Crm sales funnel management for Product Management

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hey everybody my name is cody chang and i'm the founder and one of the coaches at product gym i have about seven years of product management experience and in this video i'm going to show you how to solve a crm marketing case study in your next product manager interview if this is the first time that you're checking out our channel please be sure to take a second to hit the subscribe or like button so you can stay up to date on the next case study solution we release in this series first off i'm going to give you some first impressions of the case study then i'm going to go into how i would actually solve it um and then i'll walk you through some of the solutions and i'd be curious to hear what everyone's thoughts are about this i've laid out the slides in the order that i would actually present this solution uh to an interview panel would be but for the sake of this video we're actually to follow the best path to actually solve the case study so the prompt is while conducting customer interviews you discover that service professionals get a lot of inbound phone calls that they aren't always able to answer right away for these customers service professionals are not getting back to these calls quickly could result in a loss of business uh what type of solution would you bring to the market if you do uh what does it look like what steps would you do and then provide either a document or several slides how would you tackle this so for those of you that are following along i would try and pause this video throughout specific spots in this video just so that if you're trying to solve this for yourself for practice you can think about the question first before going through the solution that i propose in this particular case study though the company actually provides some prompts and they actually specify hey this is not exhaustive but what should you consider how do you validate the problem actually exists uh the solution what is a solution and then how would you bring the solution to the market how would you measure it success with the key stakeholders how would you monetize this solution uh this is actually a really interesting case study uh better than most of the ones that we see at product gym specifically because they give you some questions to think about and they also tell you to time boxes it's really easy to just spend endless hours on it and they actually provide they actually tell you you know don't spend more than two hours on this exercise and then send it back to me whoever the interviewer recruiter is um at least three hours before the scheduled time cool so just to recap the company is a company that provides crm marketing what do they do they connect trades people with leads or service professionals and the problem is a tool is getting the tradesperson the leads but the they are not answering so what i'm imagining in my head right now is uh server professional let's say it's a hvac service professional maybe a plumber or electrician um you know a home inspector uh glass installer whatever that is and they have a phone or they have computer and they're logged into this crm tool and people are pinging them with leads or leads are pinging them they're calling them or they're perhaps providing a form whatever that is but these service professionals aren't answering okay so like i said with most product management uh case studies and even perhaps on the job you always start with the user right so what's the user persona what are their user needs and their pain points so i pre-filled this uh just so i um you could use this as a a speaking tool here but um i thought about the person that needs the immediate help making the call right so uh there's i guess three or four parties involved here the first person is i am a person whose uh bathroom is clogged right uh my toilet burst i need immediate help please help me mid level is um you know my refrigerator is dripping or leaking some water but i could probably put a bucket uh over it or put a towel over it uh and then important but not urgent my door handle the dishwasher is loose or fallen off maybe i don't need immediate help but it'd be great that i would get some help so it's a person that actually needs the help i would think about the urgency that this person needs right they're ultimately the end user second is a service person obviously the person that is providing the service right so and they are people that probably want to be matched with leads that pay them the most but they're also the quickest or you don't you probably don't want to work on a job that's 10 hours long and costs you know a thousand dollars uh or rather you would want want to work on a 30-minute job that costs you know uh that'll pay you five thousand dollars and then the last user is probably the company or third party technician it's a person or the company the crm marketing company right that's facilitating and largely this third user is probably you as a product manager or whoever is representing this company when you think about these users i'm always thinking about what's the urgency of the end user ultimately we measure success by the person obviously who gets service but also the service person who is trying to prioritize their needs so in exploring some of these user assumptions or user personas there's a couple of assumptions that come out um we're assuming that all the leads are received by the actual service person and they are perhaps choosing to ignore them right it's not a uh it's not a technical problem right there's cell towers aren't down servers aren't down it's really important to lay out assumptions probably in the second or early parts of the solution when you're presenting it because you want to really rule out all these edge cases right there's not much of a case study if we're saying oh there's a technical problem right so you want to assume that the company that's interviewing you already knows how to troubleshoot this right so for this the sake of the case study and for the ability for you to allow yourself the ability to showcase your product management skills um you're gonna say