Bravado Flex Finding the right sales talent with AI

Bravado's has over 400,000 sales professionals globally. The War Room is an online sales community that connects sales professionals with companies that want to hire sales talent. Prepandemic Bravado focused on matching companies with full-time sales talent for hire. With the ongoing layoffs, Bravado saw an increase in contract work. Bravado found an opportunity to help companies staff on-demand fractional sales.

My Role
Lead Designer, UX Research

Project Scope
Redesign

Team
1 PM, engineering team, data analysis

Bravado
Web application feature

Launched
2023

URL
https://bravado.co/flex

Problem:

As businesses strive to achieve their sales targets, they are also facing the challenge of reducing their workforce.

We began the project by revamping the onboarding process for hiring full-time talent. When I first came on board, my colleague Alex had already started working on the initial designs for the onboarding process. The primary objective was to increase the number of companies signing the contract and hiring sales professionals.

My first project at Bravado was to design the Ai Prompt portion of the onboarding flow. I also conducted a usability study to evaluate if users could write prompts that would generate appropriate candidate results. However, we noticed that some users were simply copying and pasting job descriptions. Others were unsure about the content and length of the prompts they needed to write. Additionally, some users wanted the option to edit the prompts inline from the “preview”. To address these issues, we collaborated with our Data team to include the actual written prompts in the testing process. Based on the results, we have identified areas that require improvement to ensure better outcomes.

Improvements made based on the study

  • We would prefill an example based on the user selection from the previous onboarding questions.

  • We added tips on what to include in the prompt.

  • Our matching algorithm saw over 90% high-quality user inputs after implementing the changes, resulting in a 60% increase in conversion.

Insights found during the Beta launch

  • We set out to test with a few users before announcing our launch of Flex.

  • Bravado uses a fantastic tool called Fullstory that allows you to watch the user’s behavior.

  • We noticed that users were going directly to LinkedIn, but we thought that our sales data could help them determine if a person was a good fit for the company.

  • I was curious why.

I conducted another usability study…

  • To understand why users go directly to LinkedIn and assess the usefulness of AI output.

  • Before conducting user interviews, I performed a quick visual cleanup.

  • The cleaned-up version includes an example of how the AI prompt provides information to the user.

Key Insights found

  1. Users want to know where they worked last

  2. Users were confused about Ai Output section.

  3. AI output was too wordy, as most users scanned the text.

  4. Most users go to LinkedIn to see more details about the rep's work history; we currently hide these details. Also, work history was buried.

  5. Some information on the card was not helpful to the user. Like “Team ranking,” as the user would add in the number.

I then tested the new layout to ensure it works in all scenarios.

Mobile web improvements

I removed the padding to display more content and improved the scrolling behavior to show more content vertically.

Prelaunch deals

Sales closed a deal before the product launch. Company X was interested in staffing a pod, a group of salespeople, instead of hiring just one. We learned that Company X was not interested in looking for the individuals themselves.

We quickly pivoted to using this tool as a sales enablement tool. After a user completes the onboarding filters and fills out the AI prompt, they are directed to a view where they can preview three candidates. If they are interested, they will get a sales modal prompting them to schedule a call. We made this change because we found that the needs of our users varied based on the size and stage of their company.

Results of Flex Launch

  • Our matching algorithm saw over 90% high-quality user inputs after implementing the changes, resulting in a 60% increase in conversion.

  • Our sales team had so many scheduled meetings with interested users that we had to hire an additional Flex pod.

Next Steps Learning how to make our Flex reps successful I am creating a talent dashboard to track team productivity and ensure contract renewals.

Next Steps Learning how to make our Flex reps successful I am creating a talent dashboard to track team productivity and ensure contract renewals.

Next Steps Learning how to make our Flex reps successful I am creating a talent dashboard to track team productivity and ensure contract renewals.

Next Steps Learning how to make our Flex reps successful I am creating a talent dashboard to track team productivity and ensure contract renewals.

Next Steps Learning how to make our Flex reps successful I am creating a talent dashboard to track team productivity and ensure contract renewals.

Next Steps Learning how to make our Flex reps successful I am creating a talent dashboard to track team productivity and ensure contract renewals.