Proven Success

As part of a digital transformation initiative, I was responsible for conducting research with sales, prospects, customers, and internal SMEs to determine the best ways of replacing a legacy Salesforce Classic CRM with a completely new Salesforce Lightning experience which would decrease friction in the sales process by automating many facets of the sales process and by introducing machine learning to surface prospects most likely to buy along with key triggers indicative of likelihood to purchase. This increased sales velocity by surfacing prospects who were 6x more likely to close and decreasing the average sales cycle by 20 days.

To determine the correct factors to use in our algorithm, I conducted interviews and focus groups with internal sales and sales ops employees and conducted surveys and interviews with recently-signed customers. Certain factors built into the algorithm were based on what made for the best clients for this company, but others were surfaced through research with customers.

In addition to the algorithm used to surface best-fit/most-likely-to-close customers, I also provided the triggers we could leverage by using internal and third-party data to notify a salesperson when a change had happened within the organization that matched up to one of the top reasons for buying this product and service.

Arising from research I conducted into Autodesk’s Services Marketplace feasibility initiative, I learned that support agents spent 80% of their time answering a single customer need: Getting an activation code. Although not part of the original research request, I recommended to Autodesk that they create a chatbot experience to support those 80% of requests, providing a simple, easy-to-use, 24x7 experience on a global basis that would reduce operational costs by $800k in the first year alone.

Autodesk decided to implement the new-to-market IBM Watson as the backbone for their customer support bot, and I was secured as the researcher to work with UX designers and developers to bring this experience successfully to market. For this project, I utilized Qualtrics data, and we stood up a survey interstitial to provide potential research recruits. From there, I conducted multiple rounds of interviews and prototype observations.

Key to the experience success was the globalization content strategy: We needed to make the experience not only seamless and intuitive, but it also had to feel natural, polite, and supportive on a global scale. One of the completely unexpected findings from this research that a standard 0-10 rating would not work because some countries, like Italy, think of “1” as being the best.

After some months of research, prototype testing, and refinement, we had what Autodesk refers to as its “MLP” (Most Loveable Product) which was successfully launched to market and has since been extended to support multiple layers of customer needs.

During my time with this leading HCM company, I led the research and strategy for multiple new product & experience launches, including: An AI-based salesperson experience that increased sales velocity and opportunity closes; a first-in-the-industry prospect engagement portal which reduced manual processes, time, inaccuracies, and prospect frustration while leveraging content marketing for greater engagement; a mobile-based customer case management system; a mobile-based benefits enrollment experience, and, the limited rollout of a new HCM product built with an entirely new backend payroll system.

For all of these projects, I conducted internal and external research, including, but not limited to: Industry, competitive, and market research; external primary research with prospects and customers (surveys, observations, and interviews); internal primary research with SMEs (surveys, observations, interviews, focus groups, workshops); secondary research into behavioral data leveraging Salesforce, Pendo, Google Analytics, Tableau, and more for reporting. I identified gaps as well as correlations, providing the who, what,  WHY, what it means, and what to do about it, building consensus across groups of what to address and how, for the success of both launch and on-going iterative development and release process.

Salesforce wanted a strategy for how to launch their new platform, Lightning, and they wanted a website that could connect with their technology leadership audience on the benefits of switching from Salesforce Classic to the new Lightning Platform, highlighting their ability for low-code, no-code development.

Following industry and market research, I provided a storytelling workshop which informed the content strategy I provided. Afterwards, I interviewed technology executives on citizen development and wrote the copy for the first blueprint on citizen development (totaling more than 20k words), providing Salesforce the ability to connect, educate, and inform executives on how to implement Lightning in such a way that they could reduce their backlog and increase efficacy in delivering new, internal products to support their organizational goals and processes.

In 2016, Autodesk, a 40-year-old software company, wanted to make the shift from software being sold B2B through resellers to a SaaS B2C company, but to do so, they could be seen as competiting with their resellers who had been their customers for 4 decades. I was charged with conducting research to determine if there may be a possibility of providing resellers with additional revenue for their supplementary services (e.g. consulting) to help them continue to serve as good partners while shifting to a business which would be more profitable, easier to manage, and provide a better customer experience overall.

For this project, I conducted multiple rounds of research with internal SMEs as well as customers worldwide, learning that a marketplace could both help preserve their reseller relationships but also provide a better end user experience because as they sought out information, they largely were looking for workflow support (often complex and industry/role-specific)—rather than simple how-to instructions. This meant that companies who were strong partners could provide additional support and benefit, making users more successful using Autodesk software.

As part of my recommendations, I provided an additional surprising finding which was that Autodesk support agents spent 80% of their time answering a single customer need: Getting an activation code. Although not part of the original research request, I recommended to Autodesk that they create a chatbot experience to support those 80% of requests, providing a simple, easy-to-use, 24x7 experience on a global basis that would reduce operational costs by $800k in the first year alone, and by lifting that mundane, redudant request from agents, they could begin training agents to provide the higher-level, technical support that end users would later require of a B2C SaaS company.

You can read more on that research project in the “Automation & Transformation: Autodesk” case study. Of note, the research for this product received the 2017 AMY award for "Innovation in Market Research."

As part of a different project I was involved in, I combined research on the marketing, sales, and service side of the company business and re-thought the experience through the Salesforce 360 lens. Using my knowledge and experience working with Salesforce (Lightning) Platform, I built a strategy for a 360-degree customer view, leveraging Salesforce Marketing, Sales, Service, Community Clouds, and more.

This strategy provides the ability for customer-centric employees (which includes Marketing) to have near real-time actionable intelligence built upon data captured from the last group interacting with the customer and translating that data into what it means for the next person to touch the customer.

Across all teams and departments, if a customer was being engaged, the information could be captured, translated, pushed forward and leveraged in an actionable, intelligent way to deliver greater engagement, conversion, adoption, resolution, satisfaction, and even advocacy.

For multiple projects at this company, I provided research and strategy for influencing behavioral change. For one of these projects, I conducted research following the release of a MVP customer portal which was not meeting expectations in terms of adoption, utilization, and customer sentiment. As part of this research, I determined multiple factors affecting the customer experience, including: UX issues which extended beyond the customer into the agent experience which created delays in issue resolution; gaps in content created (and needing to be created) as well as channel strategy.

I provided recommendations for improving the user experience as well as content and IA recommendations and a comprehensive channel strategy based on reasons for case creation to route customers to the best channel to support their need at the time and in the way that best fit them. Of note, the customer and agent experiences were built on Salesforce Service and Community Clouds.

Additionally, I provided organizational change recommendations on the Sales side, uncovering through my research that the CRM was being underutilized and included bad/non-existent data as the norm. Further, opportunities were being cannibalized by other groups through a loosely-managed opportunity oversight process. Due to the investment in the sales transformation process, I called attention to the gravity of the situation, as it threatened the success of the sales transformation project. I recommended that the CRM be the one source of truth and that rules be established and enforced to support the rightful seller.

Lastly, through my research, I uncovered that prospects in-process were being oversolicited with some receiving as many as 100 emails each month. Due to the component of intelligent marketing as part of the sales transformation initiative, I called attention to the noise being created by salespeople paying no attention to prospects who were already in process. All of these recommendations resulted in organizational change which improved the experience for prospects & customers while increasing close rates & sentiment, and raising the company sentiment among salespeople.