Unlock key UX strategies to boost productivity and engagement in your sales software.
Imagine losing over 50% of your app’s users because of poor design or frequent glitches. It might sound extreme, but it happens all the time. Now imagine losing an additional 5% of your customers to competitors every month. Whether you want to believe it or not, UX mistakes can cause this too.
These results would spell bad news for virtually any B2B SaaS product. But in sales software apps, where salespeople are supposed to trust your technology with six or seven-figure transactions, the stakes are even higher. Poor UX and challenging user experiences can impact sales, lower morale, and increase stress.
There’s no fail-safe tool for driving sales and building great customer relationships in SaaS. However, with careful attention to improving the overall user experience, you can be on your way to better results in no time.
In this blog, we’ll hone in on what the user experience should look like for sales software and actionable strategies that you can use to enhance UX design in any B2B sales app:
What is a sales software? And why does user experience matter?
Let’s start with the product itself. Sales software is a digital tool or platform designed to assist sales teams in managing their activities, tracking interactions with customers and prospects, and streamlining the entire sales process. It integrates various functionalities to enhance productivity, improve customer relationships, and ultimately boost sales efficiency.
Popular enterprise sales software solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and SalesLoft operate in a highly competitive market. To stand out and retain their customers, these companies are increasingly prioritizing superior user experience. This focus helps them reduce churn and boost customer engagement and satisfaction.
Who uses sales software?
The first step in analyzing user experience is understanding the users. While many assume that sales software is simply designed for sales teams, it is used by a variety of roles, including:
Sales Representatives: To manage leads, track communications, and close deals.
Sales Managers: To oversee sales activities, monitor performance, and forecast sales.
Marketing teams: To align marketing efforts with sales strategies and measure campaign effectiveness.
Customer Support teams: To ensure a smooth transition from sales to support, providing ongoing customer satisfaction.
Each of these user groups interacts with the software differently, so it’s crucial to consider their unique needs and workflows when designing the user experience of all sales applications.
What are the main goals of a sales software?
The next step to enhancing user experience is understanding the primary objectives of the software. While each product will slightly differ, generally speaking, the goals are as follows:
Enhance efficiency: Automating routine tasks and streamlining workflows to allow sales teams to focus on high-value activities.
Improve customer relationships: Centralizing customer information and interaction history to provide personalized and timely communication.
Boost sales performance: Offering tools for goal setting, progress tracking, and performance analysis to drive better sales outcomes.
Facilitate collaboration: Providing features that enhance communication and teamwork within sales and other related departments.
Integrate seamlessly: Ensuring compatibility with other business tools and systems to create a unified, efficient work environment.
Sales software is essential for any sales team aiming to optimize their processes, increase efficiency, and build stronger relationships with their customers. By leveraging sales software with an exceptional user experience, companies can unlock significant improvements in their sales performance.
5 essential UX elements to consider when designing sales software
UX directly relates to how much people enjoy using your app and how easily they can accomplish their goals. If it's difficult to use or there is no clear ROI, your clients will quickly turn to your competitors. To stay ahead of the competition and increase customer lifetime value (CLV), here are five primary factors you should consider when optimizing the UX for any sales tool.
1. Goal setting and real-time progress tracking
Setting goals is key for any business, especially in an aspect as quantifiable as sales success. You should determine your goal and monitor your progress to stay on track. For sales representatives, this can apply at an individual or team level, and usually both.
Clear objectives
If you’ve attended a business class or spent enough time on LinkedIn, it’s hard to avoid learning that you should be specific when defining goals. Whether you follow the SMART goal framework or another acronym, most agree that vague goals don't give you a precise enough target to make meaningful progress.
For example, instead of saying “increase lead generation,” try revising it to be more tactical like "Increase lead generation by 40% within the next 6 months." You'll then know exactly what you're aiming for and how long you have to achieve it.
When we collaborated with Vivint, a home security company, their aim was to ensure their tool had clearly defined goals to measure users’ sales performance. To achieve this, we created Vivint League, an internal sales tool with granular control over sales and conversation rate goals.
Real-time goal tracking
Real-time performance dashboards allow salespeople to view progress toward individual and team goals. These can show progress towards milestones and serve as motivation to encourage your team. Seeing metrics rapidly update after data entry or recent successes is crucial for sales professionals to link their actions to achievements.
2. Efficient task management
Improving task management and prioritization within your software will improve your ROI and help end users work more efficiently.
Smart notifications
Smart notifications can alert users about new sales targets discovered by the app, or regarding customer interactions, deadlines, and important tasks. Although some system-wide notifications may be non-negotiable, letting users customize some of their notifications will prevent them from being bombarded and ensure they only receive those they're interested in.
