Sales enablement to bridge a merged sales organization
Designing and building the proof-of-concept for LocaliQ — the sales enablement platform that later became the namesake of Gannett's digital marketing business.
The Context
In August 2016 — while Interactivism was finishing up the redesign of ReachEdge — ReachLocal was acquired by Gannett to accelerate the parent’s digital growth strategy. The acquisition combined two large sales organizations with different core offerings, different expertise, different customers, and an urgent need to sell as one, and they asked us to design and build a proof of concept for a suite of sales enablement tools that could serve both teams.
The Opportunity
The brief was deceptively simple: give every sales rep, regardless of which side of the merger they came from, a fast and consistent way to put a credible proposal in front of a prospect. The hard part was the surface area. The tool had to flex across two product catalogs, two sales motions, and a long list of touchpoints from first prospect record to signed deal — without collapsing into a feature checklist that nobody would actually use.
The Engagement
Discovery ran in parallel with requirements gathering and research into third-party APIs. We interviewed sales reps and managers on both sides of the org, mapped the proposal workflow end-to-end, and aligned stakeholders on scope before any pixels moved.
From there, we worked through site maps, user flows, wireframes, and UI design, and built a working proof of concept on RDS Aurora and Ruby on Rails using a custom front-end framework.
The POC let an individual rep:
- Add prospects one at a time, in bulk via CSV, or by importing from Salesforce
- Score each prospect’s digital presence and marketing performance using a combination of third-party APIs and a proprietary algorithm
- Generate a prescribed mix of marketing solutions tailored to that score
- Customize the proposal — adding or removing solutions, adjusting tactics and budgets — before sharing it with the prospect
- Track every proposal in flight from a single dashboard
Representative budget ($)
The POC earned executive buy-in for a full build-out. From there, we refined the design, extended functionality around proposal generation and customization, and supported ReachLocal’s engineering team through the production build.
Results
The platform launched as LocaliQ in September 2018. In February 2023, Gannett retired the ReachLocal name and adopted LocaliQ as its new identity — now the digital marketing agency of the Gannett/USA Today Network.
Since launch, the LocaliQ platform has supported $15.9B in revenue, generated 279M leads, and saved 142M hours for local businesses across the country.
Marquee photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash