Unacademy CRM: Shipping an Auto-Dialer for the Inside Sales Team

Ashish joined Unacademy as an Associate Product Manager on the team building an in-house CRM for the inside sales organization. The company had outgrown the CRMs available on the market for its specific needs, and the account was too small for enterprise vendors to prioritize. The team's mandate was to build an MVP and then layer features on top of it, all centered on improving the productivity of the business development team.

Finding the Lever

After the MVP launched, Ashish ran interviews across the sales organization, speaking with BDs on the ground, AD-level managers, and VP-level leaders. The pattern that emerged was consistent: conversion in inside sales is a function of attempts, and anything that reduced time between calls was a direct drag on revenue. The lever was talk time per BD, and that was something the product team could control.

Designing the Auto-Dialer

The existing workflow required BDs to manually open each lead, place a call, fill out a disposition form, navigate back to the list, and repeat. Ashish designed an auto-dialer feature that automated the entire loop: the system would open the first lead, place the call automatically, detect when the call ended, surface the disposition form, and as soon as the BD submitted it, move immediately to the next lead and place the next call. The BD's only job was to talk and log.

Driving Adoption

Initial rollout met resistance. BDs were accustomed to their existing workflow and were not enthusiastic about changing it. After discussing with sales managers and AD-level leaders, the team made the feature mandatory for one team as a pilot. Results came through, and the feature was expanded to additional teams based on the data.

The feature drove a 5 to 7% increase in call volume, a meaningful lift given that call volume was the direct input metric for revenue.