Overview
Sales agents relied on seven different tools to create a single proposal.
Each service category had its own quotation system, while contract generation, approvals and order management lived elsewhere. Creating a proposal often meant navigating multiple applications, coordinating with managers and manually tracking progress across disconnected workflows.
For agents handling 20–30 customer interactions per day, the process created significant friction and limited the time available for actual selling.
I joined the project after its first releases alongside a Design Lead. My role focused on understanding how agents worked, identifying the most impactful usability issues and helping shape the product roadmap through research, testing and design — work that helped reduce proposal creation from about an hour to fifteen minutes and cut new-agent training from three days to four hours.
Understanding the Operation
Before proposing solutions, we needed to understand how sales agents actually worked.
I planned and conducted a month-long UX study combining:
- One-to-one interviews
- Usability testing
- Shadowing sessions
- Field observations during customer visits
- Cross-functional workshops
Working on-site gave us direct access to agents, managers and stakeholders, allowing us to observe both the product and the realities of the sales process.
The research revealed recurring patterns:
- Agents relied on seven different tools to complete a single quotation
- New users struggled to understand where to start
- Critical information lacked visibility
- Approval processes depended on manual communication
- Many actions required unnecessary repetition
We also learned that agents spent a significant portion of their day supporting operational activities, following up on approvals and helping customers with service-related issues. The quotation process was only one part of a much larger workload.
Prioritizing Improvements
The study generated a long list of opportunities.
To determine where to focus, I analyzed findings using Nielsen’s severity framework and worked with engineering to estimate implementation effort.
Together, we created a prioritization matrix balancing user impact and development complexity.
This allowed the team to focus first on improvements that could deliver meaningful value quickly while establishing a longer-term roadmap for larger initiatives.
Simplifying the Sales Workflow
One of the clearest findings was the lack of structure and visibility throughout the quotation process.
Working alongside the Design Lead and product team, we focused on reducing unnecessary complexity, automating repetitive actions and making critical information easier to access.
The team reorganized the experience around three core stages:
- Find Product
- Configure Solution
- Generate Contract
Approval status, quotation progress and supporting information became visible throughout the workflow, reducing context switching and minimizing the need for external communication.
The goal was not to add more functionality. It was to make existing functionality easier to navigate, understand and complete.
Finding a product became a catalog panel beside the quote — search, filter and add without leaving the workspace.
Configuring a solution needed to support multi-site deals. Agents could select several instances at once and apply shared settings — contract term, technology, billing rules — in a single side panel instead of repeating the same fields site by site.
Quotation work was not only about new sales. Agents also managed existing customers — renewals, upgrades and changes to services already installed. We brought that install-base work into the same workspace: search active services, select what to change and decide how bundled offerings should be handled before continuing the quote.
Results
60 min → 15 min
Proposal creation time dropped from approximately one hour to fifteen minutes.
3 days → 4 hours
Training time for new sales agents decreased from three days to four hours.
Additional outcomes:
- Adoption across the entire sales organization through a phased rollout
- Reduced dependency on external tools
- Improved visibility into quotation status and approvals
- Faster completion of day-to-day sales activities
- More time available for customer engagement and revenue-generating work
The platform was initially introduced to experienced sales agents before expanding across the broader organization over the following months.
Reflection
This project reinforced the importance of understanding work beyond the interface.
Many usability issues were deeply connected to communication, approvals and information visibility rather than individual screens.
Observing agents in real situations helped us focus on the broader workflow instead of isolated interactions.
The result was a product that required less effort to learn, less effort to operate and allowed sales teams to spend more time with customers and less time managing tools.