Frontline
A Quoting tool specially designed to empower Sales Representatives at Nutanix and help them sell complex Nutanix Solutions more efficiently.
Nutanix was using Saleforce CPQ (Steelbrick)
to create Quotes. However, with Nutanix’s growing product portfolio and complex business needs, it became increasingly difficult to Quote using SteelBrick due to it’s inextensible and inflexible framework. This led to long sales cycles and loss of important deals.
My responsibility was to build a new CPQ system that helped our Sales Representatives sell efficiently and quickly.
Team
Walt O’maley- Product Director
Nitin Mehra- Engineering Lead
Paras Shah- Product Manager
along with a team of 12+ developers
My Role
Lead Designer: Responsible for research, strategy, design & user validation
Duration
Jan 2019 - Present
.png)
In my 2+ years as Lead Product Designer for Frontline, I was able to empower our Sales Representatives to:
-
Create Quotes 10x faster,
-
Reduce the Quote turn-around time by 88%
-
Reduce the time taken for Renewal Quoting by 95%
-
Save $1.3M+ directly in annual recurring license for SteelBrick.
Overview
An average sales cycle revolves around creating a Quote, configuring products, applying discounts, and submitting for Approval. Due to SteelBrick’s poor architecture, usability issues, and absence of essential workflows, our Sales Representatives started spending way more time figuring out workarounds to create quotes and waiting for Approvals.
This led to data inaccuracy and redundancy. In the process, we were losing important time sensitive deals due to the prolonged process of creating a Quote.
20-25 min
Simple single product
Quote creation
55%
Quotes were only auto Auto-approved in SteelBrick.
$1.3M+
Spent on SteelBrick licensing & Salesforce developers
5 hrs
Minimum quote turn-around time
Project Constraints
Since we were working on a very strict timeline aiming to deliver the product before the subscription for SteelBrick ends, we worked under a lot of constraints.
Lack of domain experience
Newly hired team with little understanding of the Nutanix sales process & business.
Tight timelines
The team had a tight timeline to deliver before the end of SteelBrick product subscription.
Shifting priorities
Business Transition
Nutanix was still transitioning to a subscription model and the business model was still evolving. This led to a lot of back and forth in the requirements.
Constantly shifting requirements & priorities due to the involvement of multiple teams, where each team felt their requirement is “High priority”
Research Initiatives
Following Research initiatives were planned considering the tight timelines of the project.
Organising a Design Sprint
Goals:
Since the project was running on a tight schedule, I managed to get all the stakeholders to come together and spend a week on a design sprint organised by me.
-
Bring all the major stakeholders in the same room to align to a single vision for the product
-
Gain understanding of end-to-end sales ecosystem within Nutanix
-
Establish a selling-friendly product categorisation
-
Identify major workflows and have a user validated design in place.
Participants:
12 execs from various stakeholder teams: Frontline engineering and Design, Sales, Sales Operations, Business Operations and Product got together for a 5 day sprint.
%205.png)
%204.png)
%201.png)
Organising User Interviews
Since we were designing a completely new system which would involve users to migrate from one CPQ to another, it was important to gain understanding of the entire user journey.
Goals:
-
Understand needs of the users to build an effective solution.
-
Identify dependencies on external systems & resources
-
Understand usage patterns to reduce friction in the adoption of the new CPQ.
Participants:
9 Sales Representatives
3 Account Managers
Contextual Enquiry & Competitive Research
Building a system in-house gave us the power to design for complete customisation and personalisation for Nutanix Sales representatives. To achieve this, it was important to understand how they think, work and interact
Goals:
-
Understand Nutanix's Sales strategies & methodologies.
-
Understand how Sales Representatives approach/communicate with customers.
-
See how other players in the market are solving similar problem.
Method:
-
Attended trainings and bootcamps designed for Sales reps at Nutanix to sell efficiently.
-
Studied a few other products in market.
Snippet of a course taken from Nutanix University
%201.png)
Research Outcomes
The research initiatives proved to be extremely beneficial not just for design, but for other stakeholders involved in the project too.
