Automating Sales
How we created a sales operating system from the ground up.
STRATEGY · DEVOPS · ENGINEERING · INNOVATION
THE CHALLENGE
Addressing the challenge of sales productivity.
Solving the sales productivity puzzle requires a modern approach. Traditional CRMs were designed for managing sales rather than fostering growth, leading to dissatisfaction among sales reps. These systems are often manual, clunky, and outdated, with reps spending a significant portion of their time on data entry. Additionally, the lack of automation, focus, and context hinders frontline sales teams in maximizing revenue and building customer relationships. The industry demands a more promising platform to address these challenges and unlock the full potential of sales productivity.
THE SOLUTION
Introducing the world's first sales operating system.
Salesmate approached us with a vision to develop a sales operating system that empowers businesses to structure, automate, and optimize their sales and customer journey according to their unique needs. The goal was to provide frontline sales teams with a platform that enhances prospect engagement, increases deal wins, automates routine tasks, and boosts overall performance.
A versatile platform offering endless paths and possibilities.
Our initial challenge was to understand the vision of “Sales OS” and identify the essential features that sales reps truly need and would willingly use. Additionally, we aimed to position Salesmate uniquely, emphasizing that it goes beyond being just another CRM platform. While it can manage contacts and sales, Salesmate is designed to be a comprehensive platform that offers a rich blend of form, function, and an enjoyable user experience.
Recognizing that Salesmate is more than just an app, we understood the necessity for it to be a sophisticated, multi-faceted platform that maintains a delicate balance between various aspects to deliver exceptional sales experiences. In the face of a competitive market and evolving customer expectations, we realized that Salesmate needed to be adaptable and dynamic to ensure its continued growth.
To fulfill the Salesmate promise, we collaborated closely with the Salesmate team to formulate the product strategy, roadmap, user experience, and platform architecture. Our approach was iterative, allowing for a long-term vision. To address evolving needs and complexities, we designed the platform to be modular, extendable, and user-friendly, focusing on building each component with precision.
Accelerating the sales & customer journey
Frontline sales teams often waste around 30% of their time on data entry, leaving them with less time to effectively engage with prospects and customers. To address this issue, we implemented a solution that automates the synchronization and tracking of every update, action, and interaction. This includes emails, meetings, calls, follow-ups, contacts, campaigns, deals, and more, all seamlessly integrated, automated, and organized in real-time. This not only eliminates the burden of data entry but also empowers sales teams to gain a profound understanding of their customers and their journey, facilitating more insightful and impactful conversations.
Flex to fit any sales process
The feature set for Salesmate was extensive and intricate. Our initial challenge was to establish a robust yet highly flexible foundation that would enable customers to tailor Salesmate to align with their specific sales processes. This involved developing over 200 configurable features, including custom modules, custom fields, security roles and permissions, sales pipelines, custom reports and dashboards, smart views, and time zones.
In order to achieve this, we meticulously designed the technology, architecture, databases, and APIs. This approach allowed us to deliver the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within a 12-week timeframe without compromising on the system’s flexibility and extendability.
Save-time, Sell more, Close deals
We invested significant time in comprehending our target customers, delving into their routines, and identifying their core challenges. This extensive understanding allowed us to meticulously and thoughtfully design each power tool, revolutionizing the way sales representatives spent their time. These tools empowered them to connect with more prospects, personalize their sales approach, and witness substantial growth in their sales within a matter of months. The suite of tools delivered potent automation across every stage of the sales lifecycle:
Email & Calendar Sync
Sync and auto link your email inbox and calendars
Built-in Calling
Make and record calls, drop voicemails, and coach your reps
Smart Emails
Send and track personalized emails, get reminders, and deeper insights
Text Campaigns
Create text templates, run bulk text campaigns or send personal texts
Sales Collaboration
Work with your entire team - use mentions, assign deals and tasks
Real-time Notifications
Get real-time notifications for all events, rep, and contact activities
Sales Intelligence
Use built-in or create custom reports and dashboards, and share them
Enterprise Security
Powerful security with access control, encryption, GDPR and audit trails
Data Management
Import, export, bulk update data with a complete lineage
THE SALESMATE DESIGN SYSTEM
Crafting flawless sales experience, consistently
Establishing a design system for Salesmate proved to be a game-changer, aligning with the efficiency and speed observed in industry giants like Airbnb, Uber, Google, and Microsoft. With more than 460 reusable UI components, assets, and standards, the design system significantly streamlined the development process. The design system not only facilitated a consistent and polished user experience but also expedited the design and development of new features. It enabled designers to focus on innovation rather than repetitive tasks, and developers benefited from the ability to reuse components, reducing time and effort. Moreover, as the product evolved, updating the user experience and interactions became a seamless task. With the design system in place, modifying a single component resulted in the entire platform being automatically updated, offering a level of efficiency that felt almost magical.
API-FIRST PLATFORM
Powerful and easy-to-use APIs & SDK for building custom apps
Implementing an API-first approach is imperative to facilitate swift integrations and customizations, crucial for crafting seamless customer and sales experiences.
With a robust infrastructure comprising 750+ REST APIs, webhooks, and native components, we established a formidable API backbone that drives Salesmate’s web, mobile, and Chrome apps. This architecture empowers the sales team to swiftly introduce new features, facilitating rapid innovation. Additionally, it supports the seamless integration of hundreds of custom-built solutions for our customers. Here are some key features of the Salesmate API platform that we developed:
- Enforcing API rate limits for usage-based billing and security against potential attacks
- Implementing OAuth-based authentication and authorization mechanisms
- Ensuring API versioning and facilitating seamless migration processes
- Supporting webhook integrations and providing SDKs for third-party applications
- Generating auto-documentation and code examples for user convenience
- Implementing API monitoring and product analytics features
NEXT-GEN CLOUD & DEVOPS
Cloud-Native Architecture – Salesmate serves as the central system for all customer information and communication. Any downtime, even if it’s just for a few minutes, prevents thousands of sales reps from conducting sales. The stakes are high.
Therefore, we prioritized adhering to the highest standards of reliability, performance, and scalability. We constructed a world-class infrastructure and architecture on the Google Cloud Platform, designed to automatically scale on-demand and recover from failures without the need for human interventions.
DevOps Automation – We implemented automated build pipelines, deployments, and scaling for over 140 microservices using Kubernetes.
Massively Scalable – We evaluated technologies and designed architectures to ensure that the entire platform is fully distributed and horizontally scalable.
Enterprise Security – Salesmate stores highly sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data for all users. We have implemented enterprise-grade security measures that are certified by industry-leading vendors to safeguard this information.
The App Store & Ecosystem – We aimed to cultivate a robust ecosystem of apps that complement Salesmate and seamlessly integrate into users’ daily workflows. The “app store” strategy plays a pivotal role in boosting adoption, awareness, and retention. Users have the flexibility to install the apps of their choice and effortlessly incorporate them into Salesmate. Through APIs, SDKs, and Zapier interfaces, we facilitated over 700 native and third-party integrations.
Mobile Apps – During our interviews with potential Salesmate customers, a recurring theme emerged – the need for remote and on-the-go capabilities. These users required extensive access to their customer data and sales tools, not a generic mobile app with limited functionality. Our mobile team responded by bringing the complete Salesmate experience to Android, iPhone, and iPad through robust native apps. This initiative positioned Salesmate as the most feature-rich CRM and sales software in the market for mobile users. The positive feedback and rave reviews from customers underscored the success of this mobile-centric approach.