AT&T Enterprise Sales Transformation
End Goal
Sales reps were spending over 600 hours annually on administrative tasks, amounting to upwards of $100M in lost revenue potential. Our goal was to make strides in reducing this cost and empower sales reps to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Starting Line
At critical points in the sales cycle, sales reps relied on an outdated, manual-entry Excel sheet last updated in the 1990s. This reliance led to frequent downstream errors, often resulting in clients receiving incorrect products or services, and delays of up to six months due to internal back-and-forth. This bottleneck was a significant revenue drain, so we focused on streamlining this process to drive immediate impact.
Getting Here
To replace the rigid, linear information-gathering process, we aimed to create a solution that would request only the relevant information from sales reps at each stage of the sales cycle. We integrated data from over 13 platforms that previously required constant context-switching by implementing Palantir’s Foundry solution.
“The easiest part is actually selling it. They know who we are, it’s not a hard sell.”
The enterprise sales team at AT&T is the firm’s top revenue generator, yet its user base of 2,800 sales reps are stuck working with a disjointed, inefficient patchwork of 13+ legacy tech platforms and extremely rigid internal processes. The very tools relied upon to close deals and realize revenue are also the cause of major headaches that cause delays in the ‘quote to cash’ segment of a sales cycle (the moment a customer asks for a price through the day the first billable revenue is collected).
Further compounding the cognitive load, recent company downsizing has forced reps to take on additional responsibilities previously handled by now-eliminated sales support roles. This leaves sellers to navigate multiple political challenges, including leadership’s focus on finding new leads that overlooks the reality of the world reps must operate within. Due to rigid internal policies and the disparate tech stack, sales reps are only free to spend an average of 42.5% of working hours on revenue generating activities.
The current state of the sales cycle was overwhelming, with reps facing daily hurdles just to secure revenue. Their biggest pain points stemmed from internal processes and politics and the only direct outcomes we could influence were changes to the tech stack.
We made a concerted effort in educating stakeholders and highlighting the challenges faced by the salesforce to drive empathy. However, overcoming ingrained cultural and procedural barriers proved difficult. Some of the biggest challenges we faced included:
Sales ops/support team KPIs prioritized task completion over revenue generation; directly clashing with those of the salespeople
Rigid internal processes like billing address changes or expired contract access delayed revenue realization by six figures and unfairly impacted sales targets (ex: made them miss their quota and annual bonus)
Pain & Gain
Seller pain points and procedural bottlenecks discovered from user interviews and current state journey mapping by cycle phase.
The solution we got approval for added to the already overloaded tech stack by requiring a new platform and UI. Although sales reps wanted the new opportunity advancement form to be natively integrated into the existing Salesforce ecosystem, we were required to demo an independent proof of concept to secure funding for the solution.
To future-proof the design, we collaborated with Palantir developers to ensure the code could later be embedded into Salesforce directly. Additionally, we advocated for the entry point to the experience from the opportunity level within Salesforce to minimizing context switching.
Foundry further reduces cognitive load by auto-populating forms with data from disparate sales platforms, eliminating the need for manual input or memory recall. This streamlines the process of custom pricing, contracting, and ordering, speeding up workflows while reducing errors. As one might imagine, the context of a sales rep is ever-changing in terms of location and constant interruptions given that the focus of their role is getting in front of customers and closing deals.
Stylistically, we leveraged AT&T’s enterprise design system to meet the aggressive 30-day timeline for presenting a fully functional proof of concept—including an initial build to the AVP of Technology. This approach accelerated development since both Palantir and the design system use a React code base. We also ensured our mockups aligned with the visual language of AT&T’s customer-facing Business Center app, setting the stage for future iterations that will include client-facing features for tracking and managing orders.
Creative License
Moving away from locally saved excel spreadsheets and into 2024 with Palantir Foundry allowed us to present consolidated information for sales reps to review or edit asynchronously, streamlining their workflow while reducing error rates.
Design joined the project after developers had already built a demo and recognized that rolling out a new platform without UX input was less than ideal. We tested the existing demo to identify areas for improvement given the compressed deadline in order to quickly diagnose what needed to be fixed.
We shifted the flow from one mirroring backend architecture to a user-centered design aligned with the sales process. This included reordering form fields on the opportunity page to match the structure of custom contracts, aligning with sales reps’ mental models. Additionally, we introduced a solution design page to allow site validations upfront, streamlining the data collection process to follow the natural sales journey.
We also implemented key usability enhancements. Testing revealed that most users relied on dual monitors and faced frequent interruptions, often needing to restart tasks. To address this, we added real-time auto-save functionality, explicitly communicated in the header. This freed users to work seamlessly from their laptops, even on the go—something previously unthinkable.
Finally, we tackled a major inefficiency: small post-contract changes, such as billing contact updates, required reps to restart the entire opportunity process in Salesforce. We introduced an editable opportunity advancement form, allowing reps to make changes in real time. These updates synced with internal billing systems, eliminating redundant steps, accelerating revenue collection, and enabling reps to focus on their next deal.
Validation
Before: the initial UI we tested for a quick diagnosis of updates needed mostly followed a polished version of the developer mental model
After: we leaned on prior research of the underlying journey a user takes getting a deal done to inform the sequence of data we’d present them with to approve
What would be needed to leave current state and adopt this new platform?
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“It wouldn’t take a lot. If I could use this tomorrow I would.”
-Lead Client Sales Executive
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“I’d give up [the current spreadsheet method] in a heartbeat.”
-Strategic Account Lead
After implementing our new data collection solution powered by AI and automation, we believe we can reduce the average annual hours spent on this particular piece of the sales process by 45.6 hours per sales rep per year and $11,780,000 in wasted sales salary spend. More importantly, we’re freeing up the salesforce to spend more time on what they care most about—connecting with their clients.
