Relationship-Driven Sales Engagement

Process

Problem

Sales is about human connections, not just a series of tasks and actions. The challenge for users lies in identifying which relationships matter most and how to prioritize nurturing them. Today this is a process that requires synthesizing notes, tasks, meetings, emails, and more. Too often, this results in convoluted workflows spread across multiple browser tabs and various tools, leading to unnecessary complexity and productivity costs.

Recognizing this problem pushed me to rethink the user experience approach and how we communicate and provide value to users. Historically, the product experience focused more on speeding up sales tasks completion rather than fostering meaningful connections. The result: a tool built for clearing to-do lists rather than building contextual paths to start and countinue customer conversations.

User need

The prospect's buyer journey often involves multiple sales representatives. SDRs/BDRs typically initiate the process, starting the chain of conversations, while account executives guide the deal from prospect to customer. Once closed, the relationship transitions to customer support reps, who continue engagement and nurture conversations that ensure retention. Because this journey involves multiple personas, I saw a need to compartmentalize the jobs to be done (JTBD) into general themes so that I can focus my design efforts to provide optimal value across multiple personas.

What we leared

Ah ha moments!

- Productivity cost of switching between tools and tabs was outragious

- Our users were resourceful for better or for worse

- Overcomplicated workflows were a common theme

Based on user interviews and the creation of a JTBD matrix, I identified the key problems within the our product's communication workflows. I then categorized the users into two groups based on their role and needs.

Individual Contributor (IC) Role: Primarily SDRs/BDRs, but also includes AE's who manage multiple contacts across numerous accounts. Their role focuses on top-of-funnel activities, initiating sales conversations, qualifying leads, and driving early engagement.

Account Management Role: This category includes AEs, Sales Managers, and CSMs, whose responsibilities revolve around advancing deals, closing sales, and maintaining long-term customer relationships.

This categorization allowed me to define clear opportunity paths for meeting user needs while reinforcing our new strategy of fostering meaningful contact relationships.

Both the user personas individual needs and cohorts overlapping needs highlighted gaps in our current product offering. Narrowing down the problem space to a short list of the most common pain points allowed me to focus on real solutions that provide clarity, guidance, and motivation for our users. The following are the top 3 pain points that we agreed were most important to focused on based on our fundings, functioal capabilities, and time to value:

• (SDR's) Where to start their workflows each day
• (SDR's & AE's) What contacts take priority
• (AE's & CSM's & Managers) What accounts need attention

Hypothesis & Design strategy

Move from maintaining to-do lists and transition to fostering relationships through prioritized contextual outreach. If we create hubs that connect users to their prospects, regardless of where they are in the buyer's journey, and center the experience around building and nuturing relationships rather than just pushing outreach at scale, we can increase daily app usage and overall engagement while reducing workflow complexity and rep's productivity costs.

Ideate → validate → commit → iterate

Before diving into pixel-perfect designs, site maps and wireframes help map out structure and functionality early on. With rough sketches and low fidelity wires I explored different layouts, ensuring key pages align with user needs. From there, initial designs took shape, outlining content hierarchy and interactions before refining visuals. This approach keeps the focus on usability first, allowing for quick iteration and thoughtful design decisions.

Starting point

Working closely with my Product Manager partner, we set out to identify the most impactful starting point by consulting with both the broader Product and Sales teams. This helped us gather valuable input and ensure alignment with company goals. While Mixmax had traditionally seen strong adoption among AE and CSM teams, our traction with SDRs was limited—largely due to gaps in workflow features and the need for better tool consolidation in that segment of the market. We saw a clear opportunity to increase our footprint by delivering meaningful value to the SDR persona. By focusing on their specific needs, we believed we could drive deeper expansion within existing accounts and create new logo opportunities by targeting SDR teams more directly.

Contact Engagement List
Give reps a fast, focused way to stay on top of their Automation pipeline and to cut down on the time they spend hunting for context and jumping between tabs.

Problem
As an SDR I need a way to clearly identify which of my contacts are engaging with my emails, so that I can prioritize who to reach out to and to take action quickly.

Why this matters
Sales at the individual contributor level is largely a numbers game, but success often comes down to timing. You need to reach out when you're still top of mind for a prospect—right after they’ve opened an email, clicked a link, or accepted your LinkedIn request. Based on conversations with sales teams, prospects are more likely to respond when they have a recent point of reference. The right timing can be the difference between landing a meeting or getting ignored.

User testing and validation

To ensure the UX addressed the various user needs, I conducted user interviews to test and validate key workflows. I focused on understanding how users prioritized outreach and managed follow-ups, using prototypes of each part of the experience to gather feedback. The insights helped refine the layouts, Visual designs, interaction flows, and engagement indicators to better support user goals. You can explore an early version of the Contact engagement prototype via the button below.

Each session provided valuable insights into terminology that resonated with users, confirmed the value of consolidating workflows, and helped shape a well-defined feature set for raod-map prioritization. These findings allowed us to organize opportunities into clear categories based on user-perceived value.

Must-haves: Included the most consistent and high-impact features that clearly resonated across sessions.

Could-haves: Represented less frequent but still recurring features with moderate value.

Won't-haves: Captured one-off or niche requests that, while interesting, offer limited value to the broader customer base.

This structure gave us strong alignment for moving forward with focused, user-informed priorities.

Timing and delivery

After validating our feature list with users, the team convened to build a phased roadmap. We balanced time to value against implementation complexity, sequencing each release so it reaches the market quickly while staying manageable for engineering.