Heighten (Acquired by LinkedIn, 03/2017)
Heighten Sales Design System
We set out to boost sales reps’ productivity when working through their opportunities. Besides never using Salesforce.com again, we zeroed in on one aspect of the daily life of a rep that we knew we could improve: reducing the amount of redundant data entry they needed to perform. We built a platform where reps could take advantage of data from many different sources, including their own SFDC instance, LinkedIn, Clearbit and many others, to help make the adding data to opportunities faster and to help keep the system of record’s data clean.
The System
The smallest anatomic parts of the Sales Rep's Opportunity data entry requirements became our system objects: contacts, companies, opportunities, meetings, tasks and documents. As we built interactions inside the system, each of these objects was designed into its own information hovercard.
recognizing objects
As the system became more intelligent, it learned how to recognize the patterns behind objects. We then allowed the user to interact with the objects intelligently, reflecting the most common actions they would need to take in simple context menus.
Productivity Gains Through Smart Note-Taking
Besides dialing phone numbers, the most common thing that sales reps do is take notes during their interactions with prospects and customers.
When we asked reps what they would want us to do to help them be more productive, the answers were surprisingly simple:
Make it so that we don’t have to copy and paste data from our notes into SFDC
Make it so that the system automatically adds contacts, events, and status changes to SFDC as we take notes
Make it so that my opportunities stay up to date. My manager doesn’t get on my case on Monday mornings if my opportunities are missing data (reps go through something we call “Sunday Night Blues,” where they go back and copy/paste data from their notes into the opportunities they have on the go - it is a very time-consuming task that benefits management and sales ops but has less immediate benefit to the rep).
The final product
The smallest anatomic parts of the Sales Rep's Opportunity data entry requirements became our system objects: contacts, companies, opportunities, meetings, tasks and documents. As we built interactions inside the system, each of these objects was designed into its own information hovercard.
©️ 2024, Julie Lynn Lemieux