Salesforce sales Planning
Sales managers and individual contributors were navigating three separate platforms to complete a single annual process. We consolidated it — and discovered the real challenge wasn't the technology, it was the mental model.
Sales managers treated the planning process as a top-down forecasting exercise. Individual contributors saw it as a personal tracking tool. Both were right — and a single interface couldn't serve both mental models equally. The existing multi-platform workflow masked this tension entirely.
I partnered with the product manager and stakeholders to define requirements, built the mockups from low to high fidelity, and led 11 remote usability sessions using role-specific testing scripts. I synthesized findings in Mural, updated the prototype across iterations, and presented recommendations to the Dev team for SCRUM handoff.
Same data. Different mental models.
Eleven users were tested across manager and contributor roles — each given four goals, each with a role-specific script. What looked like a UI consolidation problem revealed itself in the sessions: managers needed top-down forecasting views; contributors needed bottom-up personal planning. The interface had to serve both without feeling like a compromise.
Sales Manager
Strategic Planner
"I need to forecast from the top-down and allocate goals across my team"
- →Territory-level overview
- →Team capacity planning
- →Historical trend analysis
- →Can't see team progress holistically
- →Manual consolidation of individual plans
Sales Rep
Goal Tracker
"I track my progress bottom-up against assigned quotas"
- →Personal goal visibility
- →Account-level details
- →Progress toward quota
- →Goals feel disconnected from daily work
- →Can't see how changes impact targets
Operations Analyst
Data Administrator
"I manage the planning infrastructure and ensure data integrity"
- →Bulk data management
- →Validation and error checking
- →Reporting capabilities
- →Constant cleanup of spreadsheet errors
- →No audit trail of changes
Before — multi-platform process
- 1Export data from SalesforcePlatform Switch
- 2Open Excel for planning calculationsManual Work
- 3Share spreadsheet via emailVersion Control
- 4Consolidate team inputs manuallyData Re-entry
- 5Re-import back to SalesforceError Prone
- 6Track progress in separate dashboardDisconnected
After — unified platform
- 1Access role-specific planning viewSingle Platform
- 2Input goals with contextual dataReal-time
- 3Collaborate in-platformLive Updates
- 4Track year-round progressAutomated
Task Completion rates by role
- Task 1: Set Individual Goals92%High Success
- Task 2: View Team Progress (Managers)67%Moderate
- Task 3: Adjust Mid-Year Targets58%Needs Work
- Task 4: Bulk Import (Operations)83%Good
Platform Consolidated
Three platforms → one unified Salesforce experience.
Replaced a fragmented three-platform workflow with a single Salesforce experience — handed off to Dev for SCRUM implementation.
Role-Based Architecture
Same data, two contextual views.
Testing data validated separate views for managers and contributors, surfacing the same underlying data in contextually relevant ways for each role.
Strategy Shifted
Reframed: UI fix → IA challenge.
Stakeholder conversations moved from 'should we change this button' to 'how do we respect the way different people work' — reframing the project from a UI fix to an information architecture challenge.
- Different roles need different mental models, not just different features.
Role-based testing surfaced that managers and contributors approached the same task from fundamentally different directions. A universal interface that treats everyone equally isn't equitable — it's just equally inadequate for everyone.
- User research shapes strategy, not just design.
The most valuable output of the testing sessions wasn't UI changes — it was reframing the problem for leadership. Research that only validates what's already designed isn't research, it's theater.
- Conduct role-based research earlier.
By the time testing revealed the mental model split, we were already in high fidelity. I now bring role-segmentation into the discovery phase — before a single screen is drawn.