This project was designed to equip sales managers with advanced hotel sales skills, helping them meet and exceed annual sales targets.
Audience: Sales managers in global hotel chains with 5-7 years of experience
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, Learner's Analysis, Scriptwriting, Storyboarding, Reviewing Edits, Production Planning Assistance
Tools Used: Google Docs, Google Sheet, FigJam, Frame.io, Canva
Note: The content in the examples has been altered to maintain confidentiality.
The Skill Gap
In global hotel chains, sales managers often struggle with cultivating long-term client relationships, resulting in potential revenue loss to competitors.
My Process
I incorporated Human-centered Design Principles to guide my course design process.
The learner persona helps me empathize with the learners and understand their perspectives, which helps guide my design decisions.
I collected and distilled the most relevant insights via desk research and in-depth interviews with target learners.
I revamped our interview approach from solution-oriented to problem-based questions. This ensures we truly understand learners' needs and the challenges that our course would address, without introducing training bias. This shift empowers us to gather critical insights for a more effective learning experience.
After identifying the most pressing challenges that our target learners (hotel sales managers) faced, and consulting our subject matter expert, I crafted a list of subtopics, or to put it more precisely, the subproblems to be addressed in the course.
Subsequently, I conducted follow-up interviews with the target learners and their managers again to validate the relevance of this list.
By prototyping the lesson list early in the process rather than at a later stage, I ensured that the course was tailored to meet the learners' needs, saving the company time and money.
Once the list was finalized and approved, I proceeded to design the content.
Since the target learners prefer bite-sized training videos, I applied the Segmenting Principle.
The course is divided into 13 lessons, each of which was designed to solve a single subproblem. This gave learners the flexibility to choose the subtopics they were most interested in rather than going through the entire course in one go.
For each lesson, I worked with the Subject Matter Expert to decide on:
1. The Learning Objectives: I targeted higher-order thinking in Bloom's Taxonomy.
2. The Quiz: I aimed to evaluate applied knowledge rather than mere memorization.
After that, I synthesized the content for each lesson. To make the learning content immediately applicable and engaging, I used different techniques, such as:
Scenarios
Case studies
Storytelling
Interactive exercises
These techniques SHOW the learners rather than just TELLING them what they need to do.
Next, I wrote the full script for all the lessons in the course. I applied the Personalization Principle to make the script coherent and easy to digest.
For example:
Instead of
Adopting consultative selling involves rigorously assessing the most fitting client solution. This mandates a continuous dedication to providing value at every juncture of the sales process.
We had
So how do you embrace consultative selling?
Ask yourself: What solution is right for this particular client? and
How can I provide value to them at every step of the sales process?
After the script was approved and read through by the instructor, I moved on to storyboarding.
First, I created a visual moodboard that was aligned with the Learner Persona and the company brand.
Note: This is a simplified version of the actual moodboard.
I worked closely with the edit team to refine the visual concept from the moodboard. This helped align our vision for the final outcome of the course as well as the level of effort needed to realize it.
Then, I created the Storyboard for each lesson.
I collaborated with the Production Team to prioritize and plan the necessary filming scenarios and vox pops.
This involved balancing scene significance with execution feasibility and budget considerations, making adjustments as required.
As the first edit was uploaded onto Frame.io, I reviewed and suggested changes to ensure all the elements in the video (text, voice, and visuals) supported the learning process.
Results
The course received positive feedback from both the team and the learners, who praised its clear and logically structured content. The engaging design of the material was noted.
Furthermore, the principles employed in this course have been successfully applied to other courses, creating a premium-quality content library for the company.
