The missing piece of the sales cycle
Sales teams sent quotes every day, but the CRM had nowhere to keep them. I designed Quotes Management so the numbers a manager forecasts on are the numbers a customer sees.
The symptom
Forecasts looked healthy. Too healthy. Some opportunities showed values twice as high as what could really be sold, and managers were planning on those numbers.
What I found
Reps presented several options to a customer, but the CRM could track only one.
They typed prices by hand to make the value look right.
Every manual edit pushed the value further from reality, so reports and forecasts were built on bad data.
The root cause: the quote was missing from the sales cycle, so the opportunity could no longer tell the truth.
The goal
A new record type that holds products, stays in sync with its opportunity, becomes a document the customer receives by email, and can be reported and forecast on.
Three decisions
1. One icon, everywhere
A quote appears in the menu, feeds, record detail, widgets and reports. I drew one icon that works in every colour and size, so people recognise a quote wherever they meet it.
2. Sync you can see
Products move between the opportunity and the active quote, in both directions. The sync control always shows its state and which quote it follows, because a sync people cannot see is a sync they will not trust.
3. Everything needed, in one widget
Status, version, process step and the next action, right in the record detail. A rep sees where a quote stands without opening it.
The result
Quotes became their own part of the sales cycle: tracked, synced with the opportunity, ready to send and to report on. The feature launched with a preview video, which I designed too.
How it came together
- Customer feedback
- User stories
- Wireframes
- UI
- Development
- Launch video
What it taught me
When the numbers look wrong, look for the missing step in the process before adding another field.
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