A 125-page document a rep drives like a tool
Alliance Climate Control installs air conditioning, heating and electrical work around Sydney. Their reps sit at kitchen tables with people about to spend a lot of money on something they will never see again once it is in the ceiling. This guide is what they open when they get there.
A sales folder gets read front to back by nobody. So this one is built to be driven: 125 pages in 24 sections, with 369 internal jumps and not one link that leaves the document. A question about ducted systems, or about what a warranty actually covers, is one tap away instead of a hunt through a binder.
The illustrations and the system renders are not mine. Alliance commissioned a custom illustrator and handed me the finished artwork. What I built is the document that holds it together and the structure that makes it usable in front of a customer.
The way in
Twenty-four sections, every one a jump
The contents page is the whole document on one screen: 24 sections with their page numbers, set as buttons a rep can hit. Ask about ducted systems and they are on that page before you finish the question. Every other page carries a mark in its corner that comes straight back here, so the way out of any section is always in the same place.
The explaining
Three systems, a page at a time
Ducted, multi-split and heating, each running page after page of cutaway renders with every component numbered and named down the side. Somebody who has never once thought about a return air grille can see where it would sit in their own ceiling. A quote stops being a number and starts being a thing in their house.
The arithmetic
Two pages the customer works through
A repair-or-replace worksheet with four lines to fill in and a total at the foot, and a climate table that puts the customer's own city into one of three zones. Both are made to be written on at the table. A number somebody has worked out themselves lands differently from the same number printed on a quote.
The nerve
Twelve questions to ask any contractor
Warranty response, employee standards, residential expertise, maintenance commitment, training excellence, quality assurance, and six more on the page before it, each written out as a question a homeowner can put to anybody quoting. Handing somebody the questions to ask everyone else only works if you are sure of your own answers, and that is what these two pages are really saying.
The standards
What a good technician looks like, drawn
Two technicians side by side with every detail labeled: hat on backwards and boot laces loose against hair combed and company shirt tucked in. The removal and installation pages then run the same comparison across a whole street. A customer who has been burned by a bad install once knows exactly which technician is turning up, before anybody mentions a price.
The promises
Everything they guarantee, in writing
What a manufacturer's warranty will not cover, quoted from a real liability statement. Then fifteen guarantees across three pages, each with its own terms. Then a table setting their package against the alternative, line by line. A customer choosing between three quotes is really choosing who to believe, and these pages make that argument out loud.
The detail
Forty-four pages of what goes in the house
Trunking, grilles, diffusers, duct connections, refrigerants, zone motors, roof brackets. Photographed and explained, running from page 82 to page 125, so a question about what is actually going into the ceiling has its answer in the same document, so a conversation never has to pause for a phone call to the office.
What makes it navigable
369 jumps, and none of them leave
There is not one external link in 125 pages, which is deliberate: nothing in a sales conversation should open a browser and lose the room. Everything the document points at is somewhere else inside the document.
Every page knows the way home
The mark in the top corner of each page returns to the contents. That one repeated element is what turns a long linear document into something somebody can move around in without scrolling to find their place.
The contents page is the interface
Twenty-four sections, laid out as a grid of buttons with their page numbers, so the whole 125 pages are visible at once. An index at the back would have been the conventional answer and nobody would have used it mid-conversation.
Reference lives at the back
Materials at 82, system components at 96, upgrades at 112. The pages a rep reaches for only when asked sit behind the ones they open every time, which is what keeps the front of the document short.
It says when it was last right
Every page foot carries the date the document was revised. A guide this size gets reissued, and a rep opening a copy on a laptop can tell at a glance whether it is the current one.
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Craig WoodCEO, Definian
Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.