Close more deals with personal videos

Background

3 years ago prior, Accordium started with eSignature SAAS for businesspeople. Accordium eSignature has provided users the ability to send and sign contracts online with a swipe of a button. With a team of 3 (PM, CPO and I), we are designing a new video solution to help salespeople close deals faster, called Accordium Engage

Problem

As mentioned previously, we found out that sending cold email messages has not been very effective. Most prospects will ignore this message as they'll treat it as spam. Generally speaking, sales text messages tend to be long, boring and potentially robotic. Imagine having 3 cold emails in your mail inbox every day, that's 3 too many to read! We want to build a seamless tool to increase engagements which in turn, increase sales for our users.

Target users

There are a lot of video platforms out there, but we are targeting a very niche market. We are building a product intended for business development team or salespeople who are trying to acquire customers through the world wide web. At the same time, we would like to convert our current eSignature user base to adopt this new service as well. The majority of our current users are based in the UK and South America.

My role

I was the Product Designer in the team, working with my a Product Lead and a Product Manager. Currently, we also have 5 active developers who are assigned to build this new product.

Scope and constraints

When we initially started, our resources are limited to only 3 developers to build this project. So we want to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within 4 months to be launched in early 2020. Having that in mind, our business mainly revolves around salespeople, particularly, to close deals. Accordium is now based in Malaysia but our current and target clients are located remotely in Europe and the States.

Are we building the right product?

Sam (not a real name) has been a business developer for 5 years, he is working at one of the top leading brands. Daily, he tries to reach out to at least 20 people to convert them as users or buy his company's product. To optimize time and energy, he created a message template and only change the First and Last name to the designated receiver.

Over time, he realizes that only a small percentage of prospects open the message and even a smaller number of people reach out back to him. This is, of course, a big issue since the number of prospects even though a lot, is finite --every time a prospect ignored his message, an opportunity is lost.

1. Standing out from the crowd

So Sam rethinks his strategy and tried out a different approach. He created an A/B testing experiment where he will send a normal text message to Group A and a personal video to the other group.

The results were mindblowing. He found out that with personalized sales videos, he can:

1. Improve lead conversions by 35%

2. Shorten the deal cycle by 81%

3. Most importantly, Increase email replies by 7%

Great! Now we know that personalized video has a lot of proven benefits, it's time to start building an MVP.

2. The build: always start with the user

We are quite lucky to have a few salespeople in the team ourselves for user research. Of course, this is not ideal since they might provide biased feedbacks provided that they already have some prior knowledge about the product we are building. However, it is still a good start to get a glimpse of how salespeople work. What's their day to day activity and what kind of problem they face every day.

Our team also constantly communicate with our potential and existing clients to ask for feedback. The team had come up with a buyer user persona based on the current knowledge of the team. Over time, we're trying to move away from user personas and gather real user feedback and data to validate design decisions. User personas are just used to guide the initial direction of the product.

Based on this, we created a wireframe and tested the wireframe with potential users. Before I start working on a wireframe, I usually start with pen and paper, I find that I generate ideas a lot faster without having to think about software tool limitations.

Figure 1: Ideation sketch for Onboarding UI

Alternatively, sometimes I conduct a brainstorming session with my team through the Crazy 8 exercise. I will ask the team to take a piece of A4 paper and divide it into 8 sections. In 8 minutes team members should create 8 rough initial designs.

The idea is to generate as many ideas as possible within a short timeframe, focusing on quantity of ideas, not quality, and then once you've got a bunch of divergent thinking on one topic, to begin converging on some winning ideas by voting on the favourites.

Figure 2: First round of Crazy 8 Exercise outcome

It depends on the complexity of the feature, but usually, I'll create 3 different user flows or design options to be reviewed by the team. These different user flows will also go through some user testing before the final idea is solidified.

During this period, I used Invision Studio to build animated micro interactions. I find that Micro interactions play an essential role in a user's understanding of computer systems. They give the user feedback, both good and bad, on what the current status of the system is, what the result of their actions will be or what has already happened as a result of their action and guide them what they should do next.

3. Handing over

Handing over the design is arguably one of the most important parts of the product lifecycle. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good your design is, if it's not translated properly into production build, it will lose its value.

I used multiple mediums for handovers:

• MarvelApp for static page mockups.

• InVision Studio for Micro interactions and animations.

• Video walkthrough for flow explanation reference and if there's mixed content like GIFS on the mockup.

• A face-to-face meeting to explain flows and design reasonings.

On top of that, I also put handover notes inside the mockup itself for developers' reference.

Designers are human too! Sometimes there's an unforeseen UX flaw that was missed. This is the reason why I prefer explaining design reasonings to the tech team. In a way, I'm allowing developers to question my design decisions (usually will test my understanding of the problem) and also making the design practice more inclusive in the team, killing two birds with one stone.

Solution: Accordium Engage

Tech Team and Product Team execute tasks in separate Sprints but simultaneously. Design is usually always 2 Sprints ahead. However, this approach was only introduced after I joined in. Since I'm working on all the final designs, initially the tech team was delayed a little bit and I was in crunch mode all the time. At least for the first few months.

So not all the features have been pushed to production yet and they're still working at it.

Record, send and review videos Based on our user research, most of our users record and send video messages through Accordium Chrome Extension and the Gmail Accordium Plugin.

Before the dashboard was built, every action was done through the extensions. So we contacted our users and talked about the problems they're facing right now. Having remote clients posed a big challenge for us since there are a time difference and interaction time with them is limited.

Here are some of the key items we've learned:

1. Users are obsessed with checking the performance of their sent videos (20 to 30 times and even after working hours) and also phone to mainly receive a callback or see when the videos were watched or replayed and watching average rate. Main driver: Users always want to improve their conversion rates, this includes checking the performance based on the content and length of the video.

2. They record the same video content but with different Whiteboard trick intro to entice receivers to watch the video. Main driver: Video personalization, higher engagements are recorded when the video intro is personalized.

3. They want to have a call to action on the video page so that they can guide their user to visit certain pages seamlessly. Main driver: having a Call to action on the video provide a clear goal of what the sender wants the receiver to do.

Here's the design that we came up with, the main statistics are put front and center on the dashboard. Users can access all the videos in one place and main video metrics are displayed on each video card as well to give a rough preview of how the videos are performing.

Based on the user feedback, sharing video is the most used feature on Accordium, so it is vital to make sure that the Share feature is accessible on the main parts of the dashboard.

Key takeways

This project introduced me to the B2B SaaS space. Navigating this landscape as a startup was truly challenging, particularly when designing a solution for a completely different geography. Although Accordium was eventually discontinued, this phase of my career taught me the importance of strategic decision-making in our product development and emphasized the value of effective communication both internally and externally with customers.