that this isn't a technical problem right at the end user we're going to assume the person in need is going through some form of a process uh to make the requests uh we're not really sure what that process is maybe it's a form maybe it's email but it is routed through this crm marketing tool company the third is we want to make an assumption about what constitutes as a qualified lead right it's not just everyone that's calling hey i want to get your expert opinion on how to you know lay tile in my home or something like that right it's a qualified lead you want to define as or we want to make the assumption as someone that maybe actually has a problem right there they have some need that requires a service professional and then in the case study we're going to assume that calls are equal to inquiry right which calls are not just exploratory calls like we had just talked about it there's a lot of other assumptions that you probably want to unpack here just to make sure that you cover the scope of the case study remember it's a pretty open-ended case study so you want to make sure that you put some guard rails in just so that as you're presenting this solution you're not just rambling right and for this particular piece you know we're saying that calls are all inquiries but there's probably a lot of other assumptions that you can probably unpack after creating these assumptions or listing them out and obviously there will be more assumptions as we talk through this you can really go down the process of understanding what is the actual problem right the actual problem if we go back to the prompt is that um service professionals are not getting back to these calls quickly in time and can result in lost business right so what does that what does that actually mean let's let's copy this actually um you know uh actually let's just take this whole thing and we're going to share this in the validation of the actual problem right so we're just going to put this as maybe a footnote here and we can get rid of this in the final presentation but as we're working through this we probably want to have access to this right so validation of the actual problem when i think about validation i usually think about metrics uh and i want to think about data and analytics right so what's how i'm thinking about this as a funnel right how many people actually call these service professionals and how many of them are following up on their missed calls right because if you assume that someone is following up multiple times it's likely a very urgent call you may want to prioritize that but for service professionals that are answering you know what's the what's the number of follow-ups that they are doing to miss calls right what's that percentage is a service professional getting 100 calls a day and they're missing all of them but they're following up with 99 of them right is that already too late or is that already is that fine so you kind of want to explore that a little bit um how many follow-ups per missed call is there right they're not always able to answer right away but are they following up five six ten times or are they just following up once um how many missed calls are there per service pro uh and really per request and then of the missed calls and callbacks how many are actually resulting in business closes right this is really important because ultimately for a service professional you want business or leads that close so again if we think of the funnel if the average lead is you close maybe let's say one in seven that you answer well if you're missing six of them okay if that's the average close one in seven um but you're not getting back to a much larger number or a lot fewer number then you have to moderate how much or how many of these actual calls result in business maybe the leads are bad you know that's why they're not calling hey this company that i crm marketing company that i signed up for the reason why i'm not calling because i'm a service professional is that they send me crappy leads right so what's the actual amount of business that results from these leads and how can we increase that quantity in order to gain trust with the service professional looking at this really takes the onus off of the technology it's really more of the actual product the deliverables okay so after validating let's say that hey you know uh we have validated that the leads are um are fairly decent uh we have validated that this is an actual problem right and we've validated that uh maybe they are doing enough follow-ups but they're already following up too late right so we really want to unpack why is a service professional not answering right away is it because i don't know they're too busy and the leads are coming in when they're already working on something is it because the leads are bad we're assuming that you know that's not the case um what what is actually the reason why service professionals are not getting back to these calls um so that's something that we we want to unpack in the solution so how do we define this solution now we just talked about some of the problems that we are going to encounter or that we want to think about with the user right so in defining the solution we always want to what i like to do is just throw as many solutions first as i'm working things out and then try and prioritize them so that uh they make sense in terms of a roadmap uh in terms of their mvp and in terms of actually solving the user problem and the pain point right so here i have two the first is you know user completes a form that filters for urgency budget location scope of the fix needed right uh here we have to define qualify leads so again the user we can say is the end user we'll say my toilet takes they complete a form and the form itself allows them to specify what's their budget where are they located what's the scope of the fix they need um what's the urgency you know maybe there is a video upload you know of the problem in addition to the text description right and then we want to define what a qualified lead is or as a sub bullet as a sub bullet allow service pro to define a qualified lead right so let's walk through the user experience right i have a toilet pipe