A former VP of Sales at Benefitfocus reached out to me when he started his new consulting company looking to add some software to help guide not only his sales meeting with clients but also his client's meetings with their teams.

One of my earliest jobs was designing sales presentations and software demos for use in sales presentations, so I had experience working with salespeople before and knew the importance of facilitating effective meetings.

That's where Deal Driver comes in.

For this project I was a Freelance Product Designer with the only product support being from the two founders of Sales Velocity Partners. I captured requirements, developed user flows, and of course designed the final product.

When most people think of sales software they think of a sales CRM - Deal Driver is not that. It's much smaller and hyperfocused on meeting productivity. The purpose of Deal Driver is to help sales associates identify hangups in deals so they can tackle them with help of their team so they can more quickly get deals up or out of their pipeline.

Deal Driver is a tool designed primarily to keep everyone in the sales funnel focused on the same goal. And it all starts with deals.

The core unit against which all significant action is taken in Deal Driver is, of course, a "deal". A "deal" or "sale" goes through several stages:

1. First, there is deal creation and initial work
2. Next there may be one or two or many follow-up meetings which generate "actions"
3. Actions must be completed before another follow-up can happen
4. Eventually a deal will close, whether successfully ("closed won") or unsuccessfully ("closed lost")

At several points through the life cycle of a deal there are going to be a hunter of "actions" that the user must complete. These are typically blockers holding a deal back and range from simple admin tasks to winning over contacts.

Deal meetings help identify potential action items as well as allow team members to provide feedback on how to close out languishing items.

While this is a small app, there are a few different types of users engaging with it:

• Vice President, Sales - This will be the buyer of the software and the least hands-on. This user will be able to log in and check status of meetings and analytics but likely will not. This person is only interested in results.
• Sales Leader - The most engaged user of the applications, the Sales Leader is the person primarily responsible for keeping sales associates on task and ensuring productive meetings.
• Sales Associate - The base user, the sales associte is the person actually running meetings and accomplishing actions within the app. They need to fully buy in for the software to add value to the business.