CASE STUDY 07 / 16BOOKING WEBSITEPRODUCT LEADERSHIPHANDS-ON ENGINEERING

Corporate Website & Event Booking.

BMI runs international student recruitment fairs, where universities and other institutions pay to exhibit and meet prospective students. Its corporate website is the sales team's storefront: institutions find the fairs for their region and audience, plan their year around the schedule, and book online.

MY PART
Set the product direction; coded the checkout and pricing.
ORGANISATION
BMI Global Ed, part of Times Higher Education
MARKETS
Africa, Asia, Brazil & Latin America, Europe, and Middle East & India · 18 countries
FIG.01 · ILLUSTRATIVE BUYER JOURNEY, NOT A SCREENSHOT
60–80Recruitment fairs a year, all bookable on the site
5Regions, each with its own fairs and pages
18Countries where BMI runs fairs
3Documents per booking, once hand-built PDFs, now automated
01WHO IT SERVES

Built for the people who sell and the people who buy

The site does four jobs for the business: it helps the sales team sell, lets institutions discover fairs by region and by the audience they want to reach, publishes the fair schedule, and takes bookings, handling the paperwork itself.

Sales team

A storefront reps can send prospects to, and a source of leads to follow up.

Existing clients

Returning institutions see the coming schedule in their regions and book the next fairs online.

Prospective clients

Institutions new to BMI find the fairs that fit their region and the audience they want to reach.

02DISCOVER

Every fair, by region and by audience

Fairs are organised two ways at once: by the region an institution recruits in, and by the audience it wants to reach: international students, the high school counsellors who advise them, or the scholarship organisations that fund them. An institution recruiting students in Asia lands on the fairs that fit, not the whole catalogue.

FIG.02 · REGION × AUDIENCE, ILLUSTRATIVE
03PLAN

The year's fairs, visible before the budget is set

BMI runs its fairs as regional tours: a run of fairs across several cities in one region over a few weeks. Institutions plan their recruitment travel and budgets around the year's tours, so the site shows the schedule of upcoming tours, offers the year's calendar as a download, and lists package prices up front on every fair.

FIG.03 · TOUR SCHEDULE, ILLUSTRATIVE
04BOOK

From package to payment, online

Each fair lists its exhibitor packages, such as a fitted stand, with what's included. Institutions add a package to the cart and book without paying up front, then pay by card, PayPal or bank transfer, and the system handles the invoice and the payment confirmation.

Package tiers

Each fair lists its exhibitor packages, each with a "What's included" breakdown.

Cart and checkout

Institutions add packages to a cart and book on the site, with no payment up front.

Campaign pricing

Pricing rules apply campaign and regional discounts at checkout, across campaigns in six countries.

05HOW IT HELPS SALES

Two ways the site sells

Reps use the site outbound, sending a prospective client the page that fits instead of a custom quote, and inbound, following up the leads it surfaces. Lead identification tools show which institutions are browsing, so a rep knows who to call.

FIG.04 · OUTBOUND AND INBOUND, SIMPLIFIED
06WHAT CHANGED

From three hand-built PDFs to automatic paperwork

Before the booking system, every booking meant three custom PDFs, prepared by hand and sent to the client in turn: a quote, then an invoice, then a payment confirmation. Invoices were tracked by hand. Now the institution books on the site, and the paperwork and invoice tracking are automated, for the sales and accounts teams alike.

FIG.05 · BEFORE AND AFTER, SIMPLIFIED
07MY ROLE

Product direction, and code of my own

I set the site's product direction. I also coded its checkout, pricing and first event pages, while the theme's build-out and the site's more recent code maintenance were a distributed offshore vendor team's work.

  • Set the site's direction as a sales platform: a storefront the sales team sends prospects to, and a source of leads it follows up.
  • Organised fair discovery by region and by audience, so institutions find the fairs that fit them.
  • Put the event schedule and a downloadable calendar on the site, so clients can plan their calendar and budgets around it.
  • Directed online booking: package tiers, cart, checkout and automated paperwork, replacing a hand-built PDF quote, invoice and payment confirmation for every booking, and manual invoice tracking.
  • Coded tag-driven, tiered cart-pricing rules applying partner and regional discounts across named campaigns in the UAE, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
  • Coded the initial cart-and-checkout integration, including custom checkout field logic.
  • Coded the first event page templates and event-card UI.
  • Instrumented the marketing-tracking stack from a cold start: Google Analytics, Google Ads conversion tracking and Google Tag Manager.
  • Implemented reCAPTCHA on the contact form, integrated live-chat platforms, and consolidated the theme's legacy templates.
08TECH STACK

Tech stack

[a] APPLICATION
PHPWordPressCustom theme
[b] INTERFACE
Advanced Custom Fields PROjQuery
[c] COMMERCE & DATA
PayPalMySQL (AWS RDS)
[d] MARKETING & SALES
Google AnalyticsGoogle Tag ManagerGoogle AdsLead identificationLive chatreCAPTCHACRM integration

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LINKEDINlinkedin.com/in/danielgorgonia

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LOCATIONLondon, United Kingdom
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