Sales Relationship Manager

The objective was to create a tool that optimizes the sales flow at Yodle.

Company: Yodle Sales
Role: Researcher, Interaction Designer, Lead User Tester

Key Objectives

  1. Optimize the application to bias towards sales best practices.

  2. Increase healthy competition between the representatives.

  3. Track sales behavior and effectiveness of sales into specific verticals

While this system was designed to be highly efficient and ultimately be beneficial to the user, the surface user goals and business requirements were in direct conflict. This system was designed to favor the business and reward users who fell adhered to best practices set by the business.

Understanding the Sales Mentality

My team spent ~2-3 (cummulative) weeks shadowing Sales Representatives and attending the extensive sales training. Our goal was to understand the subculture surrounding sales and their inherent incentives to perform. 

Key Issues

The system favored technical users.

The original system was bloated and complex, designed to handle every user type at Yodle. This meant tech-savvy users had an advantage in getting more leads even if they were not effective at selling the product.

The business wants better data,
users only want to sell.

Yodle employed a sales data team whose purpose was to provide quality leads to the sales floor. The team needed more data about the success of each representative, and required each user to complete a complex set of interactions after each call. However, mis-filing information had no repercussion or benefit to the users which led to a compromise in data quality. 

Behavioral Findings

 

Sales Users do not expect financial privacy

While the average employee uses discretion with their take home salary, sales representatives have no qualm with showing their take home commission on big whiteboards for the whole floor to see. In fact, this was often a catalyst for competition and encouragement

Users will take the path of least resistance. 

Understanding what our sales representatives were doing was important to help the data team source better leads. 

Social standing is a strong motivator.

While money was a strong (and primary) motivator, status added an additional layer of motivation to the sales floor. Users proudly touted the performance awards they had received and flaunted the special treatment that were enjoyed by the elite sales representatives. 

Knowledge inspires confidence.

Much of the sales culture revolved around confidence. In order to sell effectively a sales representative must believe he or she can sell. Representatives gathered as much information as possible about a prospect by looking at a prospect’s website, searched for them on google, and looked for a much contact history as possible. However, we also found that too much negative information (such as another sales representative failing to sell) can negatively impact the sales representative’s ability to sell.

 

 

Defining User and Process Flows

We documented a large portion of the existing user flows that were relevant to the redesign, distilled the essence of their goals, and created system process flows to detail the interaction that the system would have with the user and interface. We used these documents to align with stakeholders on how we wanted to move forward create a shared understanding of direction and was shared between product and engineering.

Product Solutions

Our  behavioral research heavily influenced the expression of the interface. Some solutions included a firefox plugin that acted as a caller ID and quick links to help sales users quickly prepare for a call. However the most significant change to the workflow was an improved data tracking system.

The disposition system was key to quickly recording the status of the prospect as well as automatically setting reminders for the sales representative.

History and Dispositions

The data team was integral to maximizing the success of a sales representative's cold call and needed to know what happens on every outgoing call. The system we designed gave equal weight to every outcome, made it easy to record the the contents of the call and schedule next steps, and automatically managed the prospects for the sales users.   

Test, Iterate, Repeat

After the first release of the product, my team went down to shadow the first dozen users. We set up video recordings, conducted interviews with the Sales Representatives, and utilized mouse tracking to gather data around efficiency and ease of use. Findings were presented to the team with recommendations.

A Yodle Sales Representative beta tests the new prospecting system.

The system gathered as much relevant information as possible and allowed for easy access to every piece of important talking point.