Transforming the Sales Cycle Experience of an Enterprise IT Company with an Efficient Sales Assessment Tool

The client used an outdated manual approach to create a sales proposal based on the end users’ requirements.

They wanted to improve their sales process in a way that also boosts the efficiency of the sales reps. Therefore, they started assessing the factors that slowed down the sales cycle. One prominent factor was the time invested in creating client portfolio proposals. This required users to log in to multiple systems, pull correct data, make calculations and create proposals (PowerPoint) manually.

A unique requirement was to develop a new sales assessment tool from scratch that automatically generates the PPTs with customized data and templates. Thus, our team had to do a lot of R&D to develop an intuitive and easy-to-use solution for the client.

Since the product involved a lot of technicalities, we had to understand the product's core concepts and technical aspects from time to time to develop it efficiently.

The client trusted Symv as its strategic engineering partner because of our domain expertise in Cloud & Infrastructure, digital experiences, and UI/UX design.

However, a major challenge was completing the project within a stipulated time. The client needed the new sales assessment tool in less than 2 months before their yearly sales kick-off event.

The sales team required a new tool to present the client portfolio solution to end customers - this meant that Symv needed a clear-cut project roadmap and low-risk scope.

As the customer had a tight timeline and needed a web app, we went ahead with React and Django tech stack, which helped in rapid development, and both of these technologies have wide open-source support.

The team comprised 1 Backend Developer, 1 Frontend Developer, 1 QA, and 1 Project Manager. The project booted off in mid-2021.

• Firstly, our team closely worked with all the stakeholders to info-map all the existing setup challenges.
• The Symv team then brainstormed the project's roadmap, design infrastructure, and tech stack.
• After getting a sign-off from the client, we worked on MVP and delivered it within 2 months as intended.
• The client launched the web app in their yearly sales kick-off event.
  And we started working on v2.0.
• The next step was to establish software engineering best practices and agile methodologies as the product had started scaling up.
• Then, we established software engineering best practices and agile methodologies as the product started scaling up.
• We implemented an enhanced UI with better UX standards, as the client wanted a top-notch UX for this tool.
• After all this, Team Symv worked on enhancing the infrastructure to make things automated and scalable per industry standards.

PPT Generation Solution: building it from scratch

• Before the Symv team built the solution, the client used to manually prepare the sales proposals for each of their domains. This process used to take anywhere between 2 days to a few weeks. A significant bottleneck was that standardization needed to be included.
• The proposal had a few important things to display regarding the product they wanted to sell a.the technical solution b. TCO ( Total Cost to Ownership)
• The process of generating the technical solution and generating the costs (tacos) was also done manually using multiple spreadsheets. Hence the process was time-consuming, and accuracy could have been better.
• The development of the all-new product majorly impacted 2 things:  
  1) The Assessment: The user can now define the technical solution within the new app. The app does the cost analysis for the answer, builds the TCO for users, and provides visual analytics simultaneously. The app also provides a comparison against competitors.
  2) The proposal - Once users fill out the assessment and submit it, the app generates the PPT instantly within 5 minutes. This PPT is content-rich and contains everything the user already has filled in - the solutions, visual analytics, and comparison. Plus, the marketing slides that the user can present to customers.
• The PPT generation process was complex and challenging. The PPT needed was heavy and had customer-branded slides, which needed to add complex components like graphs, tables, images, etc.
• Therefore, to overcome this challenge, we used win32com APIs. We used a windows server with office installed so we could use com APIs. The app server would connect to this server, submit the user assessment data, and generate the PPT.
• To generate this complex PPT, we converted the client PPT to a template and updated the PPT to the final proposal driven via configuration. We wrote different handles to insert PPT components such as tables, images, texts, charts, etc.
• With the help of configuration and handlers, all the slides could be populated very quickly and very generic manner.

Overall, it was a smooth run on the product delivery. The Symv team maintains the tool per the latest industry standard, making new feature releases fast and automated.