19th Mile

Every organization has enormous potential for breakthrough improvements in employee productivity, customer growth, and profitability, but much of it remains untapped. Without personal coaching and clear goals, organizations may struggle to stay on track towards success. However, with a clear understanding of the processes to monitor and how to track them, organizations can pinpoint issues early on, coach their employees, and gain a better overview of tasks to increase sales.

19th Mile is built to boost sales performance with a 'learning by doing' approach in real-life situations. It offers a range of tools that users can utilize to execute their jobs or practice their skills. The tool analyzes real-time performance data and provides guidance and coaching based on predefined algorithms, rules, and a knowledge base to improve skills.

Continuous coaching through the use of these tools increases users' proficiency and boosts organizational productivity. Additionally, the usage of these tools generates individual user activity data, providing critical insights for management to make better decisions.

What are the problems?

Lack of Sales Coaching: Coaching is an integral part of sales executives development. With the right sales coaching, individuals and organizations can make better decisions and develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results.
No data-driven approaches and data analysis: You can’t get lost in spreadsheets while your team is waiting for your insight. You also can’t be careless about your data or it could lead you to wrong conclusions. It is crucial to organize, analyze and correctly report so that you can easily understand the analysis and share these actionable insights with your team. Good-quality data and the key sales performance metrics can help you diagnose problems in your sales process, and leaks in your sales pipeline. Inability to Identify the Red Flags and improvement in the responsive time.
Difficulty in time management: On average a sales executive spends about 5-6 hours a day on the field and hence they have limited access to the computer, plus they often face the issue with the internet connectivity in remote areas. So it is essential to provide them the tool that would always be at their disposal and could be easy to work with.

Roles and responsibilities

My role is to apply Human-Centered Design methods to the project and to provide valuable insights from user research, to help build a solution that would take into account the complexity of everyday business cases and real user needs.

Project Duration

2016-2020

What might solve their problems?

Users require a tool that can streamline their mundane tasks, making them more efficient and highlighting their strengths while addressing performance weaknesses and developing unused skills. This tool should focus on areas that need improvement or development to effectively build skills, as ongoing guidance and support are often unavailable.

For individuals, this tool solves the problem of skill-building without the necessary guidance and support. It offers timely guidance on selling effectively, which can increase sales productivity.

For organizations, this tool solves the issue of limited time and the lack of coaching skills among managers to mentor their direct reports. It enables organizations to increase the manager's span of control while ensuring that team members receive adequate support. Additionally, the tool provides data at the activity level, enabling organizations to direct behaviors and actions at that level.

Who are the users and what are their needs?

I will now take you through the process of how we discovered the problem, the main takeaways from the process we used to frame the solution and how we segmented our ideas and defined the solutions to the problem.

We used the following research methods to understand the problem:

Shadowing, just observe a day in the life of a salesperson with minimal intrusion to find behavioral patterns.
Contextual inquiries, observe and interview the potential users.
Stakeholder interviews, to get the full picture of what needs to be built.

The research began by interviewing individuals from sales backgrounds, ranging from junior-level executives to mid-level sales managers, to understand their day-to-day activities. I documented their routines to determine which tasks could be automated through the system, as well as what features would make their work more manageable.

In the second part of the research, I spoke with higher-level managers and sales heads to determine the types of analytics they expected the system to provide. We discussed the benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) that would be necessary for measuring the success of the sales teams.

Based on our research, we have identified the main insights and pain points of our target users:

Senior Management

Senior management had limited visibility into their team's performance, and required a tool that would enable them to understand the direction in which their team was heading. This would allow them to provide individual feedback and guide their team effectively.
Comprehensive analytics for individual team members at each level within the organization were deemed essential by senior management, in order to gain a full view of their reportees' data and proactively influence outcomes.
A lack of coaching skills among management was identified as an issue, even when mid-level management were able to identify the shortcomings and challenges of their reportees, they were unable to provide guidance and assistance.
Sales managers were struggling to dedicate time and focus on the performance of individual sales executives.
Managers found it challenging to track the real-time performance of individual salespeople.

Sales Executives

Sales executives required a tool that would simplify and speed up their work, as well as keep them organized in their day-to-day activities that led to actual sales.
On average, they spent around 5-6 hours each day in the field and had limited access to computers. They also faced connectivity issues in remote areas, making it inconvenient for them to return to the office to fill out data or create reports. Therefore, they needed a tool that would work even with limited internet access, allowing them to access their data, including emails, and update their information in the CRM.
Sales representatives lacked personalized coaching and could benefit from contextually relevant expert coaching at the time and point of need.
Users had no way of tracking their targets and receiving notifications if they were falling short, other than through meetings with managers and HRs.
There was a risk of losing leads due to the inability to keep track of and follow up with clients.
It was important for the system to identify which deals were most likely to convert, which were risky, what mitigating actions to take, and provide a daily action list for each sales executive.
Insight-based notifications, performance analysis, and early warning messages were necessary to allow users to course-correct when they were at risk of not meeting targets.
Salespeople acknowledged that they could efficiently manage their day-to-day activities if they were able to plan their day in advance, but had limited resources to do so.
Discussions with salespeople revealed that they struggled to keep customer data available at all times.

