Velocify Pulse Contact strategy

summary

As the Senior Product Manager at Velocify I championed a project to make communication channels a first class citizen within our B2B sales product, called Velocify Pulse. Pulse is a sales acceleration application I helped develop on the Salesforce sales cloud. While this may seem like catch up (because who doesn't use email, texts, and phones these days), Pulse was a brand new product offering that was in rapid development.

Velocify Pulse was created for Business Development Reps who are measured on KPIs like number of calls per day, speed to call, and number of qualified leads. These users follow a prescribed contact strategy developed by their Sales Leaders. Once a contact strategy has been defined, the rep is responsible for executing and following up with leads. One of the biggest issues I identified while observing sales teams over the course of a couple of weeks was that leaving the application to write an email or place a phone call through another application we offered was killing productivity. Most reps were only working with one monitor and were constantly switching between applications to perform their tasks. It relied on a lot of copy and paste, switching back and forth, and most importantly lost time. I set out to change this experience and deliver a sales solution that let reps focus on achieving their strategic goals and less on maneuvering applications.

project contributions

I led a large team of 15 engineers, 2 designers, and 5 QA members to build a highly efficient contact strategy application in Salesforce.

Project highlights included:

• Discovery meetings with current and prospective customers to identify problems and gather rapid feedback
• Collaborating with UX designers and engineers to develop an interface that felt native to Salesforce
• Creating a comprehensive functional spec with detailed features and user stories
• Conducting rapid prototyping with sales teams to refine designs
• Prioritizing feature requests and enhancements over the course of the project

Early reviews pushed the app to a 5 star average rating in the Saleforce App exchange and boosted our NPS score from -10 to +19 in three months.

problem

Velocify leveraged voice as the primary method for contacting prospects and leads. Email and text could be utilized, but the experience was second hand, hard to find, and difficult to configure. Prospective customers and existing customers were dissatisfied with the current email offering, turning to other tools like Toutapp and Salesloft to accomplish email activities and tracking.

Solution and benefits

Email had the potential to drive 1:1 communication that was personalized, prioritized, and scaled for maximum effectiveness. For the MVP I focused on the email experience (composer) and engagement analytics.

Other benefits identified were:

• Contact enrichment
• Relationship strength
• Sentiment

Next, I redesigned the Leads View homepage that enabled reps to quickly see what the preferred contact method was for the any lead in the queue (as defined by their sales strategy). Each lead was ranked by priority and bucketed by stage in the contact strategy. Once the channel was selected the rep could:

• Draft emails directly from within the application (leveraging email templates)
• Make calls from our Dial-IQ product that was displayed as a widget within the page
• Initiate and send text messages with our partner provider

All of the available communication channels would automatically log the event in Salesforce and record the interaction on the Lead so the rep never had to spend valuable time copying over information and could quickly advance to the next lead in the queue.