Turning a sales problem into a simpler lead-generation workflow

Before touching a pixel, I went to see the work.

I spent a month learning the users and the business, then ran field research across 5 branches in 3 districts of Nepal. I followed one staff member from each branch through half a working day, interviewed three staff members per branch, and combined that with surveys, community meetings and conversations with the sales team. The branches were chosen partly for logistics and partly because they had already shown some success.

Capturing a lead and profiling a farmer happen at different moments, for different people.

The old flow had the field staff build a full farmer profile at first contact. Splitting it gave them a lighter first step and moved the burden of qualification and information gathering to the team that needed the detail.

The first conversation only needs to answer: who, and how do we reach them?

Successful sales showed a pattern. The person approached first was often a woman, but the decision-maker was frequently her husband or father-in-law. So the contact details of the right people mattered more than a farmer profile. A lead now needs the microfinance member, their phone number, the decision-maker and their phone number. Everything else was deliberately deferred, not dismissed.

The detail went to the people best placed to collect it.

The extra farmer information moved into a cloud-based lead-management tool for the internal team, where they qualify and enrich leads. Field users see four simple states (Unfiltered, Potential, Closed, Rejected), while the internal team works with a deeper sales model built with them, such as Hot, Normal and Dropped. It also became a shared record of what the team knew about each customer.

Staff needed accurate answers, not another training course.

Index cards held too much information to be usable, and training would have added to already tight schedules. The solution was a compact flipbook that works like a mini slide deck: farmer-facing pages on the front, speaker notes, specifications and FAQs on the back. The aim wasn’t to make staff product experts, only to support a useful, accurate conversation.

The tool had to work where the network didn’t.

Many visited areas had limited coverage, so leads are saved offline and synced when a connection returns. Budget meant Android first, as the most common platform among staff. And because staff had busy schedules, research and testing were planned around their regular work.

The workflow itself got smaller, and reported leads rose.

Lead entry dropped from 6+ minutes to about 20 seconds. (The old timing used dummy data; the new one was measured in the field.) In the three MVP branches, reported leads rose from about 13 to 50 per branch within three months, with no extra incentive or sales training. The process was then launched across the network as the standard, and staff described it as making their work easier.

On attribution: the sales guide and the wider rollout launched alongside the redesign, so I credit the design directly for the reduced effort and the changed workflow, not the whole increase in leads.