Background

This is one of the products I worked on while Bullhorn was becoming a CRM (customer relationship management) solution for industries other than staffing. Some of the first customers we landed are sales teams in companies similar to Bullhorn itself, which are Software as a Service companies.

Bullhorn Lab is a design led product development effort inside Bullhorn. Based on user research, the design team comes up new feature ideas, and recruit senior developers to work on these ideas, we iterate and validate quickly, if a feature is successful in testing, we would work with a PM and put it on the roadmap.
 

Problem

During numerous user research conversations, the design team heard this from users who work in enterprise software sales:

The likelihood of a successful sale is highly depend on how many people you have active conversations with inside the target company. The more people you talk to, the higher up their positions these people are in, the more likely a deal is going to be made.

We I decided to dig in deeper and see if Bullhorn can help with this process.

Process

With the help from the Lab team, I conducted user interviews, developed product strategy, explored different design solutions, created a prototype to test with users, helped with front-end development, and collected feedback after launch.

User Interviews

I talked to a dozen of users who work in enterprise software sales, including Bullhorn’s own sales team. 

Current Solution

A Sales Rep use LinkedIn and target companies' About Us page mostly to search for people to develop new relationships with. The communication could be through LinkedIn messages, cold calling, or emails. If someone responds and expresses interests, a Sales Rep would add them into Bullhorn. Once the sales team has some people added into Bullhorn, they leverage these contacts to develop more relationships. 

Sales Reps

• When trying to find people to target to make a sales pitch, it's almost impossible to find an up-to-date org chart with accurate contact info on the internet

• It takes a lot of back and forth to find existing contacts in Bullhorn to make introduction to people you find on LinkedIn

Sales Leaders

• No company-level coverage status and progress information to make targeting plans on

• Current solution of using LinkedIn and Bullhorn together is costly

Product Strategy

Because almost every user I talked to mentioned needing org charts, I started exploring design options in providing org charts and contact info inside Bullhorn. At the same time, I asked for colleagues for help exploring data sources, i.e. where can we get these org charts and contact info.

Sketches

While exploring options, I took a look at how traditional org charts are organized. 

It is manageable for smaller companies, but it's almost impossible to navigate if it's a global company with thousands of employees and countless tiers of positions.  

With their hierarchical structures, I see a parallel between an org charts and file systems, and I found inspiration from Mac's Finder app.

I sketched out how it would look for an org chart.

Designing and Prototyping

After looking into the possible data source we can use, we found out that the reporting relationship isn’t the most accurate piece of the information they have. The closest thing they have is which job level each person is. I went back to my interview notes and talked to some users, and concluded that it might be enough to just have job level without the reporting relationship. 

I explored different options while made the design more hi-fidelity. Because sales reps are the primary users, and sales leaders barely log into Bullhorn at all, I chose to address the sales reps' needs mostly at first.

Option 1

One option is still fairly close to the Mac Finder inspired sketch:

Because users told me that the job level of a person is one of, if not the most important factors when they make connections, I grouped people by job levels in the design. It directs users to think about the job level even if they aren't looking for it.

Another factor users care about the most is the relationship status between their own company and each person.

• Suggested Connections: people your company hasn't connected in any way yet

• Leads: a type of entity that already exists in Bullhorn, generally it's a stronger connection than a stranger, but a weaker connection than someone you actively engage with

• Contacts: a type of entity that already exists in Bullhorn, someone you actively engage with

I want to help users understand these differences, especially that a "Suggested Connection" is a connection TO BE MADE.

Leads and Contacts already has icons users are familiar with, I added an icon for Suggested Connections, and used the dotted line and opacity of the card to communicate the nature of the relationship - none, but there COULD BE ONE. 

Option 2

I also explored other ways of organizing the information.

I wanted to try out an option with which users don't have to click around much. This one uses a simple data table to layout most information and actions. Job level becomes a filter instead.

The downside is that because it has to fit into a data table, I can only show meta data that's common across all types - name, position, phone number and email.

Prototyping and Testing

I created prototypes based on these two design options and tested with users.

• For the first option, users liked that people are grouped by level groups, and that more relevant information are presented based on different types of connections they are focusing on.

• For the second option, users found it less actionable, they felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of information at first glance.

I also found out that I have to add at least some features for sales leaders. Even though they are not the primary users, they are the one who would push sales reps to use a new tool, and they are the decision makers of purchasing an add-on feature.

I added high level coverage progress information, which is a bite-size piece of information that answered the biggest question of sales leaders.

Launch

I prototyped the final design in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, worked with a developer to connect with the data source, to test the data accuracy with more users. We presented the positive feedback, got a PM onboard, and put this project on the roadmap. My prototyping code was handed over to a development team to work on. It was released later and became an add-on feature of Bullhorn.