How our team improved our sales process after an 8-hour challenge

We had inefficiencies in our sales process, so one Saturday we asked the whole team to help fix them. We called it the Symph 2021 Solution Challenge: Sales Edition, and the team split into groups to build solutions together.

It was not a hackathon, and coding was not the focus. We only had 8 hours, so we told the groups to build no-code solutions (spreadsheets and forms, for example) or use tools that already exist, though coding was still welcome. We spend most of our days building software, so we also wanted the team to practise solving a problem whether or not the answer was an app.

The groups spent the whole Saturday brainstorming and talking with our Director for Business Development, so they understood each problem before they tried to solve it. By the end of the day every group had a solution, and those solutions now make our sales process faster.

When a lead sends vague requirements (for example, "I want a website where I can sell my products"), our Sales team has to turn them into a list of specific features before it can estimate the cost, and that takes time. The solution is a simplified list of common features for software projects in the industry, which Sales now refers to when writing a proposal.

Leads usually share a general idea of what they want their app to do or look like. Sales breaks that idea down into specific features, then estimates by hand how long each feature takes to build to get a total cost for the project, which takes a lot of time and effort. The solution is a Google Sheets template where Sales marks which features are in or out and gets an estimated cost for the project.

For every proposal, Sales asks our developers to estimate how long the project's features will take to build. When the features are the usual ones that gets repetitive, and it takes time from both Sales and the devs. The solution is a base estimation sheet with our dev team's average estimate of how long common website and app features take to build.

The portfolio in the sales pitch decks we show leads goes out of date, because milestones and details of our past projects change (the number of active users, for example). We already had an internal tool for updating project information, so the solution automates the update. The pitch decks now use the Google Slides API to pull changes from that internal tool into the slides.

Sales gets inquiries from different platforms, and logging them by hand in one place takes time. We wanted one place where leads' questions are logged automatically. The solution is a Symph Website Contact Form built on Google Forms, where clients fill in what they want for their website. Each response becomes a task card in Linear, a project management tool, so Sales sees every inquiry in one place.

Three of the people involved told us what they thought of the day.

• "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

The challenge took one day and fixed several slow parts of our sales process, and we are still deciding which challenge to set next.

We are also hiring, and our culture website tells you more about us.

Story by Jaiun Roa