Case Study: Task Management For The Sales Team
Task management tool for a highly reactive sales team to automate mundane tasks and make the team more productive
Metroleads is a CRM designed for high touch point Sales teams in the high retail and real estate market. What that means for businesses is they can manage communications, information dissemination, marketing campaigns, follow-ups, outreaches through One Platform in One Place.
Sales Teams are often distributed and have to deal with a lot of customer meetings, calls throughout the day. Sales reps are measured by their productivity aka how many calls, tasks, site visits they performed each day. Often they are given targets to achieve based on customer outreach activities.
Problem statement
Sales reps were finding it hard to keep up with all the upcoming tasks/meetings/appointments which they were assigned or self-created. Giving the right priority to each task. These events were either created by the users for themselves or their teammates/managers and automated tasks by the system according to the business logic.
Tasks/meetings were always created in the context of every lead and were shown on the lead page per contact. Switching between leads was getting tedious and hard to navigate.
Managers wanted a single view of how the tasks were getting performed by the reps in a single view to track progress.
It was difficult to track how many tasks were performed by each rep and incentivize their work accordingly.
Goals and Challenges
Product goal: Create a dedicated space for the users to view, create and edit tasks for the desktop app. The goal was to create an easy-to-use and robust task manager in the context of the product and not reinvent the wheel by creating a copy version of any task management tools out there. Tasks were tightly bound with the leads and users, integrating with any 3rd party app was not giving the kind of experience which we were hoping for.
A way to flag the tasks that were not done or overdue
View progress/ performance of each Sales rep
Challenge: Use existing APIs and concept blocks in the product
User Journey/Task Flow
Creating a user task flow helps to collaborate with the developers and key stakeholders before any mock screens are created. The overall journey explores the opportunity space and emotional state of the user while performing the task. Mapping user journeys also helped in designing the right nudges which will help the feature to be more sticky. As time was of the essence it was empirical that all teams were working almost parallelly.
Final Outcome
Advanced Task Manager (ATM) (Advanced was the new improved version of the existing one)
The left side panel: Task meter to show you daily progress. The insights show when you are most busy during the day.
Top view: 2 views are based on the mode of work. Focused view and Manager’s view.
Task Table: Tasks are categorized at a high level for easy bifurcation based on what is the intent
Advanced filters, search, calendar view to give robust tools to manage and plan your day.
Touchpoints: Sequence of tasks set on different days/times after a certain event. Touchpoints can be defined based on the customer’s business logic. Automating business processes improved the time of delivery and removed redundant actions for the user.
Tasks settings were designed to be flexible and easy to set up. Heavily relying on templates and predefined conditions.
Wrap Up
Metroleads becomes a habit-forming product as it created workflows based on the user’s own way of working and yet becomes the manager’s favorite tool to track the events and user performance.
Sales teams work in a reactive environment, going over the repetitive tasks daily made things smoother.
And has become a show stopper for most users.
