Here in Symph, we always find ways to learn and improve our internal processes, one of which is our Sales Process.

We experience inefficiencies in this process, so we asked the help from the entire team.  We organized the Symph 2021 Solution Challenge: Sales Edition –  one Saturday where our team formed groups to altogether create solutions for our challenges in this aspect.

Unlike hackathons, this was not coding-focused. We only had 8 hours, so the groups were advised to build no-code solutions (e.g. spreadsheets and forms) or utilize existing tools (but coding was welcome nonetheless). As a team that’s used to focusing on building software, we also wanted to exercise having a more holistic problem-solving mindset, whether or not that included building apps.

The groups spent the whole Saturday brainstorming and having consultations with our Director for Business Development so they can better understand the problems and create effective solutions for them.

By the end of the day, all groups came up with unique solutions that are now making our sales process more efficient:

• Challenge: When receiving leads with vague requirements (e.g. “I want a website where I can sell my products”), our Sales team has to translate this to a specific features list to proceed to the estimation of the cost which takes some time.
• Solution: A simplified list of common features for software projects in the industry for our Sales team to refer to when creating their proposal.

• Challenge: For potential projects, our leads share their general idea of what they want their app to do or look like. Our Sales team analyzes these and breaks down this vision to specific features, then manually estimates the time to build each feature to come up with a total estimated cost for the project, which takes a lot of time and effort.
• Solution: A Google Sheets template that the Sales team can use to estimate how much a potential project costs by just indicating which features are included or not.

• Challenge: For every proposal, our Sales team creates for leads, they talk to our developers and ask them to estimate the building time of the features for that project. This can sometimes be repetitive if they’re the usual features, and takes the time of our Sales team and devs.
• Solution: A base estimation sheet with our dev team’s average estimate of how much time they need to build common website/app features

• Challenge: Our portfolio in our Sales pitchdecks that we present to leads get outdated as there are usually changes in the milestones or details for our previous works (e.g. number of active users, etc.)
• Solution: An automation of this process. We have an internal tool we use in updating project information, so with a Google Slides API, the pitchdecks now automatically fetch updates from this internal tool and reflect them to the pitchdeck slides.

• Challenge: Our Sales receives inquiries from different platforms, and it takes time to manually document them in one place. We want to have one centralized platform where leads questions are automatically logged.
• Solution: A Symph Website Contact Form using Google Forms that clients fill up indicating what they want for their website. Responses from the forms automatically are assigned as a task card in Linear, a project management tool. This way, Sales can see all the inquiries in one area.

• “Symphers and Symphterns have always been up for challenges like hackathons and solution challenges. The solutions presented were awesome and the teams were prepared to pitch their ideas. I always look forward to these kinds of activities. Something I always enjoy at Symph!” - Gee Quidet, our Director for Business Development.
• "Winning the sales solution challenge made me, again, appreciate the art in hackathons. You're given a problem, the blank canvas; then you paint on that canvas with your questions as the strokes and your mind as the palette. Once finished, your masterpiece may or may not be celebrated, but the true value of it was in the knowledge you’ve gained and the friends you made along the way. 😎" - Carl Kho, Digital Product Designer.
• “It is easy to solve problems if you can find a solution. Not all solutions have to be built from scratch. Dig deep to the problem because most of the time the answer is already there. You just have to put it down neatly and properly.” - Rachel T., Full Stack Developer

This one-day challenge helped us find solutions to our internal processes so we can be more efficient in our Sales Processes. Now.... What challenge to give next.... 🤔

We hope you find this blog post helpful for your team. In case you missed it, we're also hiring great people to join our team! Check out our culture website to get to know us more!

Story by Jaiun Roa :)

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