that bursts i need someone to help me okay i want to call someone so what happens i'm going to go on this site i'm going to fill out the form and say hey i need something immediate i'm willing to spend 500 i think that's reasonable um i am located in brooklyn and you know i just need this pipe fixed and i record a video right then i hit submit so now service professional let's allow them to define what a qualified leaders i don't want as a service professional i'm probably not going to want someone i don't want to take a lead that's in coney island if i'm in new york or that's a different state right if i'm very far away or if it's not my area of expertise or if a user has just an urgent need maybe they're not ready to pay or the budget is too low right so we want the service professional to define what that lead means to them right and then assuming that it is a qualified lead they receive the lead now we've sort of solved that validation of the first problem the first problem being okay are leads qualified we've allowed leads to be qualified and allow leads to be filtered now the service professional actually receives a lead okay why are they still missing calls maybe it's because they are working maybe it's because they are not tech savvy maybe it's because they're a one-man operation they don't have a sales or uh admin assistant right so so how do we remind them or surface these leads to them so that it is uh timely and it is in a way allowing them to follow up if they miss the call right so i thought of an auto dialer or an auto reminder hey if you get a lead to follow up this could be in a crm tool in and of its own right maybe the lead or the call the information from this form gets sent to a dashboard where it's kind of like a ticketing system you know and they can see it listed in that system it could be inexperienced or it could be mobile right if you're on the go your service professional you're not likely going to go back to your your office wherever that may be if you have an office to look at those leads and to respond right you might probably want to respond by mobile right um and then the third option i would say is probably i would say allow the potential solution is a service service pro to bid or to redirect the um the request inquiry to another service pro right so let's say i'm a service pro and i don't have time to respond to these maybe there's an expiration to these inquiries and if it doesn't the crm tool this third-party tool automatically sends it to someone else you know if you don't respond if you don't do anything obviously this could be gamed and we probably want to explore those requirements a little more uh but that's also another solution right hey we're incentivizing service professionals to pick up all the calls or all the inquiries if not someone else is going to get your business you know um cool so as i'm talking aloud through these solutions i'm trying to think about what's what's mvp my minimum viable product what's the quickest way in order to allow for service professionals to diagnose and solve the solution for service professionals to pick up the phone right ultimately the hypothesis that i have is professionals are not picking up the phone either because requests are coming in in the wrong time right there they're working you know they're already they're down on their hands and knees fixing uh you know ac units or pipes they're not going to be able to respond or the jobs just aren't attractive you know and they're they're not incentivized to actually uh take these jobs you know or respond to these calls so how do we how do we want to think about these two problems well i think for an mvp solution um is probably going to be some type of interface for a form right before a user can even an end user can even interface with a service professional they have to really do a little bit of homework to define the urgency the budget the location and the scope now for the purpose of this video i didn't create a design and i didn't go through the wireframe um but in most case studies i would encourage you to think about what that design would be and if your case study requires a design think about whether or not the case study already has a product right does this crm marketing company already have a product if that's the case you i think you would get have a huge leg up if you go to their actual product google it you know go on google images or youtube find actual screenshots of their actual product and trying to embed the solution within that design if it's a totally you know bluefield uh case study where this is the solution is totally isolated from anything else that this crm marketing tool does it's fine you can just do some wireframes um and then we think about you know how would you if it's already existing think about how would you change that interaction with the user to achieve success uh or you know what how would you change the interface in general so that it meets the requirements of the case study again in our case it's a fairly sort of isolated design i would really just create a form maybe uh and i would actually for a user an end user that's going to interact with the form i would actually draw out something using or phone right if it's a service professional that we're assuming is in the trades probably going to be they're probably going to benefit from a video of the problem most times videos are on your phone now and so your mobile device so it would make sense that you would want the solution and obviously the design to have the actual um to have it in the context of a phone right so i would actually draw out the phone and then draw out perhaps text fields uh submit button and then i would draw out what it potentially might look like for a for a service professional to receive that now thinking about these user stories we're probably going to probably have to define them for an engineer to build right so if i were to start you know as an end user i want to send my request to a service professional about my um you know problem whatever that is so that they can call me back right okay so the acceptance criteria will probably be um let's say you know i'm imagining again i'm imagining just a form