The Offer Experience
On a 200-person platform engagement for a premium German automobile brand, I found the one customer-facing moment that had never been designed, and turned it into an approved initiative.
- Role
- Senior Experience Designer
- Timeline
- ~2 years · Self-initiated discovery
- Platform
- B2B sales platform + customer portal
- Type
- Strategy → business case → approved
- Team
- 2 designers
At a glance
Problem
The brand's sales platform had designed every step of the journey for the sales advisor. But the offer letter, the only thing that lands in the customer's hands before a €50,000 decision, was a dense 7-8 page PDF nobody had ever designed. It sat in a gap with no team and no owner.
Approach
I picked up an abandoned research thread, connected it to the brand's shift to an agency model (where every touchpoint is now theirs), built the commercial case, and shaped a dynamic offer portal as proof. Then I navigated it through three layers of stakeholders.
Outcome
The client approved the initiative. A roughly €60M annual problem, reframed against a directional €1.76B revenue opportunity. Nobody had asked for this work.
1
Undesigned moment in the whole journey
~32
PDF pages a customer reads before deciding
3
Stakeholder rounds, three different decks
≈29×
Opportunity vs. cost of the problem
The problem
The forgotten touchpoint
The platform powers the brand's end-to-end vehicle sales journey: customer data, deal management, vehicle selection, pricing, financing. Every phase has a team, an owner, and a designed experience. Except one.
The offer is the single moment in the entire journey where something lands directly in the customer's hands. They receive it, read it, and make a €50,000 purchase decision with it. And it was a 7-8 page compliance-first PDF, emailed or printed, unchanged from before the platform existed. A private customer receives three or four of these per buying journey, around 32 pages, before they decide.
The digital experience stopped exactly where the customer's decision began. The sales advisor was the human bridge between a bad document and a confused buyer.
- ✺Dense, compliance-first, never designed for a customer
- ✺Static PDF: no login, no comparison, no in-context help
- ✺Every interaction resets to zero, no memory or continuity
- ✺Unchanged from before the agency model even existed
- Customer data→
- Deal management→
- Vehicle selection→
- Pricing→
- Offer — the gap→
- Financing→
- Order→
- Handover
Every stage of the sales-rep journey had a team, an owner and a designed experience, except the Offer, the one moment that reaches the customer's hands.
“The offer letter has always been part of the customer journey. It just hasn't been part of the platform.”
Business case
From a UX gap to a commercial argument
Under the agency model the brand owns every touchpoint directly, so a weak offer is no longer a dealer problem, it's a brand problem. To make that land with non-designers, I sized it. All figures are directional, modelled from public data.
~€60M
Cost of the problem, per year
Advisor time spent on offers plus printing, conservatively modelled
~€1.76B
Revenue opportunity, per year
From a 5% conversion lift across European sales
~123M
Offer pages generated annually
Reducing them also aligns with the brand's 2039 sustainability goal
These are directional estimates built from public data. The real figures were never shared with us. Even discounting by a third, we are still looking at a significant problem. The ratio, not the individual numbers, is the argument: the opportunity is roughly 29 times the cost.
Process
How I approached it
- 01
Picked up an abandoned thread
A colleague who left the project had started exploring the offer gap. I picked up that research, built on it significantly, and connected it to the bigger strategic shift nobody had linked it to. Entirely self-initiated. Nobody gave me a brief.
- 02
Found the strategic frame
The unlock was the agency model. Post-pandemic the brand took ownership of the customer relationship end to end, with fixed pricing and the advisor acting as their agent. That reframed a tired document into a brand-owned experience gap sitting inside the company's most significant commercial transformation.
- 03
Built proof, not just slides
Talk is cheap, so my collaborator and I built a working proof of concept. It used no brand design system, no proprietary assets, and no real data, stated explicitly in every presentation. A generic design language standing in for the real thing, enough to make the opportunity tangible.
- 04
Sequenced the politics deliberately
Someone had previously been removed from the engagement for going to the client directly without alignment. So I ran it in order: design team first, then internal PMs, then the client. Different deck, narrative and ask at each stage. Same idea.
The work
Screen by screen
Secure, personal access
Instead of a PDF attachment, the customer gets a private link and a four-digit passcode from their named advisor. The first touch already feels personal and considered, not transactional. (Branding here is a neutral placeholder, not the real client.)
A curated selection, in one place
Up to four proposals as cards, each with a hero image, price, monthly payment, a badge, and a line on why the advisor chose it for this customer. The 32-page PDF stack becomes one calm, comparable view.
Detail, financing, and a clear next step
Full specs, the advisor's personal reasoning, and a live financing calculator with a deposit slider. The Express Interest CTA leads into a digital signature, so the decision can happen in the moment instead of in a follow-up phone call.
Fully responsive
The same considered experience on the phone, where many customers actually open the link. On mobile the signing flow becomes a bottom sheet; on desktop it's a leather-diary animation. The medium fits the device.
