Context
A popular and very successful courier company operating between South Africa and the United Kingdom had a growing sales team which was becoming difficult to manage with their outdated CRM.
Goal
Create a mobile solution to increase sales efficiency, facilitate quicker turnaround and improve customer relationships. Provide immediate and accurate reporting to stakeholders.
TLDR
Click the button below to check out the final product.
What's The Problem?
On the surface, it may appear that the problem here was a need for a more user-friendly CRM with a bunch of automation. And, yeah, we built that too. But, the real problem was privacy.
During initial meetings with the client, they made it clear that they aimed to track salespeople out of the office. And I mean 'track' in the literal sense - geolocation.
Discovery? More Like Damage Control!
Word had gotten out that some people were developing an app to track their movement and some salespeople even quit to avoid being forced to use Saleboat.
Empathy would be vital in crafting this solution, and I threw the client brief out of the window. Instead, I put myself in the shoes of the majority of users and began interviews that focused on them.
Before I could think about features, I had to provide a kind ear, listening to their concerns and how these made them feel. With that off their chest, they could tell me how to help them.
I asked them about their day and which tasks they enjoyed most and least. They were frustrated with administrative tasks that took time away from building and maintaining client relationships.
The Pitch Gave Me An Anxiety Attack
Candidly, management was apprehensive about what we were proposing. Understandably, they were concerned with how much it would cost and how long it would take. Thankfully all that research paid off, and I shared the user journeys I had created through collected data. I illustrated that the majority of wasted time was being spent on data capture into the existing CRM. Automation would save staff more time, freeing their day to meet with more clients.
We had tenuous approval - I had convinced them that what they needed was a better way to track the sales process rather than track their employees' location. This would be a delicate tightrope to walk, keeping management happy while prioritising my users.
Six Months: Fly Or Fail
We were on an extremely tight deadline to get an MVP out. Thankfully I had endeared myself to the invaluable users when designing the flows and prototypes. Salespeople are an incredibly diverse bunch, and we had folx from 18 to 65, all kinds of different backgrounds and pretty extreme variance in technical aptitude.
Whatever I designed had to be simple enough for the least technically minded individual but dynamic enough to collect the data necessary to represent their successes.
Familiarity Is Not A Flaw. It's Fundamental To Functionality
You're probably looking at the visual design and thinking, "That's a very literal interpretation of Google's Material Design."
Yes. Yes, it is.
Part of my research covered devices and preferences. We discovered that the entire sales team used Android devices, and many were using Google apps to manage their client list, schedule their daily meetings and tasks and plan their routes on the road.
Remember, we were aiming for smooth integration into their existing ecosystem. Something so simple that it required just a day of training and fitted into their workday with no pain points.
I added some colour for a bit of flair to keep things spicy.
I Love It When A Plan Comes Together
You can tell by the heading that the results were excellent. First, we were given 20 salespeople to test out if our solution worked. Then we were given 50. Within three months, we'd been rolled out company-wide.
A month later, we'd integrated Saleboat into two more courier companies. A year later, my design was on three continents.
Saleboat successfully automates much of the drudgery and tedium that salespeople have to deal with using traditional CRMs. Management gets meaningful reports to better understand their teams' success.
Wait, What Happened To Tracking Employees?
Tracking had to be included in the app to meet the requirements in our brief, but I insisted on ethical implementation. No pinging the phones of staff day or night.
But even this got turned into a feature for the users. When a salesperson arrives at a meeting location, they 'check in' with a single button tap. Their location is recorded and referenced against the location set for the meeting, and if it's within a reasonable distance, they're considered as having attended.
What I Learned From Saleboat
More than anything, I learned that trust is more important than meeting targets. It sucks feeling like your boss doesn't trust you and wants to keep tabs on you. Staff don't belong to their line manager or their employer, and they perform better and are more successful when you trust them to get the job done. I now carry this empathy into every meeting.
Oh, and I learned that before you can get any helpful information in an interview, you have to just let the user vent for a while first. Many hours were spent with customers, collecting information about their needs. The data collected helped craft a user experience that saved time for sales reps and managers :)
Oh, I Built The Brand Too
When designing the logo for Saleboat, we went through many drafts. Finally, we settled on a simple collection of shapes that imply some motion and bright, bold colours and typography.
The logo measures and dimensions were specifically crafted for ease of use. They accommodate for a variety of common digital cropping utilised by the Play Store and sites like LinkedIn.
The Saleboat brand was built from scratch so a lot of work went into creating marketing collateral which would effectively communicate the benefits of the app.
Video became a crucial part of promoting the brand. To effectively communicate the benefits several ad spots were created and aired across social media platforms.