Complete Understanding of the System
As an outcome of the research and Design Sprint, I gained complete understanding of the following key areas of Sales at Nutanix:
-
Mapping prospect customer Goals to Nutanix Solutions
-
Upsell & Cross-sell strategies
-
Categorizing Products
-
Creating different types of Quotes
-
Quoting different types of products
-
Renewals
-
Approval Processes
For the sake of simplicity and brevity, this is a simplified version of the user’s journey compared to actual User Journey that covered a wider aspect of end-to-end Sales ecosystem.
Better understanding of key Users & Usage patterns
Since we were designing a completely new system which would involve users to migrate from one CPQ to another, it was important we understood their usage patterns and needs to reduce adoption friction and ultimately build an efficient and effective system.
Secondary User
Primary User
Key Insights
Even though a lot of insights were generated around the end-to-end processes carried out in SteelBrick, there were a few strategic level insights that shaped the new solution. Some of the insights around creating a Quote were:
Disconnect between real-world solution selling and SteelBrick’s feature-based quoting tool
SteelBrick operated on Quoting product SKUs. This approach did not match the real world Solution selling approach where Sales Rep bundle together multiple products to sell a solution that made logical and practical sense to our customers.
Poor search & discoverability as products had to be added by their technical SKU codes.
With over 2 lakh product SKUs and hundreds of product combination rules, a lot of cognitive load was added to remember the various products and product combinations available. As a resort, Sales Reps heavily relied on external documentation to assess compatibility.
Product Search results in SteelBrick
Product Search in SteelBrick
Information overload due to non-contextual display of information
Since SteelBrick followed a rigid process of Quoting, the “Create Quote” form was overloaded with fields that were required across the process of quoting, all displayed at once.
Create Quote form in SteelBrick
Product configuration in Steelbrick
Opaque approval workflow leading to slow and uncertain timelines
Once a Quote was sent for approval, there was no clarity on the chances of the quote getting approved, approvers involved and the stage of approval. This led to ambiguity and uncertainty.
Inflexibility of the tool led to lots of complicated workarounds being created for simple workflows.
Complicated workflows like Renewals, upgrades and partner integrations became increasingly tough due to the non-flexible nature of SteelBrick.
Large amount of data duplication slowed down the Quote Creation process.
Large amount of data duplication led to slow product catalog updates and long loading times while adding products
Lack of support for Configurable Terms
SteelBrick followed a rigid pattern of selecting the subscription term. Sales Reps had to come up with workarounds to provide the flexibility of configurable terms to customers.
Design Directions
Our research initiatives helped us draw a clear picture of what our users need in order to succeed in their tasks. It was really important to formulate these design goals so that every stakeholder is on the same page on the vision of an ideal product. An ideal CPQ that would significantly help our Sales Representatives succeed would have following attributes:
Scalable & Flexible framework
Organize products to simplify the process for sales and to support assembly of solutions bundles or guided selling .
Expert
Guidance
Keep the user informed about the Quality of their Quote, and provide guidance in products to reduce dependency on external documentation.
Configuration Confidence
Inspire confidence amongst Sales Representatives that the recommended solution is the right one.
Seamless
adoption
Maintain consistency across the new system and the existing system & retain major flows for Advanced users who have used the system for long.
Personalisation &
Customisation
Start with products and configurations based on customer profiles and preferences.
Actionable
Insights
Help users to identify problems & course-correct before sending the Quote for Approval.
Solution Highlights
Even though there were lots of minor and major insights around the usage of system, user behaviour and process, for the sake of this case study, I have picked up a few key insights that created most impact around our two main goals- reducing sales cycle and increasing efficiency.
Select Products
Creating a Flexible & Scalable Framework
Frontline’s guided selling approach gave Sales Representatives the flexibility to select products, services and bundles instead of product SKU codes.
