The beginnings of an AI powered productivity app for sales people: Exploring hero features
The life of a sales person is far from mundane, let alone consistent from one sales person to another. While there are the star sales people who goes beyond hitting quota, majority still struggle in finding a sure-way to close deals.
That’s where managers along with the visibility of activities through CRM come into play. However, it is no surprise that adoption of tools like Salesforce has been difficult given the self-driven and independent nature of sales people — compliance is far from expected. They simply don’t see the value for themselves hence comply to fill it only as part of reporting their statuses.
During my time in Nektar as a 1st employee & UX lead, we explored opportunities where sales reps could find value in using a platform while at the same time, fulfil the need of keeping their managers in the loop for potential coaching moments.
In this article, I will outline a few features that were explored from scratch, through a process of research, prototyping, concept testing & post-development usability testing.
Feature exploration 1: Meeting agenda
Insight: A sales playbook crafted by the organisation would increase chances of sales reps closing deals
Say, for a prospecting playbook a sales manager may ask, “what kind of emails are you sending?”. If we do it right, response rates will improve.
About the feature:
- Stage based checklist that is pre-filled with goals and agenda bullet points for an upcoming meeting
- Sales reps can add additional goals and agenda items by typing it out manually or selecting from an internal library.
User reaction highlight:
Well, the Wow for me was the ability to make a BANT (Budget-Authority-Need-Timeline) assessment Quantitative rather than Qualitative, because that is a problem that I have not seen a solution for work before. By tying it into the goals/agenda framework it makes it less about the Sales Rep’s gut feeling and entirely about whether that box was actually ticked.
This one user’s response made us feel so understood. While it may feel like we were on to something with the idea of encoding an organisation’s playbook to scale the ramp up of new sales people, we soon realised that users drop off after experiencing (and learning) once. The content repeats itself for each deal so once they get the hang of the goals and agenda for each stage, they no longer need the reference Nektar app provides.
So we asked ourselves, what if we reminded them only when they didn’t comply with what’s in the sales playbook?
Feature iteration:
- From a desktop admin UI console, organisation can set stage-based conditions that sales reps need to fulfil in order to advance in the sales process
Feature exploration 2: Guides
Insight 2: Sales reps find hassle to prepare for meetings
I look at company website, company & industry news, social media, financial reports, stock market, news on company leaders. Can you synthesise all this for me in 1 page?
About the feature:
- Bite-sized information about product and competitors that can be easily copied and pasted to messaging channels
- Content will be retrieved from organisation, typically crafted by the sales enablement role
We did not iterate much on this feature as sales reps were using in a way that we expected. However, we took the evidence of user adoption as a starting point on possibly expanding it as a whole product in itself.
So we moonshot the idea to be…
A Wiki to collect all the information about all the deals that are happening / have happened. So for example, a sales rep hustling to close a prospect in the manufacturing industry could just search from within the organisation, other deals ongoing or closed in that industry to glean insights, plan of action or inspiration.
Feature exploration 3: Follow-up prompts
Insight 3: Constant, relevant and timely communication is key in building rapport with a prospect.
46% of survey respondents marked 7 and above in difficulty in getting a response to a follow up
About the feature:
- An “assistant” screen that generates a list of deals and leads the rep is recommended to follow-up with, based on an organisation-defined cadence
- The follow-up prompts are generated based on parameters like period of inactivity and when the close date is approaching, etc
A wish list for this app feature’s further development:
- Surfacing updates of the individual prospect or company as well as industry updates, to use as conversation oilers so it won’t just sound like someone following up for the sake of it
Feature success on desktop
While we started off with a mobile first strategy, COVID had changed the way sales people communicate to being mostly desktop. As such we did a quick experiment to blast daily emails of varying types, each of which is a digest of follow-ups, through mailchimp and moEngage. We were pleasantly surprised to see an average of 50% open rates.
Overall reflection and some leaving thoughts
I leave the company with clarity on the product vision.
- Enable organisations to design their own sales playbook -> generate reports to inform the organisation to keep improving the playbook
- Draw external data to better guide sales reps in communicating with prospects at every stage ie. info at lead stage and negotiation stage would be vastly different -> ask users ‘is this helpful’ and let the system learn
- Rethink about the role of sales managers, once playbook takes affect
What I would have done different
As someone totally clueless about sales and the life of sales people, I would have advised my past self to do shadowing work — even if it means being WFH with a sales person in their home. This method did not cross my mind at all but as I reflect now, shadowing would have helped give insight of the highs/lows of each step in a sales rep’s work journey.
Another lesson I took away is to spend more effort concept testing, especially in nascent stages of a business journey. It saves so much dev work! Instead of building a google Cal-to-app Sync, could we just ask the rep to share their Cal with us and we deliver the solution (message prompts) through existing messaging channels like whatsApp.
Being a first employee may not be for every designer but if you have the drive to solve a mystery and take ownership of mining for that gem for a product, this could be a very fulfilling experience.
