Case study: A sales course for people who hate sales, but love drinking wine 🍷

Client: Danielle Lewis
Project Timeline: December 2020- February 2021
Focus: UX Research and Website Design
Location: Remote (Queensland, Australia)

Background

After committing 15+ years of her life in sales, Danielle the co-founder of Scrunch, deciding to share her knowledge behind everything it takes to prosper in sales. Realizing that sales aren’t everyone’s cup of tea– a lot of people dislike sales and everything it entails, Danielle decided to not only change the drink but also change the thought process behind sales.

Danielle came up with a creative and innovative way to impart her extensive knowledge in sales. A course that has a new-age approach to teaching sales while sipping on wine.

Design Challenge

With a new business idea in mind, Danielle wanted her website to reflect not only the brand’s personality but also her approach to sales. A website that imbibes a fun take on sales that works. The challenge was to capture the viewer’s attention with a course that has a modern-day take while confirming that this course works and the thought process behind has been working for years.

So the site would:

1. Capture the attention of business owners and salespeople with a course that is legitimate and qualified to improve revenue
2. Encourage the target audience to freshen up their perspective of sales to achieve goals and be happy

Danielle has a clear vision in mind for her idea of what sales are. However, to convey let alone convince people of this approach is the site’s responsibility. This was an interesting project for me and here’s how I worked through it.

The Solution

Sales & Wine is a concept that is quite new. Just like the approach Danielle has taken towards sales, the business will reflect her ideals. From my briefing, these are some pointers I kept constant to start with:

1. Reflect the casual and legitimate sides of the business
2. Let the vision shine and speak to the audience
3. Keep the site authentic but make it fresh just like the new take on sales

Quickly I realized that most of Sales & Wine was about Danielle’s personality. The people who are going through the site need to understand her side of the story to make sense of the course and its ongoings. It is necessary to share who this course is for, what it would teach and how much one could benefit. Giving a crystal clear idea to viewers to decide whether this course is for them. The main purpose of the site would be to drive female entrepreneurs to apply for the program. Thus, the application and its related info as the first thing on the home page to build appropriate expectations and prompt users to get in touch.

On researching the users and understanding the course offered by Sales & Wine, I found that sales are quite hard and that most users don’t get along with salespeople. The course they are offering is a perfect fit for- people who don’t like sales and people who don’t like salespeople. Simplifying the process and bringing energy into conversations not only broaden one’s perspective of sales but also teach to incorporate the course into your business and work-life. At the end of the day, every business needs a strong sales team to survive.

Danielle built this business on her interests and expertise– Wine and Sales. These are also common interests of a niche audience which is an intersection of salespeople and people who have fruitful conversations over wine. Hence, the site would draw attention from audiences with these common interests. Using this as a queue to pitch the course and all the offerings of Sales & Wine.

Screens for the Sale & Wine website

Having salespeople being pitched a course for sales is challenging. Convincing them to understand the necessity of such a course and encouraging a new approach adds to the complexity. The website had to be thorough, the courses and their objectives. To me and the business, building something that was accessible, communicated well, and easy to get around was critical. The final website ticks all these boxes for three parties– the business, the audience, and me.

What I Delivered

Working with a very different niche audience was interesting and challenging. To deliver a site that matched user expectations and fulfilled the business requirements felt like new learning in this case. Here’s what I delivered at the end of my process:

Insights & Learnings

My journey with Sales & Wine taught me that you can build over good relationships. This means as a business you need to maintain a good rapport with your clients. Selling as a human first and then as a business.

1. As a brand and company, Sales & Wine is just a month old, even then it has received positive feedback from visitors of the site and the business.
2. In the near future, I see myself working with the Sales & Wine team with A/B Testing and Usability Testing. We will also be closely taking note of analytics on the site along with Hotjar screen recordings for a better understanding of the users and their behaviors.
3. Once we get a hold of how well the users and prospective clients are perceiving the company, I will move on with regular iterations on improving the interaction experience.
4. After a year so, I would also like to observe how well the company is doing in terms of course registrations and one-on-one consults and work my way to improve their numbers.