Compass: Distributor Sales Enablement Portal for Sealed Air

Make me an expert, fast

Sealed Air's $450MM Product Care line (Bubble Wrap, Instapak, Korrvu) sold through an outside channel: distributor reps who carried Sealed Air alongside competing manufacturers. To win, those reps had to sound like Sealed Air experts in front of end customers. The catch, as field research made blunt: packaging is an afterthought. Reps do not lead with it, and the product specs, talking points, and value props they needed were scattered, outdated, and impossible to find in the moment.

I ran a full Pivotal Labs inception over four months, pairing with Jim Grant, Sealed Air's client PM, in the "I do, we do, you do" coaching model. The team was two UX designers and five engineers. The design principle that came out of the research framed every decision after it: make me an expert, fast.

Research in the field, not the conference room

We mapped 20+ stakeholders across executive leadership, sales, marketing, IT, and engineering, then went where the selling actually happened. I shadowed a distributor sales rep on real calls, including a 100-degree parking lot pre-meeting before a customer site moving 200+ packages a day. He was running late and had not prepped. That was the reality Compass had to fit.

From that research I co-created six illustrated personas, each a distinct selling behavior, and split them into two archetypes the product had to serve at once: Hunters, new reps asking "what's the solution?", and Farmers, established reps protecting turf and asking "where's the thing?". A structured risk workshop surfaced the one that could sink the launch: the "Empty Shiny Box" problem, a beautiful portal with no content in it. We mitigated it by designing the content workflows alongside the product.

What shipped

Compass (seecompass.com) launched in 2018 as a responsive portal organized three ways at once, so a rep could start from wherever the customer conversation did:

• Packaging Applications (Blocking & Bracing, Cushioning, Void Fill, Surface Protection, and more), Brands & Solutions (Bubble Wrap, Instapak, Korrvu, Cell-Aire, Fill-Air, Jiffy mailers), and Problem Solving pillars (Damage Reduction, Cube Optimization, Fulfillment Velocity, Customer Experience).
• A consistent product-page anatomy: value proposition, Fast Facts, an image and video gallery, applicable uses, compatible machines and materials, and downloadable spec PDFs, so reps got fluent on any product the same way every time.
• A guided product selector that matched reps to the right product by question, "What are you protecting?", "How heavy?", "Price range?", rather than asking them to browse a catalog.
• A "Find a Rep" lookup that routed a prospect to their territory contact by postal code, and a New Products feed that kept reps current.
• A content management system so Sealed Air's marketing team could keep everything fresh, and a mobile-responsive experience for reps selling from the field.

The outcome

Compass launched as Sealed Air's distributor-facing sales-enablement portal, and Jim Grant came through the engagement a capable product owner, coached from observer to driver across the inception arc. Just as important, I instrumented success before claiming it. We defined the model up front: more attributed revenue from distributor sales, distributors reporting Sealed Air is easier to work with, reduced customer-service time, and portal usage that correlates with sales. The goal was never a prettier catalog. It was a rep who walks into a customer site already sounding like the expert.