Making a more useful sales tool for all global users
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The idea for this project really began a year ago as I was working on a new set of features for a major global semiconductor distributor's custom-built internal sales application. As that web-based system is a complex application for a specialized domain covering sales, purchasing and general logistics, several weeks had been spent on research for the design and development of those new features.During that project, I had discovered that the structure of the sales teams in the Asia Pacific region had evolved, leading to a significant realization that the company's mobile sales application, originally released in 2018, has never been able to be fully utilized by all of them.
With approximately $2B in sales each year plus a diverse business culture, this major global semiconductor distributor relies on its presence across 16 cities located in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Currently, there are more than 160 salespeople worldwide, with approximately 40% of them located in the 8 offices within the Asia Pacific region.
First released in 2018, the mobile application, released for both iOS and Android platforms, was a clear and quick response to the salespeople's need for a tool to enter and access data while on the go. However, while the primary desktop sales application has received numerous bug fixes and major new feature updates over the last three years, the mobile sales app has had very few.
Historically over the last couple of decades, the general understanding of how the global sales teams were structured were multiple groups of independent sales representatives reporting to sales managers, all entering data for themselves. While a small number of administrators in the company's sales maintenance team has existed for many years, they typically handled higher level master data management along with addressing sales order or system data issues.
However, I discovered that the sales teams in the Asia Pacific region had evolved to incorporate a sales assistant role that handled day-to-day transaction entry. And yet, the rest of company still worked as it always had. Unfortunately, the company's systems, especially the mobile app, didn’t change in a meaningful way with it.
What was intriguing about this problem was that the sales structure had changed slowly, leading to numerous, small and specific requests for system changes being sent to the IT department. On their own, each would not have told a story, but cumulatively - and in hindsight - a major transition was occurring.
Earlier this year, as business has grown tremendously, I began to hear more from the offices in Asia that they wanted to be able to do more with the mobile application, which I believed was indicative of a greater need in that region. I also realized that the mobile application could not be used by assistants or fully used by managers.
‟We need to be able to do more with the mobile sales application.”
With approximately $2B in sales each year plus a diverse business culture, this major global semiconductor distributor relies on its presence across 16 cities located in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Currently, there are more than 160 salespeople worldwide, with approximately 40% of them located in the 8 offices within the Asia Pacific region.
Prior to starting the project, I created an eight-week plan in Monday.com that accounted for research, design, prototyping, and testing with the intent to work with the company's internal development team, at a later time, to begin implementation.
As there were significant challenges in scheduling overseas interviews in such a busy time for the company, I modified it at different points of the project, adjusting tasks and timelines accordingly.
As the project began, I started off with a design thinking approach: first, conducting research, then evaluating it to better understand the users, generating ideas based on what I learned, and ultimately creating a prototype that I could test, eventually leading toward implementation.
I first began by designing a survey that would be used for both screening participants and also gaining useful insights.
By using branching logic in SurveyMonkey, I collected information regarding the frequency of use of the current mobile application, usage drivers either for or against its use and the frequency of use of core application functions. Additionally, general demographic information was collected in regards to the global region in which the participants work, their tenure and sales related role. As I knew that certain types of sales roles were not capable of using the mobile application, I added an additional question regarding their manner of use of the desktop sales application.
Prior to its distribution, I also worked with the internal marketing team to have the survey and instructions translated into Chinese to encourage a greater response rate from the offices in China.
The survey was sent to all sales related users company-wide in English and Chinese with a follow-up reminder sent approximately one week later. Responses were also captured and exported into Google Sheets to better evaluate each respondent for potential interviews. Based on the allotted project time, several key results were highlighted and evaluated based on the relative similarity to the research targets, maintaining as diverse a mix of participants as possible.
Ultimately, I selected 13 employees to contact with a total of 11 interviews scheduled over a three-week period.
Prior to the interviews, I documented an interview plan and guide including my research objectives, ideal participants, process, an interview script, and questions with potential follow-ups. Over the next few weeks, I completed 11 remote interviews in multiple countries through Zoom and Microsoft Teams - mostly late at night to accommodate each participant’s schedule. However, while all employees are expected to be fluent in English, communication was at times difficult with the offices in mainland China.
Additionally, two distinct qualitative interview approaches were used:
The higher-level organizational discovery incorporated several guiding questions:
The more individual-specific discovery also utilized the following guiding questions:
In addition to the survey and remote interviews, I also compiled a little more than three years of usage data as well as gathered sales team organizational charts from the company's internal education team as they too - independently - had been working to better understand the sales processes in Asia.
I continued by using Otter.ai to transcribe all of the videos and I set up an integration between Airtable and Mural, using Zapier, so that I could make the process of capturing insights more efficient by automating the creation of "sticky notes" as I added new information in Airtable. Gathering the sales usage data was a bit more challenging, requiring VPN (Virtual Private Network) access to the appropriate database, and I used Excel for exporting, compiling and evaluating the usage data.
As the captured insights automatically imported into Mural from each successive interview, I continually updated and expanded the board I created.
Ultimately, from my initial research, I recorded over 300 key insights, opportunities and pain points with a significant percentage of repetition throughout all interviews. These insights, organized through an ongoing affinity-mapping process, covered a variety of themes including organization, communication, business processes, as well as feedback about both the desktop and mobile applications.
From the compiled research data, I created six personas, first in Mural, followed by finalized versions in Sketch for Mac representing the combined global sales structure at the company: western sales managers and sales representatives following the more traditional structure and eastern teams consisting of sales managers, senior and junior sales representatives and sales assistants. These personas defined the multiple goals, tasks and frustrations of each role.
I also learned that sales assistants share most of the system permissions as members of the sales maintenance team located in the U.S. offices, and also that those team members will, sometimes, enter data for salespeople in the Americas when needed. This was an important insight in that the global sales assistant persona would also generally apply to the sales maintenance team members as well.
Next, I documented and evaluated a typical sales flow from beginning to end, and I noticed that there were similarities between the western sales roles and their eastern counterparts, but that with the addition of junior sales representative and assistant roles, the individuals who completed each task varied. This swimlane task analysis, combined with the user personas, provided me the necessary information to write several key user scenarios that would help others to relate to the needs of each persona.
As I continued, I discovered that I could distill the needs and tasks of all six personas to three distinct user types: a sales manager, sales representative and sales assistant.
The sales manager user type represents a salesperson who must also manage and monitor a team of salespeople and their activities. The sales representative is an individual who sells to customers and may work independently or on a team. Finally, the sales assistant is a data-entry specialist who manages communication and order processes.
