Finding the right contacts faster

When sales reps research a company, one of the main questions is who at that company they should contact. The company page should help them answer that quickly.

In practice, this page was not doing that job well. The default contact list was often not useful, so users had to leave the page and switch into a more advanced workflow to do the real filtering.

This project aimed to keep more of that prospecting work on the company page by giving users a better starting list of contacts and the filters they actually needed.

To help sales reps quickly find who to reach out to in a company page, the page defaulted to a preset list of likely decision-makers ("Buying Group"). Prior research had already shown that users often found that list unhelpful, but they could not turn it off to widen the view to other employees.

The page also surfaced only a few other filters compared to Advanced Search, a separate screen built for prospecting across the whole database. Most sessions followed the same pattern: users opened the Employees tab in a company page, decided Buying Group wasn't the right fit, and clicked through the Management Level and Department links to Advanced Search to filter properly over there. The company page became a shortcut into another tool instead of a place to decide who to contact.

The goal was to shift more of the prospecting work onto the tab itself to make prospecting faster and easier. To avoid disrupting existing habits, we kept the links into Advanced Search untouched for users who relied on them.

We ran qualitative user interviews, focusing on single-company prospecting. Users mentioned they mostly relied on a small set of filters: job title, management level, department, and location. Opportunity stage (pulled from their CRM) mattered too, because they adjusted who to target by deal stage: lower management when a deal was early, C-level when it was late. Most were looking for 5-10 contacts to talk to per company, and the specific titles varied by firmographics. They wanted C-level at small companies, directors at large ones, and different titles depending on industry.

We also researched how competitors (Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 6sense, DemandBase, etc.) show employees in company pages. Most showed contacts in a grid with more filters than what we allowed (e.g., department, management level, job title, location). Many surfaced relevant contacts based on persona or engagement signals. Several showed engagement reasons (seniority, tenure, recent activity) directly on each contact.

The interviews and competitor research suggested that users want a short, curated list of contacts to act on based on parameters like deal stage, past engagement, and firmographics. Since Buying Groups weren't helpful in that regard, it was decided to replace them with an AI-recommended set of contacts based on users' past activity in ZoomInfo Sales, which more aligned with what research surfaced. Our design explorations used that as a baseline.

With the research in hand, we gathered fellow designers into a Crazy 8 brainstorm to generate ideas faster. Each designer sketched 8 ideas in 8 minutes on their own. We presented and voted on the strongest ones, then each did a more detailed sketch of the top-voted concept and voted again. Those sketches became the starting point for the concepts below.

All three concepts shared the AI-recommended baseline. They differed across two dimensions: how to handle the filters users needed beyond the default list, and how to display information about each employee.

Advanced Search on the tab

This was the literal answer to the filter problem. We took the Advanced Search filter panel, trimmed it to filters relevant here (job title, department, management level, location, etc.), and put it alongside the AI-Recommended default.

It solved the missing filters problem, but made the tab visually heavy for a place meant for researching one company, and engineering flagged the shared filter panel as a nightmare to maintain across two screens.

Grid view with quick filters

This was a more structural direction. Here, we changed the Management Level and Department links into quick filters on a right-side panel: clicking "C-Level" would apply the filter inline instead of redirecting to Advanced Search. We also changed the table from cards to a grid so each row could show more per contact (CRM status, engagement, location), which users said they wanted so they could decide faster.

The layout restructure was deemed too expensive for the MVP, and changing how the Management and Department links worked risked disrupting existing habits.

Future direction

Other teams were reworking the company page in parallel, moving the Overview info to a left panel. We sketched what the Employees tab could look like inside that layout: grid view, quick filters above the table, AI-recommended contacts as the default. The Management Level and Department widgets moved below the fold, still there to support existing habits, but no longer competing with the contacts that mattered. This concept was parked for when the new page layout would ship.

Product opted for a smaller, lower-risk MVP:

(1) The Buying Group filter is off by default so users can see other employees without being forced through that filter first.

(2) AI-recommended contacts are added as a new default filter, surfacing a short, curated set based on the user's past activity, bypassing the need to filter to find the few contacts users actually want to talk to. A one-time intro popover notified users about the new default.

(3) The missing filters users said they needed are added: job title, department, management level, location, and more.

Management Level and Employees by Department links were kept untouched to avoid disrupting existing workflows and keep the MVP small.

I went on parental leave before release, so I didn't see post-launch feedback. What I would've wanted to measure was whether the AI-recommended list kept prospecting on the Employees tab instead of pushing users to Advanced Search, and whether the model's picks matched who users actually reached out to. Looking back, I'd also run a second round of interviews before finalizing the designs, as that would've helped us pick a direction with more confidence.