Background & Challenge
Sales management is a key component in the full real estate development circle, and good sales strategies can significantly improve market performances of a real estate product.
However, due to the lack of dedicated management tools, sales team usually need to spend a good amount of time on collecting, analyzing, managing both internal and external data across multiply platforms. This is a huge burden preventing the sales team from making correct sales strategies.
Solution & Impacts
SMACS is a sales management tool dedicated to specific real estate product, focusing on collecting, analyzing, managing sales activities and product data, helping sales team on improving the collaboration and efficiency. It helped client's sales team increase sales performance by 12.2% and decreased sales team meetings by more than 60%.
Team & Role
- Product Manager
- Product Researcher
- Data analyst
- Product Designer (me)
- Product Prototyper (me)
- Marketing Team
- Real Estate Development Team
- Real Estate Agent Team
- Engineering Team
Impacts
Sales Performance increased:
12.2%
Sales team meetings decreased:
60%+
The problem
Sales team tracks sales data with spreadsheets, searches info from factsheets, manages team via task management software, shares insights through presentations, working across multiple tools makes collaboration extremely hard and sale extremely inefficient.
So what exact tool they are looking for?
Research and findings
To deeply understand the problem problem, we started with understand target users. There are mainly two groups of users: sales manager and sales agent. Each of them has their own goals, motivations, needs and characteristics.
Both of these two group of users are important for this product, so in order to understand their daily work and problem they might face, we mapped their user journey.
By reviewing the user journey of both sales manager and sales agents, there are two groups of opportunities being identified:
Pain Point 1
Sales agents are not always in the office, they are not always able to sync status with the team in real time.
Pain Point 2
The building info is always presented as fact sheets, which is hard to understand and convey.
Pain Point 3
It takes times to search and collect apartments that meet clients’ requirements, so it is hard to be quickly responsive.
Is the problem really having too many tools and working across multiple tools? No, the root problem is that current tools doesn’t well satisfy their needs for collaboration and sale activities.
What they are looking for? They need one integrated tool that can facilitate all their collaborations and sales activities, and they can use it in different scenarios.
Design goals
So the goal is obvious, to design a integrated application that:
1. Allows users to sync their status, schedule, and sales performance.
2. Allows users to check the building info in a diagrammatic and interactive way.
3. Allows users to quickly sort out target apartments satisfying clients needs within inventory.
Solution for the design goal #1:
Provide real time updates of sales performance, status and schedule of each team member.
The 'agent' section allows each team member to update their status, edit their schedule and check the sales performance, all these information are shared within the team in real time. Thus the team doesn't need to meet often but can still stay in communication with less effort.
Meanwhile, the performance module visualizes the sales data in the way that sales team can easily evaluate their performance and sales strategy impacts.
Solution for the design goal #2:
Translate key info of the building into graphic language and present them in an interactive way
The 'building' section contain all building related info that agent might need to provide to clients if they are interested in. However, they are not just obscure numbers that only professional may understand, they are translated into illustrative graphic language, meanwhile, they are properly structured in a way allow agent to quickly response any questions client might have.
Solution for the design goal #3:
Apartments are sorted with filter and presented in 3D
The 'inventory' section contains all available apartments, they can be easily sorted per parameters that are prioritized based on clients' interests. Agent can save those apartments they find or share them with their clients.
Each apartment are presented in 3D together with their basic info, thus either agent or client can quickly find what they need to know.
The product hugely increased the sales team performance, not only sales but also collaboration efficiency. The sales performance got increased by 12.2% and sales team meeting got decreased by 60%+. This product has been developed into a template that are widely used by other client's sales team.