During our competitive analysis of existing CRM applications, we discovered that traditional CRM systems typically functioned primarily as record-keeping systems. Users would enter their data, but the system would not provide insights or guidance to help them improve their performance. Based on this analysis, we determined that our system needed to do more than simply keep records. It needed to provide users with insights and guidance that would help them perform better.

We have identified four main areas that require improvement/development in order to maximize an organization's productivity and profitability:

Sales CRM: This would allow users to record their activities, leads, and opportunities.
Sales analytics: This would significantly shorten the time gap between performance data availability and corrective action recommendation, enabling users to identify the right approach to improve their sales.
Sales coaching: This would provide coaching that is available at all times, 'in-the-pocket' and 'on-the-go', to eliminate the lack of manager's coaching skills as a significant impediment to the sales force. It would also reduce the time required by sales managers to spend with each executive, thereby increasing their ability to have a higher span.
Content delivery engine: This would provide relevant content and training to salespersons.

The process of designing the most relevant CRM solution began with designing the information architecture. This is essentially a representation of all the information that needs to be tracked by the user and how it should be organized hierarchically.

Our key goals were to:

Create transparency within the organization.
Strengthen collaboration between the team.
Provide insights on the basis of data entered by users.
Enable fast reaction time.

Problem Statement

How might we help sales executives plan their activities efficiently?

The secret to winning deals is the things that a sales executive does day in and day out.
An activity management system helps organizations get the most out of their salespeople by uncovering, tracking and motivating the activities that lead to sales.
With the help of the sales activity management system, managers can keep their team motivated and manage the sales goals, effectively increasing the sales team’s efficiency; hence leading to revenue generation.

How can we make it work?

Sales reps primarily perform two types of activities: Personal Meetings and Phone Calls with their clients. And these are the basic information that the user captures for an activity:

Contact - their name and phone number.
Deal/Lead information - the deal/lead for which the activity is being created.
Purpose - The reason for their meeting or the call.
Details - Date and time of the activity.

Activities Management

User flow for creating a new activity

The Activities module should have the following features:

A sales executive can schedule an activity, and based on predefined parameters, the app will display useful content to the user, allowing them to close deals faster. For each individual activity, the app provides specific study materials, tips, tutorials, and other resources in the form of audio, video, and text.
The app can identify the locations of nearby customers and send notifications to the user based on their defined range. This feature is especially useful when users are out in the field and need to keep track of clients in a specific area.
The app includes an auto call logging feature that saves users time when creating activities. When a user calls a contact who is also in their 19th Mile app, the app automatically identifies the call and asks the user if they want to capture it as an activity. With just a click of an icon, users can create an activity with the contact, without having to manually fill in all the necessary details.
The app provides reminders for planned activities, reminders to review completed activities, and reminders for reviewing pending activities at the end of the day.
For supervisors, the app includes a Daily Status report (DSR) feature, which is wizard-driven and allows for hierarchy-based drill-down to individual users' activity reports. This feature shows how many activities users have planned, how many of them are completed and reviewed, what the outcome was, and any meeting notes.
Activities created by subordinates are always visible to supervisors, so they can get a sense of how many activities are planned by individuals and how many are completed and reviewed.
Users can call, send messages by SMS, WhatsApp, email, or directly from the app to their customers.
The system tracks the number of days since the last activity occurred with each contact and customer.
Users can check in their location without opening a map and identify the shortest route to their customers.
Ability for users to identify the shortest route to their customers.

Overall, these features will help sales executives and their supervisors manage their activities more efficiently and effectively, ultimately leading to increased productivity and more closed deals.

It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and highly contextual information.

-- Paul Martiz

Opportunity Management

Opportunity management is a crucial aspect of sales pipeline management. It provides sales reps with a sales roadmap that guides their sales efforts by following a standardized sales process. By doing so, it enhances the visibility of their sales pipeline, allowing them to gain real-time insights into where all their opportunities are along the sales process.

Using opportunity management offers three significant benefits for both organizations and sales reps:

Optimized opportunities pipeline workflow: By standardizing the sales process and keeping opportunities moving forward, organizations can optimize their pipeline workflow.
Improved win rates: Users can see what they need to do next and how to complete each sales step, which increases their chances of winning more deals.
Enhanced opportunities insights: Focusing on the opportunities that matter the most helps users to gain insights into their pipeline that can help them make better-informed decisions.

The opportunities module is designed to track the progress and aging of deals through different pipeline stages. To help users manage their data easily, deals are segregated into different stages, and users can view their entire pipeline in each stage.

