Empowering Reddit's sales team with easier access to data insights

Overview

Helping the Reddit sales team unlock value from a key internal data tool.

In April 2022 I joined Reddit’s Data Tools team and led design and research for a key internal analytics application used primarily by the sales team. I worked closely with an engineering partner to define and execute on product improvements that ultimately improved time to insights and increased sales productivity across Reddit.

Sales at Reddit

The Reddit sales team gets clients interested in advertising on Reddit, committing spend, and delivers successful campaigns for clients.

To support the sales cycle, sales uses an internal analytics application to understand various data points to bring to client meetings and inform each phase of the cycle. For example if working with Arby’s, key questions sales will answer and bring to discussions:

• Where is Arby’s talked about most on Reddit?
• Is Arby’s talked about more on Reddit compared to competitors (McDonalds, etc.)?
• Where do Redditors talk most about fast food?
• Are Redditors talking more or less about fast food?

The Problem

The analytics application emphasized and required coding for deep insights; a major obstacle and product deterrent for a majority of sales.

This led to other cascading issues:

• Sales sapping time from technical teams to get help.
• Saving and using the same queries repeatedly, leading to a fear of missing out on data.
• Simple comparisons became repetitive time consuming tasks.
• It was off-putting to newer sales people.
• Abandoning the product altogether.

Solution

Empowering Reddit sales with plain text searches and templated reports, each tailored to support key sales questions.

Keyword Report

Users can type a keyword and generate an entire report of valuable insights to answer common questions and inform client meetings.

Share of Voice Report

Instead of manual searching, tallying, and creating custom charts in Excel - this report allows sales to easily input and filter brand searches and makes comparison a breeze.

Communities Report

Sales commonly needed to answer questions about specific communities. Is growth occuring? What do Redditors discuss most? If a Redditor posts in this community, where else do they post? This report answers all of those questions and more.

All accessible from a redesigned home page

The home page was re-designed to make the reports accessible and discoverable at the top of the page.

Impact

The reports were considered a vast improvement and led to various increases in product usage and positive affirmation from the global Sales team.

Signals we tracked to validate product success:

• ~120 keyword tool users per week (35% of sales team) compared to 12% normally in product.
• ~1.7 queries per user compared to 1.2 normally.
• Qualitative indicators include much adoration in our Slack #sales channel.
• We even saw positive comments from non-Sales users including Data Science who found the new reports more accessible and easy to use.
• An increase in feature requests from the sales team. I took this as a sign users being more invested in the producted after our changes.

What gave me high confidence in my decisions throughout the design process was the reception throughout user testing (you may need to request access to view this video).

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