Salesperson Persona

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Go Hands-On SharePoint 2003 (v2)

Go Hands-On SharePoint 2007 (v3)

The productivity of salespeople is critical to the success of an organization. Many business applications for sales force automation are designed with a "one size fits all” approach. The Salesperson Persona is a role-based interface that is designed to maximize the productivity of the salesperson, while viewing and working with information located in an organization’s workplace. The key to the productivity of this Persona is that the information and the functionality is brought to the salesperson, organized in the way that is best for them, instead of them having to go to one or more places to get their work done, and working in an environment that is designed for many different roles. Thus, you can design your Sales Portal for the community of people, and you can have a separate but connected interface that optimizes the productivity of the salesperson.

The Salesperson Persona is designed with the productivity of a salesperson in mind. It is assumed that this Persona is implemented as a separate interface that is to be used by all salespeople (i.e., it is a role-based interface). This interface is then connected to the source of sales data. In this example, it is assumed that it will be connected to the Sales Pipeline solution that is part this Solution Set. However, with a little bit of configuration, you can connect it to any source of sales data within a SharePoint workplace.

The key line of thinking for this type of design is that no single interface can be optimized for multiple groups of people. Here are a few groups in a typical sales environment:

• Standard Sales Representatives
• Sales Managers
• The VP of Sales
• Inside Sales Reps working leads
• Marketing people looking at sales information
• Executives viewing sales information
• Temporaries doing data entry or data cleaning
• Account Managers wanting detailed information on accounts and less concerned about transactional productivity

If you were to design a single portal interface, by definition, it could not be optimized for each group. Thus, you could have a simple interface for a common denominator for the Sales Department Portal. Then, each of the above groups could have their own Persona that is specifically designed for their work.

• Role-based interface to optimize the work of salespeople
• Dynamically shows only the information for each sales representative
• Integrates with the Sales Pipeline solution dataset, making it easy to connect it to other custom datasets
• Pre-configured actions to automate work, such as
  • New Lead
  • New Opportunity
  • Last Contact Follow-Up Note
  • Close Opportunity
  • Automatic Follow-Up Reschedule
  • Change Status
  • Submit Quote for Approval Email
  • Request Technical Sales Support Email
• Ability to pre-configure email-enabled business processes
• Cross-Connect displays to manage relationship between leads and new opportunities
• Color-coded calendar of events
• Views of Sales Representatives’ sales
• Charts of sales