Experience Design in Sales Opportunity Forecasting

I contributed to CRM Opportunity Module product design and optimised the sales process. I successfully build the Opportunity module to forecast and report four years one-off and recurring, unweighted and weighted revenue.

Project Process

Step 1

Painpoints & Demands

💬 Conversation | 👀 Observation | 😵 Painpoint | 🤔Demand

Sales team

💬 😵 Calculating revenues for four years is frustrating.

💬 😵 Don’t want to spend too much time filling the forms.

👀 🤔 Want an easy learning curve.

👀 🤔 Helpful instructions for each sales stage.

Leadership team

💬 🤔 Want to track overall Lead and Opportunity progress.

💬 😵 The deviation between forecasting revenue and actual revenue.

👀 😵 Hard to monitor sales performance.

💬 😵 Need to manually create reports on revenue and numbers of connectivity for all regions.

Finance team

💬 🤔 Create an invoice automatically based on the Opportunity.

👀 😵 Rework on the updates of products, exchange rate, etc. on both finance system and CRM.

Marketing team

💬 😵 Needs data on Opportunity dropout rates to measure the marketing campaigns.

👀 🤔 Gain insights into buyers decision making, product and service trends.

Step 2

MVPs

Opportunity Module

  • Define methods to create opportunities.
  • Optimise sales process. eg. Simplify the Sales pipelines from “Convert to Simplified Sales Process” and “Convert to Complex Sales Process” to one pipeline starting from different stages.
  • Classify the fields for input and reporting, minimise input fields display for the Sales-end. eg. Hide “Simplified Sales Stages” from the sales-end as it is for reporting purposes.
  • Design fields as a task checklist for each sales stage to support sales activity.

Opportunity Forecasting Module

  • Standardise sales experience into calculation formula.
    • Implant ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) to revenue ratio into recurring revenue calculation.
    • Four years ramp-up revenue calculation for recurring revenues.
  • Simplify revenue calculation requirements.
    • Weighted & Unweighted
    • One-off & Recurring
  • Minimise the fields the user needs to fill.
  • Add product line into the Opportunity forecasting table.
  • Create Product categories to meet reporting requirements.

Reporting Module

  • Define essential data collection and filters.
  • Map fields from CRM modules to the reporting module.

Step 3

Developement & Verification

  • We communicated internally with the leadership team and finance team to prepare related input.
  • Created and walked through 8 use cases (91 Opportunity forecasting data items in total) in real scenarios.
  • Verified the calculations in modules, developed by third party developers.

Outcomes

The Opportunity module is now working on the CRM system with four years of revenue and connectivity forecasting features.

  • The sales team is satisfied with the day-to-day tracking of the opportunity.
  • The leadership team collects data from Opportunity reports and receives alerts once an opportunity is overdue without follow-up actions.
  • The finance team can sync the data from Unleashed with product ID and input actual values for reporting.
  • The marketing team can measure the Lead performance with the Opportunity dropout rate.