so i'm thinking about google forms right or even type form show you know header text in the form which says uh request for service pro and then maybe that the sub bullet might be subtext is describe your problem right if i already have data about what problems most people contact service professionals about it could be just a drop down right so describe a problem uh show text field for user um you might want to limit it to i don't know say 500 characters whatever that is um again another solution might be uh show drop down of default problems and then you probably want to define the problems it says toilet leak or hvac or whatever that doesn't mean right and then you want to go down the list here right so then next you want to show next you want to show uh subtext the next field is urgency right or budget um budget and then you may want to show a scrubber tool of um budget min and max right whatever that is you want to describe in detail for as user stories to engineering next um you want to think about data and analytics you know what are you tracking to ensure success uh what does success look like and if you were to pivot what data would you look at um again how would i bring this specific product to market um i would first try and qualify the leads you know using this uh you know made-up design that i don't have here um that's aligned to this user story first uh and then understand you know what are you tracking to ensure success so if i have a form you know uh form completion [Music] uh rate you know uh open slash start versus submit um i probably look at uh form completion time or people spending you know 40 hours writing one piece because their cat got into the hvac and scratch it up or uh are they really spending just a minute 30 seconds it's so urgent that they're just flying through all the fields on the forum right um you can also track obviously this is on the end user side you can also track whether or not service professionals are opening the form or using the form right so click through on the form from service professionals services serve this professionals um you know if they get the form and the call comes through are they rejecting it except versus a uh reject rate checked rate of calls and forms and this is again ultimately a successful product if a service professional gets the form accepts the form accepts a call and ultimately does business with it right it's another thing if they get the phone they accept all the forms because and then they end up getting on the call or they end up missing all the calls right then that just means a form is another step but if they're filling out the form and they're taking the call even if it takes a couple of follow-ups and they're closing the deal you know that means that the solution works they're screening for the right qualified leads what the success looked like again i just sort of talked about that but i would type that up you know a number of completed forms number of returned or answered calls number of closed leads and then obviously if the end users people having the problem are having success number of maybe reviews slash nps promoter score or any other metric to allow the end user to say hey this was a successful process right and then you obviously want to think about if you were to pivot what kind of data would you look at um so obviously if i looked at this data let's just say you know there's a number of forms a lot of folks are completing the forms but the service professionals aren't really returning the calls what does that mean it means likely that the service professionals looking at the form they're like ah this is not really my thing right so that means we have to target likely a different set of service professionals that can actually service these folks on the completed forms or maybe the completed form maybe the forms are completed but all the data is garbage right then that means okay uh we have to pivot and say maybe the form isn't working out uh maybe it's just a video and then you send it up to like 40 people right so again i would start the mvp with this uh form right um auto dialer is i think a good next step because if we find that hey leads are qualified they just don't have time or they don't service staff auto dialer can help remind them uh or dial for them right and then obviously this is a bit of a nuclear option hey as a company service a crm marketing tool service professional isn't picking up then we're going to send it to someone else you want you don't want this person's business we're going to find someone else obviously we want service professionals to come out as successful in this relationship but as different stakeholders we would probably want to launch something like this as a very last iteration of this so future iterations you know i kind of just talked about based off of the mvp uh and you will really want to write this in the form of a user story right so if you think about a marketplace you can write the user storage for that i'm not going to go over it in this video uh but you can try and take a stab at answering or creating your own user stories based on a marketplace last but not least i'd go over potential challenges think about where the product life cycle and release did you feel there would be difficulty how would you solve it and then this is really a slide that you want to use to showcase some of your prior expertise right so um i'm going to try and fill this out as part of the solution you know where in the product of life cycle and release do you think there would be difficulty you always want to showcase to the interviewer that you are retrospective right you're not someone that just launches look at the numbers and then next time maybe next time right you want to stop yourself do a retro and say okay after i've launched or i have learned this i am going to apply these learnings to my next launch so in thinking about potential challenges it allows you as a candidate to highlight that to your interviewers in this particular case i come from more of a business operations background and so if i apply that to this product development life cycle i would actually i would actually guess that the difficulty here is going to be to