CRM Sales Application
A new Customer Relationship Management application to support the sales team
Situation: Vertafore had tools to support agencies once they had a customer’s business, but nothing that helped the sales team track and follow up on leads to actually bring in customers as the first step.
Task: Design an application that collects information about potential customers, logs communications, schedules follow-ups, tracks quotes, and provides dashboards that show everything in the sales pipeline and where each lead is in the process.
Result: High-fidelity wireframes and a prototype to communicate the concept to executives in order to fund the project. Funding was received and the application was built on a 3rd party platform, becoming a popular product for mid to large agencies.
Actions:
Competitive research
User interviews & testing
Task Flows
Wireframes
Prototype
Intro
I was new to Vertafore and the insurance industry when I started this project and was fortunate to work with two fantastic PMs who were leading this project. One PM had owned his own small insurance agency previously and had a strong vision for what functionality would be needed. I did a lot of research into existing CRM tools to understand what options were available and how the sales funnel process worked.
The SalesTrack product (now integrated into agency management) is an application to track insurance sales leads. Vertafore wanted an offering for the Producer (sales) persona in an insurance agency but wasn't ready to commit to a budget for development. Together with a product manager, I led initial research into what capabilities this tool should provide. I looked at competitive products, interviewed core user groups, outlined flows and features, and built a fully functional and user-tested prototype to showcase the features and power it could provide.
Task Flows
After completing competitive research and interviewing users, I had a good understanding of the problems we needed to solve. I broke them down into five individual workflows to map out how each would tie into each other. This allowed the team to reach an understanding of exactly how a salesperson would move a prospective customer through the entire sales funnel, and what functionality would be needed.
Navigation
After understanding how users needed to move through the system, I started to work out the specific capabilities that would be needed for each screen and develop the navigation bar. Shown are the menus and the actions users would need to take under each item.
Role-Based Views
Laying out the key categories helped our team and user research group to understand the full suite of capabilities. At this point we began to consider role-based views. Super-users would get access to all the functionality while core groups, such as Marketing, would only see the functionality that pertained to them, freeing up visual space and making it easier to navigate.
Shown is one of the screens the Producer would see while entering details about a sales prospect. This is one of the more field-dense views, as Producers need to enter lots of details about the customer to better understand their needs. They also need a robust communication tracking system, as the sales process can take a long time and each touchpoint needs to be entered.
The First Screen
This is the concept for a dashboard landing page, which identifies key pieces of data that help the Producer know where to begin their day. It also has a Recently Viewed panel so they can easily pick up where they left off the previous day. The Work Queue tracks all the dates entered in the screen shown above so the Producer is notified when they need to reach out again, or when any due dates for contracts are approaching.
Conclusion
We took this prototype to our top leadership, who saw the value and approved budget to move forward. The project was ultimately taken up by another internal team and built on a 3rd party platform, and was a popular product among mid- to large-sized agencies. It’s now integrated directly into Vertafore’s agency management software. It was fun to start with an empty slate and be able to create something from the ground up.