The system displays the risks associated with each deal and explains the necessary actions that can be taken to mitigate them. The risk involved with each deal is automatically detected by the system, based on predefined parameters, and assigned a corresponding risk rating. For example, in the screenshot above, the risk rating for the deal is 'High'.

To access helpful content that can aid in closing a deal, users can click on 'Learn Now'. The system displays relevant content based on the risks associated with each individual deal.

The Opportunities module in 19th mile offers a multitude of features and usability, including:

Display of the age of each deal in every stage of the pipeline.
Ability to attach images and documents to each deal.
View and respond to emails associated with individual deals directly from the app.
Ability to create and send quotes for the deal to clients.
Ability to track discount percentage for individual deals, with discount approval by a supervisor.

Performance Management

Organizations need to develop performance management systems that not only accurately evaluate their workers but also provide managers with the tools to effectively coach and mentor their employees. Good performance management can increase employee productivity and retention of top performers, both of which can improve a company’s bottom line.

In simple terms, performance management involves frequent, ongoing coaching conversations, as well as development opportunities as necessary. It is a behavioral attribute that places the employee at the center of their growth and the leader's responsibility to help build and enhance employee performance.

A performance management process is a system that enables managers to monitor and review employee work performance. This system involves close collaboration between managers and employees to create goals and provide guidance for enhancing each employee’s effectiveness within the organization. A performance management system typically includes three important features: setting expectations, monitoring performance, and providing feedback.

Setting Expectations

Creating clear and specific goals allows sales executives to understand their position's expectations and enables supervisors to evaluate their performance and contributions to the company.

Monitoring Performance

Supervisors need to actively monitor the performance of each sales executive to identify early if the sales rep is missing the mark or lacks the essential skills required to excel in their position.

Providing Feedback

It is the responsibility of sales managers/supervisors to provide feedback to sales executives on their performance, so they have the opportunity to make course corrections and guide their development within the company. Sales managers should regularly communicate with their team to offer ongoing support and mentorship.

A well-developed performance management system can significantly improve employee engagement and productivity.

How can we make it work?

To help organizations monitor sales performance effectively, 19th Mile provides a library of over 50 pre-built, ready-to-use metrics and associated reports that offer a comprehensive view of individual and team sales performance. These metrics are calculated daily, aggregated based on the organization's hierarchy, and displayed with trends across multiple time frames. Managers can view team heat maps for each metric. Setting up and deploying these metrics and reports can be accomplished within minutes. Individual quotas and targets can be assigned centrally or by managers, providing flexibility in managing sales performance in dynamic environments.

Over 50 pre-built metrics and reports covering Sales Productivity, Pipeline, Activities, Opportunities, and Conversion ratios for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly timeframes.
Daily tracking of individual performance through a dashboard that includes both leading and lagging indicators.
Early warning messages and recommended actions based on any at-risk metrics detected by the system.
Graphs, charts, and team heat maps that enable managers to quickly identify areas where coaching interventions may be needed.
Escalations, reminders, and notifications based on analytics related to leads and team performance.
Insights and analysis for all leading and lagging indicators and metrics available on a daily basis.
Ability to set and modify individual targets for team members based on their capabilities and context, for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly timeframes.
Real-time visibility into the status, outcome, risks, and progress of all activities and leads assigned to the team.
Indication of target achievement and display of percentage change.
Summaries of team performance.
Hierarchical aggregation and presentation of data.
Ability to track KPIs specific to level, role, or business.
Heat map of performance for individual users.
Drill down capability that allows managers to view the performance of each individual team member.

What gets measured, gets managed.

-- Peter Drucker

Sales Academy

The comprehensive analytics that the 19th Mile app calculates are used to provide algorithmic and data-driven sales coaching to sales reps. This coaching includes early warnings, deal risks and risk mitigation advice, and daily action lists, even if sales reps don't receive inputs from their managers. Managers can now focus on higher-order issues with their teams.

The 19th Mile platform also includes an in-built Sales Academy that provides access to a catalog of high-quality content sourced from leading sales trainers and publishers such as Harvard Business Publishing, Coursera, Udemy, and Sales Hacker. The academy delivers these modules in contextually relevant situations for the seller. Organizations can also upload their own content and deliver it contextually. For example, relevant content such as tips and product information can be pushed through the 19th Mile platform when a sales rep is on their way to a meeting.

Sales Academy covering 18 skill areas
Content curated from the best-in-class sales training publishers and experts
Relevant content delivered based on the context of activities, leads, and coaching inputs
Mobile content delivery
Academy structure & content is 100% customizable
Supports PDF, video & audio

Outcome

Our unique approach, with a 75-85 percent engagement rate, has resulted in reduced sales cycles and increased conversion rates, as well as the number of activities performed by sales executives. As a result, we have helped our clients raise their target achievement rate by almost 50 percent.

Overall 4.6/5.0 rating received on capterra

What users have to say about 19th mile

References

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