allow allowing the service professional to um access the information on the actual call right so i would say this is one hypothesis right you can even say hypothesis hypothesis is service professionals may not be uh properly trained to handle missed calls or access the information on the forms right a lot of times we think that technology will solve all of our problems but if you think about it if you're a service professional that's you know fixing um you know uh a gas stove or an oil stove somewhere in a restaurant hey you know my hands are dirty how do i access these calls right um it's the actual implementation of the product that sometimes uh in my experience as a business operator technology doesn't really think about or solve right they just they just can't access this information readily so this could be you know potential problem number one right or challenge one you know another challenge might be implementation let's say you're the service professional you get the form coming in um and you don't respond right you don't really know whether or not you want to take this right so what's as a service professional you put yourself in the shoes of the user what's some of the reasons why you don't want to take it could be you know hey this person doesn't have enough money right like the lead or this piece of business isn't worth it it could be um i don't have enough time um you know they're offering a lot of money for this one problem but hey i am in new york city and this person is all the way in albany right um so that's something that can be controlled with the um with the video or um with the filters but i think the second challenge would be communicating the depth of depth or scope of the problem that end users communicate so specifically even with a video a lot of times people hire service professionals because they are professionals just a video of a pipe burst may not be enough to inform the service professional what exactly is the depth and scope of the problem it could be just be you know you just replace a pipe uh or it could be you know the whole system of pipes is rotted right whatever that is as a non-professional as an end user i don't have that type of expertise and so even with the video and even trying to write out all of the description of it this service professional still may not have the information they need to make a determination of whether or not they want to take this piece of business right as a person at suffering you don't know what you don't know right i don't even know what i should be communicating to this service professional and so on the other end as a service professional it's difficult to really take this job if they don't understand the depth or the scope right so these are two that i've started with curious to hear what all of you think about this these potential challenges last but not least uh i want to revisit the executive summary so in the executive summary i usually fill out you know what do you what do you know don't know or assumptions what's your solution very quickly and how do you know you're successful right very very quickly and i like to do this usually to make sure that if i'm presenting this case study in front of a panel and they um they scroll through very quickly i can't expect all of the participants actually pay attention it's just a fact and then many times in a panel the people that are in the interview panel are only going to care about the slides in which they have the most uh relevant expertise or profession and right the ux researcher that's interviewing me is only going to care about the ux research slide right what's the type of explorations that i did to validate uh that this is actually a problem right the marketer in the case study panel is only going really going to pay attention um about implementation right like future iterations designs uh and the engineer is going to think about a lot about the engineering and the user stories right so in an executive summary allows you as the interview candidate to really preemptively inform them hey if you're gonna fall asleep during my presentation these are the parts where you have to pay attention right so if i were to fill this out uh the most major assumptions i would say is my first assumption is you know assuming there is no assumptions there are no technical issues and then i would you know fill out all the ones in an abbreviated form of all the assumptions that usually have a lot more than four and if you've been paying attention to this video you have caught a lot of other assumptions that i've added as i've articulated this case study uh what is your solution you know mvp to create a form to validate lead quality how do you know you're successful um i had just talked about it uh which was number of uh completed forms number of um i say uh calls answered followed up and then of course a number of closes closed business cool obviously depending on your case study uh your mileage will vary of course uh with the type of work and the amount of time that you have to dedicate this i went through this extremely quickly and if i were to recap and think about the problem you know i would try and incorporate these questions specifically into a particular format where i go through all of these particular points whether it's design validation data user stories it's really something you really want to cover the entire product development lifecycle when you're thinking about solutions because unless you know exactly who your audience is who your users are for the interview you really want to be careful about any information that you leave out intentionally or not intentionally cool so again um this is not exhaustive hopefully i've answered all these questions but if i haven't and you feel like there are any parts of this case study a solution that you think i've missed please feel free to comment um or send us some of your thoughts directly you will be able to download a version of this case study of course uh and i invite you to schedule call with us if you're i have any questions about your case study thank you very much for watching and i look forward to sharing more of these case studies with you in the future thank you [Music] you