Project Klondike
At a glance
Problem
B2B sellers depended on 12 disconnected tools, conflicting eligibility data, and a Salesforce process that could take approximately an hour to complete.
Solution
A single Salesforce-powered experience that turned an address into authoritative eligibility, installation timing, relevant product options, and a ready-to-create deal.
Services
- Product strategy and service design
- Enterprise systems integration
- Custom Salesforce development
- Seller tools consolidated into one primary experience
- 12 → 1
- Reduction in deal-entry time
- 83%
- Sellers reached through nationwide rollout
- 5,000
- Improvement in qualified lead volume and quality
- 20%
- Estimated business benefit
- $12M
The Context
Selling fiber required sellers to become systems experts
For a nationwide telecommunications sales organization, determining whether a business could receive fiber was rarely a simple yes-or-no question.
Eligibility depended on the address, type of property, nearby infrastructure, available equipment, installation schedules, and several product rules. The information existed, but it was spread across 12 tools that could return conflicting answers.
Experienced sellers developed their own workarounds. They messaged managers, called trusted colleagues, and compared multiple systems until they felt confident enough to speak with a customer. Only the most experienced people knew which answer to trust or how to escalate a questionable result.
The difficulty continued after the sale. Recording a completed order in Salesforce involved a lengthy sequence of forms and repeatable data entry. The process could take approximately 60 minutes, so sellers often postponed it until the end of the day—or several days later.
That created consequences across the organization:
Eligible prospects could be overlooked.
Ineligible customers could receive incorrect expectations.
Deals could be delayed or canceled after a customer had agreed.
Unsuccessful installation visits could create avoidable expense.
Managers received incomplete or delayed pipeline information.
Sellers spent time navigating software instead of developing new business.
This was more than an interface problem. It was a product, workflow, data, and adoption problem operating at enterprise scale.
What was really preventing sellers from moving faster?
Leadership already knew that usability and data quality were contributing to the problem. However, seller compliance was still considered a major part of the explanation.
Four months of research and preparation revealed a different picture.
Carl led a time-and-motion study and the creation of the organization's first end-to-end blueprint of the sales process. The work documented every seller action, tool, handoff, supporting system, and data dependency—from identifying a prospect to recording a completed order.
More than a dozen sellers, managers, engineers, executives, and operational stakeholders contributed through interviews, observation, collaborative workshops, and a Google Ventures-style design sprint. Sellers completed real tasks while the research team documented what they actually did—not merely what the official process said they should do.
For many leaders, the resulting blueprint was the first time the entire system had been visible in one place.
“This is the best tool we've been given access to. I use it every day, and it makes me feel like the business is investing in how I work.”
Discovering the Root Cause
Sellers were not avoiding the process. They were responding rationally to it.
The service blueprint shifted the conversation from individual seller behavior to the environment in which sellers were being asked to perform.
Different seller cohorts had been trained at different times, using different technology and interpretations of the process. New tools had been introduced without fully replacing old ones. Critical knowledge lived with experienced employees rather than in a governed product.
The research identified four connected causes:
1. Fragmented tools
Sellers had to move between 12 systems to complete one sales journey.
2. Conflicting data
Different tools could produce different eligibility answers for the same address.
3. Complex business rules
Correct decisions required technical knowledge that most sellers could not reasonably be expected to maintain.
4. A burdensome transaction process
Salesforce remained essential, but its generic workflow did not reflect the way these sellers worked.
Additional training could not resolve those structural issues. The organization needed to redesign the experience around the seller's actual job while preserving Salesforce and the authoritative enterprise data behind it.
The new product goal
Give every seller a fast, trustworthy path from an address to an eligible opportunity and a correctly recorded order—without requiring them to understand the systems working behind the scenes.
Deeper Discovery
What became clear when we mapped the entire service?
The team found that sellers were doing invisible integration work themselves.
They were comparing databases, interpreting network information, reconciling contradictory results, and finding the right operational team when something looked wrong. A process that appeared simple in a presentation was extraordinarily complicated in practice.
The service blueprint gave product, design, engineering, data, training, and sales leadership a shared model of the problem.
Principles that guided development
Start with the seller's real workflow.
Make the authoritative answer unmistakable.
Preserve Salesforce as the operational backbone.
Automate predictable and repetitive data entry.
Communicate uncertainty instead of hiding it.
Route feedback directly to the team capable of resolving it.
