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?

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:

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


Sales Executives


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:


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:

Problem Statement

How might we help sales executives plan their activities efficiently?


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:

Activities Management

User flow for creating a new activity

The Activities module should have the following features:


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:


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:

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.

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.

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

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