OVERVIEW
From 2022–2024, I led the design of a replacement for a legacy CRM. Our primary users, account managers, used it because they had to, not because it gave them anything back. Usage like documenting client activity was required for compliance, so entries were minimal. The actual, valuable intelligence account managers gathered lived in unconnected, unsanctioned tools like OneNote and email.

ROLE
UX design

I OWNED
Design strategy, activity workflow, account page layout

The findings

Sales leadership needs data to make decisions for their org. Account managers steward that data, going out into the field and building relationships with hiring managers. Still, by the time it makes its way back to leadership, it’s a diluted facsimile of the rich conversation AMs lead.

I ran ~20 user interviews over a quarter to understand how account managers uncover this detail, log it, and share it. The findings showed three areas that are fundamental to how account managers manage their book of business.

My bet was that, by building a pleasing experience around any of these in the new CRM in a way that added value for account managers, we could begin to shift the source of truth for client data from disparate, unsanctioned systems to a unified tool.

The bet: Client activity is community activity

Org charts would be a value-add for users but would depend on clean, robust data. That data didn’t exist. Tasks would have been a nice-to-have for users, but I didn’t believe it added enough value for an account manager, so I settled on a pitch: Meeting activity is community activity.

Celebrate the team that supports the client. Every account manager sees all meeting activity on a client, with no silos. A meeting doc’d to comply becomes a meeting doc’d for a colleague. It used an existing behavior (celebration and collaboration) to bring users to a unified system with their client insights.

RISK: Some account managers were territorial about clients. They were the exception; the field's collaborative culture carried the idea.

Bringing people along

Rollout: The legacy system stayed live for a year during the new CRM rollout. Adoption was voluntary during this time. The engineering team made this decision; if anything failed, users could fall back to the legacy system.

During the rollout, I co-led a training session with the product manager for 40 participants, including account managers and sales managers selected by our stakeholders. I led monthly playbacks with stakeholders, sharing what we learned during the training session and one-on-one feedback sessions.

~25% of account managers adopted the new CRM voluntarily in the first 3 months. This group, our champions, saw the value despite limited functionality citing “ease of use” and “everything in the same place” as the top reasons for adoption. Our champions agreed to use the new CRM exclusively and encourage peers to do the same. With their help, roughly another 70% of account managers adopted it over the next 6 months. Only ~5% had to be moved at the 12-month cutoff.

Next steps

The open data concept wasn’t radical. Most modern CRMs allow for this, but this CRM defaults to public view first and celebrates the team that works a client. Reminding an account manager that their peer can see their content nudges them to provide cleaner, more actionable data.

The next step is to explore what an AI model can capture and structure for notes. Plugging in a model to transcribe the client conversation and produce notes is easy. The trick is not to automate so much that the account manager doesn’t retain client details.