SalesCaddy Chrome Extension

SalesCaddy was developed to help sales teams maintain the balance between responding to inbound leads quickly and finding the time to uncover new, high-potential prospects that aren’t picked up through marketing campaigns.

product failure

The chrome extension my team and I created allowed sales development reps to quickly search for prospects and add/update them to Salesforce with the click of a button.

The idea was born from one of our developer's who saw competing companies getting into the prospecting space. He created a prototype and presented his work to our leadership team. Low and behold they were thrilled! They couldn't wait to get this new offering to market and called all hands on deck to make this happen ASAP. As a product person I was wary of this sudden change in direction over night but didn't voice my concerns (mistake #1). We built the product very rapidly and did not involve user testing until the very end (mistake #2). When it came time to launch the product we hit a major snag. A competitor product was in legal trouble with LinkedIn for violating their ULA and we had to rewrite a lot of code to work around this new development (mistake #3).

All in all this product was a failure. Why? Because we bypassed all the steps to research and evaluate the potential market before we let our leadership throw the road map out the window. 

I wanted to highlight this project in my portfolio because I learned so much by failing and here my biggest takeaways:

1. Managing up is a necessary skill and it is my job to filter through the noise and focus on the most valuable initiatives to the overall company goals

2. You should never (I mean ever!) build a product without getting users involved early and often

3. Always do your homework. Had I taken the time to properly evaluate the market I may have been able to navigate the legal issues early and prevented months of additional development time

Below are screenshots of the two primary features available in the SalesCaddy.

SocialCaddy

The ultimate prospecting assistant for Salesforce. Easily find, update, and add new prospects from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Crunchbase directly into Salesforce. No more copying and pasting contact information. 

MailCaddy

The intelligent sales assistant for your inbox. Precisely choreograph prospecting flows with integrated email templates and tracking. Works with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, OWA and Office365.