Loopio’s End-to-End Sales Response
LLoopio has long focused on formal responses, but saw an opportunity to grow by supporting a wider range of response types. This project set out to gauge market interest and define how Loopio could expand strategically to unlock new growth. The goal is to assess demand and uncover the best ways to serve a broader set of needs—positioning Loopio as a more versatile solution and deepening its market presence.
Company: Loopio Role: Product Design Manager* & Individual Contributor (after a layoff) Project Length: 7 months
* As Product Design Manager, I partnered with the tripod team to shape long-term strategy, align our direction with company OKRs, and mentor the lead designer. I worked closely with senior leadership to communicate the vision, resolve team dynamics, and coordinate across multiple streams (mission, data science, ML). Midway through, I also took on IC responsibilities following company layoffs.
“How might we expand Loopio’s Sales Response offerings to support more of the end-to-end sales journey, while also creating a new stream of business growth.”
Objective
Enhance Loopio's Sales Response capabilities by developing a long-term vision to improve user experience and increase user adoption.
Discovery & Research
Stakeholder Interviews: The Product Manager and myself started the project by conducting comprehensive interviews with various stakeholders across the business. This step was crucial to align our goals and understand the different lenses of the opportunity space.
Customer Interviews: Following discussions with stakeholders, we interviewed users who were already completing non-formal proposals using Loopio, and complemented those with ones who were not. This helped us identify pain points and needs more effectively.
Long-term Strategy: With valuable insights from both stakeholders and customers, we created a strategic roadmap that outlined opportunities in the end-to-end sales response domain. The strategy allowed us to sequence these opportunities, with scheduled measurement and feedback loops after each release.
Senior Leadership (SLT) Review & Buy-in: We presented the long-term strategic roadmap to our SLT to make sure it was aligned with the company's vision and obtain buy-in for the direction ahead.
Research Findings
Two broad problem areas were identified during discovery: Content Deployment & Content Generation
Content Deployment: Users are seeking solutions that meet them where they are.
Content Generation: Existing entries should be adapted for non-formal responses.
Content Generation Challenges
Summarization and Simplification: The ability to condense and simplify entries at the time of deployment.
Support for Grammar, Spelling, Tone: Incorporating tools that assist in maintaining proper grammar, spelling, and tone.
Automated Narratives and Business Cases: Implementing automation to assist in crafting narratives and business cases.
Library Maintenance: Strategies to efficiently manage and maintain the content library to ensure relevance and accuracy.
Content Deployment Challenges
Breadth of Integrations: Our competitors excel in offering a wide array of integrations, effectively meeting users in their preferred work environments, such as the Microsoft suite (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, etc.).
Depth of Functionality: In addition to supporting users across various platforms, our competitors provide deep functionality that caters to the specific use cases necessary to streamline these workflows. This necessitates bi-directional data flow in our integrations, encompassing tasks such as suggesting new question and answer pairings, preserving rich-text formatting, assigning content owners, and marking content as reviewed.
Design Process
Concept Sketching: Building on the long-term strategy, we initiated concept sketching sessions to address the short-term goals, starting with the Chrome Extension. These sessions were designed to garner feedback and insights from stakeholders and customers.
Data Analysis: We collected and analyzed data on integration usage and feature usage, to showcase the desirability to future build out Loopio’s capabilities.
Usability Sessions: Usability testing sessions focused on improvements to the Chrome Extension, and SLT was invited to participate or observe these sessions to hear first hand if these improvements were addressing our strategic objectives.
Iterations: Iterative design changes were made based on user feedback to create a solution that was both user-centric and strategically aligned.
Implementation: Worked closely with the development team for implementation, with updates shared regularly with stakeholders and SLT.
Beta Planning
Collaboration: Throughout the beta rollout, close collaboration with stakeholders was maintained to create a strong Go to Market strategy.
Measurement: Key performance indicators were determined to measure success of the feature.
Pricing: Worked closely with the Go to Market team to align on a pricing strategy that fit the business objective and encouraged customer adoption.
Challenges
A Product Summit deadline: Every year Loopio hosts a Product Summit/Loopicon to showcase some of the work we’ve done. Leadership committed to launching this piece of work at that event (8 months out) before we started digging into the problem space or what opportunities there were. There were some tensions early on in this project, as leadership just wanted us to start building, but myself and PM explained why we need to do discovery and the value it will bring to help them buy-in to the sequence of our work.
Go to Market (GTM) plan: Myself and the PM had a few ways we were thinking about the GTM plan for this initiative, including how we wanted to price and package it with different tiers. The Product Marketing team had very different ideas. It took us quite a few working sessions to collectively land on a GTM strategy, but there were a lot of differing opinions and challenges we had to work through in order to get there.
Outcomes
This work is still in beta and the impact and next steps are being measured.