on the design of the portal, informed by the personas and customer journey identified earlier in the process. The agency worked through the back-end development such as template builds, website style sheets, functionality, repeatability and scalability. I managed the front-end development, building the page and post templates, defining page-specific CSS, providing illustrations, icons, content and language, and ensuring each supplier’s page was appropriately co-branded with Arrow.

This was in parallel to approving all aspects of the back-end development. Prior to moving into full scale design and coding of the site, each page design template went through a review and approval cycle with Arrow Brand, Product, Sales, and cloud marketing leadership. Once we had approval of the homepage, the main product page and each type of subpage, we moved forward with identifying the initial suppliers. Pages were mocked up in alignment with their branding needs, and those page designs in conjunction with content writing were sent to Arrow and supplier stakeholders for review and approval.

Additional design duties also fell to me – designing the collateral that would be linked to from the supplier page. While all this was going on, I was also designing the templates for the required pieces of collateral necessary for a supplier to be included in a launch:

Onboarding Document Battle Card

Data Sheet Sell Sheet

We had 4 short months to get this partner portal up and running in English. We, of course, tested each page as it was coded and additional interactive elements added, but upon deployment, we also brought in some testers for the final UX and UI designs that were based off the initial testing. Tweaks were made to language and some journey elements prior to sending the link for the site to a select focus group for testing. Again, tweaks were made, another round of reviews, and then publication.

Once the English version was complete, we got on to regionalizing it for deployment out to 12 countries in 7 languages. That is a whole other project.

The Results

We socialized the new site through our internal communication channels, as well as our Arrow Cloud Journal and our social media channels. Anyone who interacted regularly with suppliers and partners was educated about the site and trained on it with the results that 75% of the supplier partners were actively using the site within 12 weeks. We were also seeing substantial cross-traffic between suppliers and between the partner portal and the purchase platform. With this piece in place, we were able to move on to designing arrowcloud.com – Arrow’s lead generation website, which would funnel into the partner portal.