A playbook for designing for sales

Sales design is a type of service design with its own best practices.

I’ve been designing for sales for the past five years, at Salesforce as a consultant & DocuSign as a product designer, and have come up with a working playbook.

Defining sales design

Service design enables all types of employees, with tangible and notable intangible design which contributes to a better customer experience.

Sales design enables sellers, which makes the buying experience better for the prospect/customer.

As the lines of sales and service blur, it’s important to bolster sales which creates a better service. This is a more focused goal that deals with the people selling first-time buyers, selling renewals to existing customers, and upselling existing customers. Enabling the seller increases time in the field, net new bookings, retention, customer satisfaction, data quality, self-service activity, referrals, positive reviews, and product footprint per customer, among other things. It also decreases time spent entering data, time to close, clerical errors, out-of-sync spreadsheets, and manual reporting. These metrics directly contribute to exponential profits.

The Players

Which UX designers design for sales?

You may find yourself designing for sales as a consultant, at institutions like McKinsey & Company, engaging with one company, or as a product designer who crafts a product for a sales user, like DocuSign’s preparing motions.

Spot the trend

The latest addition to the team is a new role within companies that had sales design consultants come in, and now want to hire one in-house since consultants are expensive and these projects run for multiple years. These companies are banks, insurance agencies, and automakers, but this role is also on the rise within the healthcare and education industries. Here are a couple examples:

Role: Commercial Banking — Sr. UX Designer — VP
Company: JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Experience: 5 years of UX (yes you can be a VP at a bank with 5 years…