Configure Products
Quick, logical & contexual Product Configuration
Review Products
Single view to Review Multiple Products
Quote View
Personalized view with actionable insights
User Validation
The workflows were tested with our new and experienced Sale Reps. Even though we received raving reviews about the ease of use and upgraded product experience, there were certain areas where we could improve the experience.
“Can we fill all the white space to reduce scrolling in the product?”
After using SteelBrick, our users were accustomed to looking at content dense screens that reduced scrolling but made scanning through content increasingly difficult. Even though our users liked the overall aesthetics of the product, some of them expected to see more content at once. This was a tough call to take since it would involve going away from Nutanix Design System and basic laws of Usability.
Previously
After Improvements
“I deal with hundreds of Quote lines at once. Can we improve the scanability of the Quote view?”
One important insight that we missed in our initial research was about the maximum number of Quote-lines there could be in a Quote. Our Usability Testing indicated that some users deal with hundreds of Quote-lines in a single Quote. To solve for this, we introduced a compact and a comfortable view. Compact view reduced the height of each row by 50% and font size went down from 16px to 14px. This let users accommodate way more quote-lines than usual.
“I would like to edit and apply the same attributes to multiple Quotelines”
This was an important and extremely useful insight we got from some of our users after our Beta 1 release. We introduced Bulk Actions to solve this problem.
Impact
Apart from the Qualitative Impact, we tried to measure the success of various workflows by conducting Quantitative Usability Testing sessions with our users.
10x faster quote creation
Initial feedback is 2 mins vs 10-15 mins for simple quotes and even better performance for more complex and large quotes.
88% reduction in Quote turn around time
From 5 hours in SteelBrick to 36 minutes in Frontline.
45% increase in Quote Auto- approvals
80% of the Quotes are auto-approved in Frontline compared to only 55% in Salesforce SteelBrick.
1.3M+ direct savings in annual recurring license
This happened once all users moved to Frontline from SteelBrick in Q1 of 2020.
95% reduction in Automated Renewal Quote Creation time
On demand quoting for Renewals led to time savings for Sales Rep (CSV team) from ~2 hrs to few minutes.
Saved 3 hours of effort to prepare Renewal Quote
Initial feedback is 2 mins vs 10-15 mins for simple quotes and even better performance for more complex and large quotes.
User Testimonials
What an amazing Quote tool we have now! What's really cool is the deal quality indicator which allows you to gauge how well or not your deal is being priced. Very impressed!
Will Cash
Global Solution Architect
Every person that I have spoken to is relieved that Quoting time has been cut at least in half. Multiple Qoutes have been cut by 80%
Shawn Rutter
Account Manager
Frontline is faster, cleaner, simpler. All round improvement from the old process.
Will Cash
Global Solution Architect
My guys are all raving about the ease of use (and how surprised they are 😀). This will be a productivity game changer."
Shawn Rutter
Account Manager
I have not seen anything this good in his 25 years of Sales Operations experience. Competition is not even close.
Jake Hofwegen
VP of Sales Operations
This tool is awesome! This is going to be a major benefit to everyone in the field. Thank you!!!
Graham Carssow
Customer Success Representatives
Learnings
Importance of organising a design sprint early in the Product Life
Conducting a one week intensive design sprint was one of the most fruitful and well received initiatives of this project. Doing it in the early stages of conceptualisation, it helped us build relationships across stakeholders from various teams we only spoke to emails on. This also helped us set a common vision for the product. Our stakeholders liked it so much, it became a popular path to solving problems within the organisation.
Handling Stakeholder Bias
Even though all stakeholders mean well, it is sometimes easy to divert from the mission we set for our product in the beginning. Since design is a key reflection of various design decisions being taken at various steps, it’s important to take a step back whenever someone diverts.
Understanding User Bias
The project took an interesting turn when we realised that our users preferred a design that was against the most basic UX principles just because they had been using the older product for too long. Designing this product was especially tough because it was expected to take a lot of decisions directly based on user feedback rather than understanding the root problem and solving for it. It was critical for me at this point to convince the team about the best UX practices.