A moment worth watching
The signing moment, made an occasion
Signing a €50,000 expression of interest shouldn't feel like ticking a box. On desktop the offer arrives as a leather diary that opens to a personalised letter, where the customer signs by hand. A small piece of theatre that matches the weight of the decision, and the cultural respect a printed offer carries in German premium automotive. (Branding shown is a neutral placeholder, not the real client.)
Craft
Decisions worth defending
A link, never a PDF
The PDF is the root cause: no memory, no interaction, no continuity. Replacing it with a living, passcode-gated portal is the whole point. Everything else follows from refusing to ship another document.
Honest numbers, owned out loud
I never claimed the figures were verified. Every deck stated they were directional estimates from public data, and credited the colleague whose research I built on. Trust came from transparency, not from defending numbers I couldn't.
Proof with no brand assets
Building the portal in a generic design language, with no proprietary data, kept it an honest proof of concept and sidestepped legal and brand risk, while still making the opportunity real enough to react to.
Three decks, one idea
Designer-to-designer, colleague-to-colleague, then formal-to-client. Same insight, retold for what each audience could approve. Reading the room is part of the design.
Alignment
Navigating the room
The hardest part wasn't the design, it was getting an unsolicited idea through an organisation without tripping its politics. I sequenced it as three deliberate conversations.
Round 1 · Internal design team
The ask. Validate the problem and surface blind spots. Designer to designer, confident, inviting challenge.
The outcome. The team backed it and pushed me to sharpen the value for the customer and advisor.
Round 2 · Internal product managers
The ask. Does this gap feel real, and who should carry it forward? Framed as 'let's find out if we're right', not 'let's build this'.
The outcome. PMs bought the concept and green-lit taking it to the client.
Round 3 · Client product owner
The ask. Does this feel real from where you sit, and will you let us pursue it? Formal, premium, precise, with the honest-numbers caveat up front.
The outcome. The client approved moving the initiative forward.
Roadmap
Two horizons
Horizon 1
Quick wins, inside the current platform
Let the advisor preview exactly what the customer will receive, with a live edit preview, before sending. It removes the print-and-proofread loop on every revision and saves measurable time from day one.
Horizon 2
The offer portal, a new customer experience
The passcode-gated portal: curated offers, side-by-side comparison, a context-aware AI concierge, in-context advisor chat, and a digital signature. Everything else on the platform optimises the advisor's side. This is the only thing that directly influences whether the customer says yes.
Honest reflection
What changed, and what I got wrong
My usual loop is research, flows, high-fidelity design, then a handoff. This project was the opposite shape: no brief, no team, no mandate. The design work was the easy part. The real work was strategy and persuasion, and that taught me as much as it cost me.
What changed in the process
I led with the business, not the pixels
Normally I'd open with the experience and let the craft speak. Here, designers don't approve initiatives, money does. So I built the commercial case first, the €60M cost against the €1.76B opportunity, and used the design only as proof the opportunity was real. Framing a UX gap as a P&L argument is what got a yes, and it's now the first thing I reach for on anything unsolicited.
Persuasion was a sequence, not a pitch
A handoff goes one direction. This had to move sideways through an organisation, and order mattered more than the deck. Design team, then PMs, then client, each a different narrative for the same idea. Treating stakeholders as a designed flow with its own states and entry points, rather than one audience to convince, is the skill I'm proudest of building here.
Proof beat persuasion
I could have argued the gap in slides forever. Instead we built a working portal, with no brand assets and no real data, so people could click the future instead of imagining it. A tangible prototype collapsed weeks of debate into a single demo. I now default to building the smallest real thing rather than describing it.
What I got wrong
I almost over-built the proof
I kept wanting to polish the portal: more screens, richer states, the leather-diary animation. The case had already been made by a rough version. Polishing a proof of concept that no one had approved yet was effort spent on the wrong risk. Make the case first, earn the polish after.
I under-weighted the human cost at first
My early framing was efficiency and conversion. But in German premium automotive the printed offer carries real cultural weight, and the advisor relationship is personal and long-term. I initially treated the PDF as pure friction. It isn't only friction, and respecting that nuance, rather than digitising it away, became central to the validation plan.
I leaned on directional numbers longer than ideal
The estimates were honest and labelled, but I let the headline figures carry a lot of weight before I had a plan to verify them. The ratio was defensible; the absolute numbers were exposed. Next time I'd pair the business case with the validation plan from the start, so the argument and the way to test it arrive together.
Outcome
Outcome
The client approved the initiative and it moved toward a build phase, pulling in brand, legal, technical, data, AI-governance and sales-operations teams to take it from proof of concept to production.
I also wrote the validation plan: a research guide for sessions with sales advisors, built to test the problem, pressure-test the numbers, and surface the cultural weight the printed offer carries in German premium automotive, where the advisor relationship is personal and long-term.
Why this one matters to me
Nobody asked for this. I noticed a gap, connected a UX observation to a billion-euro opportunity, built proof, and moved it through three rooms without tripping the politics, to a client yes. A €50,000 purchase deserves a €50,000 experience. That's the kind of work I want more of: spotting the thing everyone walked past, and making the case that it matters.