Case Study · SAAS, Business applications · NYC

Sales Prospecting & Lead Management Tool

Salesgenie Lead Manager gave SMBs a complete workflow for managing and qualifying leads. As UX Designer, I helped shape new features for a data-driven B2B product used by small and medium businesses.

Company:: Infogroup
Role:: UX Designer
Timeline:: 3-6 months
Tools:: Illustrator

Problem

Usability testing revealed that customers were using Salesgenie to manage their sales leads, but the product didn't support this workflow. The new features were designed to help customers track and manage their sales leads and conversions.

The product, Salesgenie, was an online database that allowed business owners to find business information, curate lists, and research customers and competitors. It operated via a subscription-model.

Approach

I conducted informal user testing sessions at our HQ to validate early designs. Testing revealed new and unanticipated lead-generation behavior that the new product would not support. The VP of Salesgenie decided to change our project’s focus so that we could design functionality to support lead generation.

Outcome

The outcome of this project was a suite of new features designed to help small-to-medium businesses track and manage their sales leads and conversions.

As the UX Designer for Salesgenie, I was responsible for producing wireframes, sitemaps, and workflows. I partnered with visual designers and product managers on branding and business requirements.

User Testing

Informal user testing revealed a new opportunity focused on supporting sales leads.

Early wireframes focused on the idea of shared licenses and team collaboration.

Under a single subscription, a manager or team leader could assign “seats” to team members, known as agents. As a group, the team would search for leads.

Team leaders would invite team members, in-office or remote, and assign email credits. Email credits were used by each agent to generate or follow-up with leads. This would involve:

Team leader and agent status
Allocating email credits to agents
Maintaining active and inactive licenses

Wireframe: Manage agents screen

→ Pushing for usability testing

As I began working through these initial designs, I felt we had too many assumptions about our customer's behavior. I wanted more validation that our designs would actually serve the needs of our customers.

→ Testing revealed gaps in the core Salesgenie product

Testing revealed an unanticipated "lead-generation" workflow that the new product wouldn't support — a finding that redirected the design strategy. I led the testing sessions at HQ and received positive feedback on my facilitation approach.

→ Lead Manager development

The Teams product was put on pause while we refocused on building the lead generation features. The new features became known as "Lead Manager". The design updates led to many design changes which applied first to Salesgenie and then to InfoUSA.

Design

New designs supported customer insights from testing, and included updates to the UI.

After gathering qualitative data, the new features focused on supporting the 3 main customer behaviors uncovered during testing sessions.

Finding and tracking leads
Categorizing leads by potential to convert
Tracking conversations

Wireframes of tags in list view and search

Behavior 1: Finding and tracking leads

Using the summary panel, customers could create user-defined tags help to identify and categorize leads. Once created, tags could also be applied as a search filter.

Behavior 2: Categorizing leads by potential to convert

Customers could select a lead status to help identify potential or existing customers. Some of these terms came directly from our testing: Hot Lead? High potential to convert. Dead Lead? No chance of converting. Don’t waste your

Behavior 3: Tracking conversations

There was a new notes area on the side panel and on detailed business overview pages that allowed customers to quickly add notes about their conversations with customers. Customers could also use notes as a filter.

Design updates to the Lead Manager UI led to many design changes.

This included breaking away from the fixed-width layout, adding the ability to customize columns, and adding a side panel to hold new features.

Collapsing panels and resized windows

The new designs included the ability to collapse the filters on the left and a new right panel. In order to accommodate all the new features, we needed to break away from the fixed-width layout. To document this, I created wires showing different breakpoints for the browser, starting with a wide screen version.

Collapsed right side panel

Click image to view gallery.

Minimum height

Minimum width

Narrow width

Collapsed panels

Customizable columns

"Custom Views" was the official name of the updated column customization features. This enhancement included the ability to resize columns, as well as rearrange, search and filter. Columns could also be hidden if they weren't needed.

Reorder and filter columns.

Columns can be rearranged, hidden, and resized

Click image to view gallery.

Resize column width.

Click image to view gallery.

Error Messages and Prompts

Towards the end of the project, I documented functionality for error messages, prompts, and special cases.

Retrieval error

Status error

Prompts

Tooltips

Outcome

These designs were successfully released as the Salesgenie Lead Manager, and many of the features were incorporated into other products at InfoUSA.

We eventually returned to the product that was put on hold. It was released as Salesgenie Lead Manager Team Edition. A few early wireframes are shown below.

Salesgenie Lead Manager final product release screen

An early stage wireframe showing dashboard updates, Manager view.

Salesgenie was a subscription product so a list could get new leads over time. This view shows a team leader or manager getting notifications about new leads for their lists.

Managing Lead Status in Salesgenie Agent

Assigning values to the lead status flags by toggling the status, then customizing the status meaning.

Allocation of Leads

The allocation window is how team leaders could allocate records to their team members.