The challenge
A leading academic publisher wanted to find ways to drive additional revenue through more personalised and targeted customer engagement from their sales teams.
The traditional process of matching their diverse content (books, articles, videos, audio, newly acquired content, and more) with the specific needs of research institutions, pharma companies, and new types of customers such as corporates and governments was manual and therefore time-consuming. Staff tended to “go with what they know” or relied on keyword searches or user input tags, leading to frequent missed opportunities in a changing market.
The solution
In six weeks, we developed a user-friendly tool that lets staff submit any long-form text, such as:
- Course descriptions
- Research interests
- Grant proposals
- Faculty profiles
The tool provides highly relevant content suggestions, allowing users to see how that piece of content is related to the input text, drill down results on screen, filter by content type, and export them in different formats for use in sales presentations to customers.
The results
Our client’s teams are saving time and uncovering new opportunities. The tool has become essential for sales staff, leading to more effective cross-selling. It’s also now being used by editorial and marketing teams to discover potential authors for new content and create thematic content collections for promotions.
Looking ahead, it’s clear that this foundational technology can be extended to various customer use cases, opening up exciting new possibilities for engagement and growth. For example, the future roadmap includes allowing customers to directly upload their own abstract, grant application, or research hypothesis to then be served relevant content from across the portfolio.
