I joined Salesforce as part of their acquisition of RelateIQ, a startup focused on making an out-of-the-box CRM that was easy and intuitive for small businesses (SMB). As part of this acquisition, my team was charged with identifying a strategy to roll out a new edition of Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s primary product built for salespeople, that would be optimized for small businesses. This product became Sales Cloud Essentials.
I led a team of designers and partnered with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to define, design, implement, and iterate upon the CRM experience for small businesses.
Coming from our startup into the larger Salesforce organization was a big change for the team. In parallel to focusing on product design, I helped navigate this change by:
Sharing platform and product knowledge: As our product development team transitioned from working on a separate CRM product to working within the Salesforce platform, we faced an initial lack of knowledge around how the platform works and how we should leverage it for Essentials. I led efforts on our design team to up-level our knowledge of the platform by providing opportunities for training and by building relationships with product owners across the organization who would partner with us during the design and development process.
Building connections across the design, product, and engineering teams: I built relationships for me and my team members with other leaders, designers, product managers, and engineers across the organization. I encouraged the team to network with not only the team they worked with, but with others who can help them navigate Salesforce as an organization.
Revisiting career goals, areas of focus, and team health: I aligned our team’s career ladders and expectations with those of the larger User Experience organization to aid in the integration process. I held career discussions with my team and evaluated them against these revised competencies to help position their new work with how it relates to their goals. I conducted regular health checks with the team to ensure their transition was successful.
User research, competitive analysis, and customer feedback identified several user pain points that became our key areas of focus:
Based on these known pain points, we focused our efforts within the design and development of Salesforce Sales Cloud Essentials on:
Product migration strategy: In addition to creating a new edition of Sales Cloud, we also had to transition our customers from our previous product over to Salesforce. This involved an extensive strategy touching on communications, in-product messaging, and feature alignment. I led the definition of the experience to transfer customer data between systems.
Cross-functional creative partnership: I worked closely with our product and engineering leaders to jointly define the product strategy. Instead of approaching this effort as a “handoff” between teams, we worked hand-in-hand to align user, business, and technology needs.
Prioritization of opportunity areas: I led exercises to brainstorm potential focus areas for the product, and helped prioritize those opportunities based on their potential user value and alignment with our experience themes and goals. I worked with our product and engineering leads to define market value and technical feasibility for each major direction.
Experience themes: I defined experience elements for the team to explore through research and ideation in order to provide focus as we looked to evolve the product. I leveraged storyboards to communicate high-level concepts for the team to explore further.
UX principle definition: I conducted an exercise with the team to have them effectively define what makes the Essentials experience unique as a product edition, and how global design and business principles align with the Essentials product. These principles helped guide the team to map their concepts to user goals, and ensure that we had a cohesive understanding of our approach cross-functionally.
Brand and marketing creative design alignment: A large part of the visual design direction for the product was informed by the company’s brand direction to ensure a consistent visual look and feel between marketing and in-product experiences. I coordinated reviews with the brand team to ensure alignment and to also inform future research around messaging and brand perception within the product.
Alignment within the platform and product packaging: We needed to ensure we crafted a unique and valuable SMB-oriented experience without negatively impacting higher priced editions. I ensured our design team fully understood the implications of our pricing and packaging strategy as a constraint to consider during design.
Resource constraints: Limited resources meant that we needed to prioritize our focus and leverage existing design system elements in order to reduce net new engineering work. I led the coordination between our design team and design systems teams to focus our work on things that would be high impact and low effort to build. We also maintained an experience backlog to ensure appropriate focus as more resources became available.
Realistic scoping within releases: Salesforce releases three times a year, and careful planning was required to ensure that we were able to deliver meaningful value in each release. I maintained a three release design plan that outlined our scope so that we could revisit it frequently and ensure alignment across the team.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Essentials has become the premiere small business solution for sales teams, allowing users to onboard onto the platform and grow with it as their business grows. The ease of use of the product has been called out as one of the primary differentiators of the product over its competitors.
Customer Quote:
Gamechanger!! Ease of use, implementation and most of all it improves your sales nurturing cadence. What I love about it is it provides companies that don’t need/can’t afford the enterprise version of SF with a product that helps them nurture relationships and close business.
— Y’vonne Sisco Ormond (@ysormond) June 8, 2018
“As a small business owner working with all sizes of clients, our 5P team always looks for technology that isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why I love Salesforce Essentials… It’s a platform that fits the needs of small businesses of every shape and size with a cadence that makes us feel like we run like a larger enterprise level organization. Salesforce Essentials has been phenomenal for my business. It’s increased our productivity tenfold and has given us a cost-effective way to operate like a larger organization at the scale of a small business. – Y. Ormond, 5P Consulting Read More