Measure usage and outcomes from the beginning.
Avoid creating another disconnected sales tool.
The Solution
1. Search an address—or an entire list
A seller could enter one or multiple prospect addresses. Bulk results appeared in a clear table and map, making the experience useful for both individual opportunities and outbound prospecting.
2. See an authoritative eligibility result in seconds
Clear green and red indicators showed what could be sold. Sellers also received estimated installation timing based on factors such as property type, nearby equipment, and operational schedules.
Addresses requiring additional investigation were identified with a confidence warning and routed for manual review. Previously, many of these opportunities appeared simply as unavailable and could be missed entirely.
When information was missing or incorrect, the seller could submit feedback to the appropriate team with one click. That escalation path had previously been known mainly by experienced sellers.
3. Create the deal in Salesforce
Once the seller identified an eligible opportunity, they could create the deal and complete the required order information through a simplified form.
Repeatable actions and data entry were automated, while Salesforce remained the system of record. The resulting workflow reduced the time required to record a completed sale from approximately 60 minutes to 10 minutes.
One experience, supported by enterprise systems
The product brought address lookup, customer information, service eligibility, product compatibility, bundle options, promotions, installation timing, and order creation into one seller journey.
Salesforce remained the long-term investment and operational backbone. Business logic and reusable capabilities were implemented through its data model and APIs, while custom software provided an interface designed for the specific needs of B2B sellers.
The 12 legacy seller tools were approved for retirement following launch. Their planned four-to-six-month shutdown period continued beyond Carl's involvement in the initiative.
Product Delivery and Adoption
Built with sellers, then rolled out nationwide
Following four months of discovery, blueprinting, and stakeholder alignment, the team moved into a six-month development and rollout period.
Carl led the overall initiative with support from an enterprise architect.
The core product team included three to four dedicated developers, one product designer, one product manager, product research support, and enterprise data, Salesforce, training, and sales stakeholders.
Carl led executive communications, managed a $3.5 million delivery budget, and oversaw the product, design, research, and development teams.
The product launched first with a regional seller group in Chicago. Feedback from that release informed the broader rollout before the experience was made available to approximately 5,000 sellers nationwide.
Adoption was treated as part of the product—not an activity left until the end. The delivery team partnered with official training groups, seller managers announced the release, facilitated training sessions introduced the workflow, and seller champions supported team-by-team adoption.
End-to-end clickstream analytics measured how sellers used the experience and supported before-and-after reporting.
Results
A faster workflow—and better information at the moment of sale
- 60 → 10 min
- Time required to complete and record a sale
- 15%
- Of seller time redirected to prospecting and customer conversations
- 20%
- Improvement in lead volume and quality
Additional outcomes
One consistent interface in place of 12 seller tools.
Eligibility answers returned in seconds instead of requiring hours of investigation.
A nationwide release reaching approximately 5,000 sellers.
Clearer handling of uncertain addresses that previously appeared unavailable.
Faster, more complete Salesforce records for management reporting.
Twelve legacy tools approved for retirement.
An estimated $12 million business benefit based on increased qualified leads and fewer false-positive opportunities.
Why It Matters
For sales leaders
Sellers gained more time to prospect, greater confidence during customer conversations, and a faster path from agreement to recorded order.
For data leaders
Existing enterprise data became a usable operational product. Authoritative sources were brought into the seller's workflow, improving both frontline decisions and the quality of information returned to management.
For product and technology leaders
The organization simplified the employee experience without replacing its core platform. Salesforce remained the backbone, custom software addressed the specialized workflow, and legacy seller tools received a clear retirement path.
Product magic at enterprise scale
Project Klondike did not succeed because the team added another interface.
It succeeded because the team established a measurable product goal, studied the entire service, translated research into a delivery roadmap, worked through enterprise dependencies, instrumented the experience, and planned for adoption from the beginning.
The result was a product that made complex network data feel simple: enter an address, understand the opportunity, and create the deal.
This founder story reflects the approach Fyve Labs brings to enterprise product work today—connecting ambitious adoption goals, customer and employee insight, enterprise data, and custom software to produce measurable outcomes.
This is a Fyve Labs Founder Story. The work was led by Fyve Labs co-founder Carl during a previous in-house role, before Fyve Labs was established. Organization, product, and customer names have been generalized, and results reflect operational measurements and estimates available at the time.
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