SalesforceIQ

Project Basecamp

In 2016, the SalesforceIQ team started charting new visions for Salesforce, its parent company. As a part of this effort, I led a vision exercise called Project Basecamp to imagine how the SaaS platform could operate on the desktop. This project would go on to evolve into what became Salesforce Essentials.

Challenges

SalesforceIQ, formerly RelateIQ, was a completely independent product. Our team had the knowledge and technical capabilities to create the next generation of CRMs, and our mandate was to explore how to do that on top of the Salesforce platform. The direction we had from Marc Benioff and Parker Harris was high-level and open-ended. It was our organization's responsibility to chart through that ambiguity and return to the founders with a concise vision of what Salesforce could be.

Solution

Salesforce invented the concept that SaaS tools are built on today, changing how software is bought, sold, and owned. In a changing landscape and with the emergence of technologies like Electron, I imagined how Salesforce could take its online platform and package it as a desktop app explicitly optimized for SMB personnel.

The resulting app was an all-in-one tool for salespeople to seamlessly use Salesforces Sales, Service, and Marketing cloud alongside our SalesforceIQ technology. In addition to bringing all of Salesforces Cloud products into one app, I explored how we could leverage AI to optimize a Sales persons daily workflow with innovative features like Ellie, a friendly assistant that integrated with strategic partners.

The concept included hyper-focused versions of each of Salesforce's "clouds." The Sales tab, organized intelligently by Ellie, displayed a daily itinerary to allow users to efficiently go from meeting to meeting. The Service tab listened to inbound data sources, allowing users to quickly identify essential tickets to resolve them within SLAs. The Marketing tab had all the tools for users to send mass communications to their customers to generate new leads. The entire app was anchored by a fully integrated email and calendar solution, representing how sales and service personnel actually want to work.

Role

I was the product leader for this vision exercise, creating the concepts from inception to final designs. I crafted presentations for executive leadership, received buy-in, and incorporated feedback to rapidly explore the ideas' viability. I led the SWAT team created to experiment and take the idea to MVP. This project eventually evolved into Salesforce Essentials, the SMB tool built from the ground up on the Salesforce platform.