Task prioritization and to-do lists
To-do lists are critical to streamlining a sales app's UX to make the completion of sales tasks less clunky. Adding a frictionless workflow for creating action items and crossing them off is key to helping users stay organized.
AcuityMD, a software for medical device sales, added a pipeline management system that helps salespeople identify sales opportunities and determine where to spend more time. This system allowed filtering by different territories and metrics (like total sale opportunity) to help users maximize their day-to-day efforts.
Integration with productivity tools
Pulling data or entering fields twice is inefficient, and seamless third-party integrations can make or break otherwise great SaaS software. Allowing integration with tools such as calendars, email clients, and project management tools will benefit users. Sometimes, they can even mean the difference between successfully scheduling a meeting or losing a lead.
3. AI integration and automation
There’s no escaping it—AI and automation are here to stay. In the context of sales software, AI’s main benefit is its ability to increase efficiency and help salespeople focus on what really matters.
Lead scoring and qualification
AI algorithms can mine information on leads using various criteria such as demographics, behavior, and engagement history. It can then create and show a composite "lead score" derived from those factors alongside data that sales professionals can use to improve their efforts. For various reasons, not every sale carries the same weight, and AI can help illuminate which leads are worth prioritizing.
Sales training recommendations
AI can help to assess an individual’s performance and determine skill gaps. From this, it can recommend suitable training paths to help them improve. This often uses adaptive learning interfaces, that include articles, videos, and lesson plans tailored to individual needs.
Automated data entry and CRM management
Data entry is tedious and time-consuming, so automating this (and other administrative tasks) can improve productivity. AI tools can analyze customer requirements for automated proposal creation, freeing up more time so your sales professionals can focus on closing the next deal.
A great example is Salesforce’s AI-powered feature to automatically import customer information and sales details from emails and calendars. Manually entering this data into separate fields is mundane and mistake-prone. However, by doing this automatically for salespeople, Salesforce’s Sales Cloud Einstein platform frees up time for more strategic account management.
4. Personalization with dynamic functionality
Although there are plenty of high-quality sales software out there, they vary widely in their ability to offer personalization. Generally speaking, the more your app can adapt to the unique needs of sales professionals and their wider teams, the more indispensable your product will become to them.
Adaptability and flexibility
Sales professionals are often chasing moving targets, so it's best to allow them to adjust their goals dynamically. This can help them adapt to changing market conditions, business priorities, and other factors.
Sales performance analytics
Comprehensive analytics can show salespeople's strengths and areas for growth. Along with a data-driven approach, providing up-to-date metrics helps sales professionals improve their strategies to get the best results.
Mobile optimization
The more flexibility your sales application has across different devices, the better the user experience will be. Since they spend so much time on the road and juggling data entry with back-to-back meetings, having consistent experiences across devices is critical.
To further improve the AcuityMD platform, Neuron ensured that their web and native apps allowed sales reps to track targets and enter data effectively on mobile devices. The wide variety of products and clients that medical sales reps work with meant that Acuity’s app would have to work equally well inside doctor’s offices, conference rooms, at dinner tables, and even at the golf course.
To tackle that, intuitive and powerful mobile views were crafted to accomplish the same results as the web app. The outcome was a smooth workflow that naturally encouraged adoption among busy reps.
5. Gamification tactics
There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition, especially for the personality types that tend to thrive in the sales landscape. Gamification and rewards can foster healthy competition, ideal for increasing sales and boosting morale. In fact, 90% of employees said gamification made them more productive.
Neuron helped Vivint create a heavily gamified portal that provides inbound sales reps with an openly competitive virtual space and gives managers insight into their performance.
The entire interface was created to appear more like a video game than your average SaaS product.
The web app uses a points system, in-app trophy awards, and digital currency “Vivint Bucks,” to rank and reward users. The goal was for teams to compare their performance in a light-hearted way that encouraged people to strive for better results. There are many ways to incorporate leaderboards, badges, or a recognition system to motivate team members.
How improving user experience will transform your sales software
Ideally, you’d want to include some or all of the above tactics when designing or revamping sales software. At the most fundamental level, start with creating a system for setting and monitoring sales goals clearly and accurately. Once you can keep teams on track, AI and automation can help improve sales professionals' productivity and efficiency. Finally, mobile optimization and gamification help eliminate friction and boost engagement—critical for ensuring users return for more.
If you have sales software you’re looking to enhance or build, Neuron specializes in crafting intuitive interfaces that boost productivity and engagement. Get in touch with our team to drive results and keep users coming back.
About us
Neuron is a San Francisco-based UX/UI design agency that creates the best-in-class digital experiences to help your business succeed. Whether you want to develop a high-quality sales software or refine an existing product, we strive to create collaborative client partnerships that bring your vision to life.
Want to learn more about what we do or how we approach optimizing sales applications? Get in touch with our team today, or browse our knowledge base of UX/UI tips.