Hulu's advertising sales division generates billions in annual revenue, yet its reps were toggling between seven disconnected tools just to build a single proposal. Data lived in silos, context was lost between handoffs, and leadership lacked real-time pipeline visibility. Higglo Digital partnered with Hulu to design and engineer a bespoke enterprise sales platform that unified every critical workflow - from audience targeting and inventory availability to proposal creation and order management - into one fast, intuitive application. The result: a 41% jump in rep productivity, a 28% reduction in deal-cycle time, and a platform that became the operational backbone for 200+ sales professionals.
The Challenge: Seven Tools, One Frustrated Sales Org
Hulu's ad-sales team had grown rapidly alongside the platform's expansion into ad-supported streaming. But the technology stack supporting that team hadn't kept pace. Over time, the organization had accumulated seven distinct tools - a CRM (Salesforce), an audience planning application, a rate-card spreadsheet system, a proposal builder, an order-management portal, a reporting dashboard, and Slack-based approval workflows - none of which talked to each other natively.
The consequences were painful and measurable:
14+ hours per rep per week burned on admin: copying data between systems, reconciling conflicting records, and chasing approvals in Slack threads.
72% CRM data accuracy - inconsistent naming conventions, duplicate records, and stale opportunity stages eroded leadership's trust in pipeline reports.
4.2-day average proposal turnaround - assembling a single proposal required pulling audience data from one tool, rate-card pricing from another, and formatting in a third.
6 weeks to onboard new reps because each tool had its own login, interface, and tribal knowledge.
Hulu's VP of Ad Sales Operations approached Higglo Digital with a clear mandate: give our sellers one platform that works the way they think - and give it to us fast.
The Approach: Seller-Centric Design Meets Enterprise-Grade Engineering
Higglo assembled a 12-person cross-functional team spanning product strategy, UX research, front-end and back-end engineering, and QA. The engagement ran 28 weeks, organized into three interlocking workstreams: Custom Software Development, User Experience Design, and Sales Enablement Solutions.
Rather than starting with a feature list, the team began with people. During a two-week discovery phase, Higglo conducted 18 stakeholder interviews and shadowed 30+ reps across four sales teams, logging every click, tab switch, and copy-paste action. This contextual inquiry surfaced 47 discrete friction points, which were then ranked by revenue impact to set build priorities.
The resulting information architecture mirrored the natural selling cycle: Prospect → Plan → Propose → Close → Report. Every screen was designed to minimize context-switching and surface the right data at the right moment - inline audience insights on deal records, auto-populated proposal templates pulling live rate-card data, and smart global search spanning every data source.
Execution: 28 Weeks From Discovery to Full Production Rollout
Development of the platform - christened AdPulse - proceeded in two-week agile sprints on a modern stack: React on the front end, Node.js microservices behind a GraphQL gateway, and PostgreSQL plus Elasticsearch on the data layer - all hosted on AWS. The architecture was deliberately modular so Hulu's internal engineering team could extend individual services post-handoff.
Key engineering milestones included:
Bidirectional Salesforce sync running every 15 minutes via custom REST APIs, keeping contacts, opportunities, and activity logs consistent across both systems.
Role-based dashboards for reps, managers, and executives - each surfacing different KPIs and drill-down paths.
Automated proposal generation that pulls audience segments and pricing in real time, reducing the proposal flow from ~84 clicks across four tools to ~23 clicks in a single guided interface.
Structured approval workflows with routing rules, SLA timers, and a full audit log - replacing the chaos of Slack threads.
QA executed 320+ test cases covering data integrity, role-based access control, SSO via Okta, and sub-second load times under 300-concurrent-user stress tests. A 40-rep pilot cohort validated the build over one week before the team rolled out to the full 200+ rep organization with interactive onboarding walkthroughs and a dedicated support channel.
Outcomes: Measurable Impact Across Every Sales KPI
Within the first quarter post-launch, the results were unambiguous:
+41% rep productivity - measured by revenue-generating activities (calls, proposals, deal advancements) per rep per week, rising from an average of 22 to 31.
64% reduction in admin time - weekly non-selling hours dropped from ~14 to ~5 per rep.
3.8× faster proposals - average turnaround compressed from 4.2 days to 1.1 days.
CRM data accuracy at 98.6% - up from 72%, thanks to automated validation, deduplication, and stage-gate enforcement.
94% voluntary adoption within 30 days of full rollout - a testament to the UX investment.
~$340K/yr in licensing savings from decommissioning seven legacy tools.
New-rep onboarding cut to 2.5 weeks - down from 6 weeks.
28% shorter deal cycles - first contact to signed IO fell from 34 days to 24.
+63% qualified pipeline within the first two quarters post-launch.
Beyond the numbers, the platform shifted the culture of the sales org. Managers now coach from real-time dashboards instead of stale spreadsheets. Reps spend their time selling instead of wrestling with software. And leadership trusts the pipeline data for the first time in years.
Three workstreams, one delivery cadence.
Custom Software Development
Higglo architected and built the AdPulse platform from the ground up on a React front-end, Node.js service layer, and PostgreSQL data store hosted on AWS. The system integrates bi-directionally with Salesforce CRM, Hulu's proprietary inventory management system, and third-party audience-data providers via RESTful APIs. A modular microservices design ensures each capability - proposals, inventory, analytics - can scale independently. The team delivered 4 major platform modules across 8 two-week sprints, maintaining 92% sprint-goal completion and zero critical defects at launch.
User Experience Design
The UX workstream began with 40+ hours of contextual inquiry - shadowing reps on live sales calls and observing tool-switching patterns. Higglo's designers identified that reps lost an average of 11 minutes per deal toggling between systems. The team designed a dashboard-first information architecture with progressive disclosure, reducing cognitive load by surfacing only deal-relevant data at each stage. Three interaction models were tested with 18 reps before the final paradigm was selected. The result: a median task-completion time 54% faster than the legacy workflow and a System Usability Scale score of 87 (industry benchmark: 68).
Sales Enablement Solutions
Beyond the technology, Higglo delivered a full sales-enablement layer: automated proposal templates pre-populated with audience data and rate-card pricing, a deal-scoring model trained on 18 months of historical win/loss data, and a guided selling workflow that prompts reps with next-best actions. The enablement suite also included a management reporting dashboard giving leadership real-time visibility into pipeline velocity, stage conversion rates, and rep activity metrics - replacing a weekly manual Excel report that took 6 hours to compile.
Data Integration & Migration
Hulu's sales data was scattered across Salesforce, Google Sheets, a legacy Oracle database, and several team-specific tools. Higglo built an ETL pipeline that consolidated 2.4 million historical records into the unified PostgreSQL store, de-duplicated 18,000+ contact records, and established automated sync jobs running every 15 minutes. Post-migration data accuracy improved from 72% to 98.6%.
Change Management & Adoption
Higglo partnered with Hulu's sales operations team to design a phased adoption program. This included role-based onboarding journeys (AE, Sales Planner, Manager), 22 micro-learning videos averaging 90 seconds each, embedded contextual tooltips, and a Slack-based feedback channel monitored daily during the first 60 days. Voluntary adoption reached 94% within 30 days - well above the 70% target - and the NPS among active users hit +61.