Saleswhale is a lead qualification tool that fits seamlessly into any modern marketing tech stack. It works in the background with AI assistants who follow up with a high volume of leads at scale, actively identifying hand-raisers for your sales team. This means your sales team gets to spend more time on meaningful opportunities.
The Brief
Saleswhale is still a rather niche product in the market and most marketing managers still struggle to grasp how AI assistants can help them and how we can fit into their existing tech stack. It can sometimes fly over people’s head when we try to explain how our software works with demo videos and an integration diagram such as this:
Without a proper understanding of how the product works, it can be hard for prospects and new users to visualize how our software can work for their unique use case. As we are moving into the self-serve space, not every user is empowered with enough information to kickstart their own campaign.
Constraints
We have brought up the idea of a template library multiple times during ideation in our past design sprints but always shelved the idea in fear of it becoming something larger we can take on with limited resources on the web team.
We did not have ready-made templates ready in-app and content and email scripts had to be written from scratch, and that also seemed like a huge cross-functional effort needed from the product team.
The Goal
Our goal was to help prospects and new users how Saleswhale works as quickly as possible and reduce the friction of them giving Saleswhale a try.
How might we help prospects visualize how Saleswhale works and encourage them to sign up for an account with minimal human guidance?
Role, Team, Scope
Role: Lead Designer
Scope: Interaction design, Visual Design, Prototyping
Team: Dea (Frontend Dev), Reshma (Project Manager), Gabriel (Stakeholder, CEO)
Timeline
~2.5 weeks
Key takeaways from the research
- Customer Gong Calls — Takes a while for prospects to comprehend how Saleswhale AI works. “This looks quite complex”; “How does the AI know what is qualified?” Customers also struggle to connect their pain points to our solution sometimes, which also means they struggle to come up with use cases after onboarding.
This is extracted from the product team’s customer research as part of their design sprint to build onboarding playbooks in-app.
- Market Research — A quick look at how some of the high-adoption self-serve products manage to illustrate how they work. We looked at Typeform, Miro, and Canva. They all have a robust repository of ready-for-use, tried, and tested templates. The hypothesis is that templates can empower the user to jumpstart the use of our product with minimal guidance.
The Solution
At this point, the playbook library in-app was already in production and so we had some point of visual reference how the library could look like, there was no point in starting from scratch.
With that in mind, we (the web team) had to figure out a way to feature the use case library on the marketing site, with the goal of getting more new users to start their own campaign on Saleswhale.
I came up a proposed user flow for from use case library to sign-up page:
Internal Testing
Before we started dev work for the library, we sent out a simple survey for our internal stakeholders such as marketing and customer success to get validation for our proposal.
Some important discussion points were raised:
- Was a Search function necessary if we only had 7 templates/playbooks to start with?
- What is the unified term we should use for templates — playbooks or use cases?
- How can we make the templates more robust and surface more educational material for new users?
- How can we come up with a proper filtering system for the library? How should we categorize the playbooks?
As a result of weighing different scenarios for filtering, we decided to streamline the Filter function, categorizing the playbooks by Use Cases solely.
Closing the Loop
Final Results
As of the time of publication, the use case library has become the top 3 most-visited pages on our marketing website:
We are still in the midst of gathering data on how helpful are the playbooks in terms of helping new users get onboarded to try out Saleswhale. We are also continually adding new playbooks to the library, our latest set of 4 focusing on helping Salesforce-integrated customers.
Specific playbooks are now also specifically mentioned in Customer Stories.
Relating it back to our sprint questions
We started the project with a rough idea to replicate the playbooks we have in-app on the marketing site.
At the end of the sprint, we did that and a little more, crafting a unique user journey for visitors from organic search to find out more about how to use our product. Another bonus, we also increased the amount of resources on our marketing site for customer success and marketing to use as educational material for prospects and new users. Finally, the playbook library also serves as a good foundation for new playbooks to be added and shared at scale in the future.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on the MVP — The initial prototype included some features like the Search Bar and Sliding option for the cards. Upon scoping with our frontend developer, we quickly realised that these functions would take up much more development time than intended and may not move the needle as much for such a preliminary stage for our library (less than 10 playbooks at that point in time). We decided as a team to move those functions to backlog and focus on pushing the MVP in the 2 week time frame instead.
- Be resourceful in recycling relevant research and content — The product team had already set out the direction for the playbook onboarding in-app and had some content structure laid out when the web team was planning to feature these use cases on our marketing site. We managed to save quite a bit of time by basing off our designs on some of these sketches and notes provided by the product team.
