How to run a creative branding project that smashes its original goals.

(Hint, it’s about an effective Kit of Parts)

One of our clients YouTube set us a challenge. How could we create an experience for their high-performing UK B2B sales team that landed the key messages from YouTube’s new advertising campaign?

One of the challenges in B2B is making sure that your sales team has the right set of tools. A motivated, well-equipped sales team is an essential part of any successful B2B strategy. 

But sales teams are notoriously hard to cut through too. They are driven by targets and can be a tough crowd to impress.

At Hands Down!, we love a challenge. We knew that we needed to create a high-energy experience that cut through to the team and equipped them with the right takeaways, stats, and stories to help them sell Google products to their clients.

The result?  A two-fold experience: The Alpine Lodge and The Zone, accessible to all Google employees and HQ visitors. And a discrete room off The Alpine Lodge, The Zone, an escape room for the sales team only to get competitive and get embedded in the campaign story and stats. 

The Alpine Lodge was a pop-up space accessible to all Google HQ employees and their guests – an engaging cosy space that showcased the latest YouTube campaign, More Than Just Viewers. The sales team could use this space for meetings with their clients,  to get them inspired about the latest campaign. 

The Zone was a competitive, team escape room experience for the sales team. No huge set build for this one; it was an escape room in a box. We devised a series of customised puzzles and interactive tasks which related to their industry verticals. Teams were challenged to either tackle a taxing beauty poem, follow a football pundit’s commentary or crack a cryptic cooking puzzle.

Both of these experiences created a real buzz in the office with sales team members clamouring to take the experience to their clients. Registration slots at Google were filled within an hour of launch.

Feedback was so strong that YouTube then rolled The Zone out across their partner media buying agencies – using the Kit of Parts™ we created.

The comprehensive Kit of Parts™ included physical props, instructions and digital assets. We trained up their events agency to ensure that it was rolled out effectively over a number of different media partner offices. The Kit of Parts™ was effective because we had taken the time to understand HOW the activation was going to be used.

The project achieved the following four things: 

  1. 15% of the sales team engaged directly with the activation.
  2. Upskilled attendees on the campaign facts and figures.
  3. Brought YouTube’s fun nature to life.
  4. We devised a process for delivering office activations that paved the way for future employee engagement campaigns.

If you want to learn more about how you can create Better Branding, sign up for our free five-day Creative Workout HERE.

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