Travis Francis - Competitive Invoice Upload

Competitive Invoice Upload

Reducing up to 8 hours of order guide creation to just a few minutes for 60% of prospect customers

Role
Lead Product Designer

Team
Product Manager, Back-end Architecture, Legal Compliance, Web Engineers, iOS and Android Engineers

Duration
9 Months (not yet live)

Summary

Sysco sales consultants (SCs) often spend over 3 hours manually creating personalized order guides for new prospects, a key step in driving first purchases.

Due to time constraints and catalog complexity, over 60% of new customer accounts never receive an order guide, resulting in missed conversion opportunities and stagnant growth.

To address this, we designed an AI-powered tool that enables SCs to upload competitor invoices and rapidly generate a Sysco-equivalent list, saving hours of manual work. The tool is expected to boost engagement, reduce time-to-first-purchase, and increase market share by streamlining early prospecting efforts.

3-8 hours

to manually build an order guide

60%

of new customers never get an order guide

Problem

Building order lists for prospective customers is a manual, error-prone, time consuming task that can take anywhere from 3 hours for more tenured SCs and up to 8 hours for newer SCs.

Reps often had to manually cross-reference SKUs, prices, and product attributes with Sysco’s catalog. The process isn't scalable, and reps have limited time to follow up with warm leads.

Customers also have no self-service way to easily build lists based on their regular purchases from their current purveyors, creating a barrier for the onboarding process.

The current sales consultant's workflow often requires repetitive manual input per line item, creating hours of work depending on their familiarity with Sysco's catalog.

"For me, it's easy to find this stuff. But for a new person, this would be life changing because I bet you it would take him or her hours... and hours... and hours... to build a list."

T.J. S

Sales Consultant IV (8 years)

Discovery

PM, Research, and I explored a wizard-based onboarding solution similar to Spotify's model - users would select industry, categories, menu items via a brief questionnaire to curate a list of relevant top-selling products.

However, two discoveries changed our approach:

First, SC interviews revealed that nearly 60% of prospects provide competitive invoices during initial conversations.

Second, our back-end architecture team was experimenting with integrating Vertex's AI model into our search algorithm for promising accuracy improvements.

This convergence of user behavior and technical capability pivoted our strategy from manual data entry to automated invoice processing - transforming an 8-hour task into minutes while leveraging existing customer assets.

Initial concepts explored creating an initial order guide via a questionnaire to curate a list of relevant products.

Solution

I collaborated with the Sysco LABS team to workshop a rough outline for a web-based and mobile app interface that enables users take photos of, or upload, a purchase invoice.

OCR + back-end matching logic would recommend Sysco Shop catalog alternatives with pricing and availability. Users can select which invoice items they want before prompting the back-end to perform a search that aggregates the recommended products into an order guide.

Future-facing plans include:

1. Enabling users to review/edit recommended invoice item names in edge cases where the OCR incorrectly interprets item names and other attributes.

2. Include further search refinement tools via selecting number of recommendations per query, stock type, and in-house branded products.

3. Rolling out an interface adaptable for customer self-service onboarding with improved OCR and product recommendations.

4. Explore options for uploading photos captured on mobile devices directly to the web platform for a more seamless experience.

The implementation of Gemini and Vertex automates sales consultants' workflow down to just a few minutes with a few clicks.

"Going line by line, check the box 'add to list', select which list, click submit, then go down to the next line, and do it 100 more times... and you guys are figuring out a better way to do it."

Kahner T

Sales Consultant (6 years)

Validation

The product discovery group pod (including myself as the lead designer) partnered with sales teams to observe current workflows and identify friction points.

I partnered with UX Research to conduct interviews with SCs to understand how they go about prospecting and onboarding new customers. We also ran moderated prototype interactions with SCs to test the clarity of upload and match flow.

Qualitative feedback with SCs led me to iterate on affordances and streamlined actions based on feedback (e.g. bulk accept/reject, match confidence).

33.3% of SCs

create an order guide before their second meeting with a prospect

93.3% of SCs

create an order guide before a customer's first order

"It's a great resource, especially for me when I'm still learning a lot about the products and I don't have an extensive product knowledge."

Sophia H

Sales Consultant (8 months)

Sales consultants primarily utilize Sysco Shop's web interface more often than the mobile app; we will monitor how they utilize photo uploads for invoices on web to inform a seamless solution for photos captured on their phones.

Results (Projected)

Expected to reduce SC's time per invoice by ~90% (from 3–8 hours → under 10 mins).

Initial tests conducted by Grid Dynamics (via integration with Salesforce) with 3 SCs shows a significant uptick in follow-up activity and lead quality.

The groundwork for self-service adoption among customers is established with the patterns already outlined for SCs' user journey.

Bolstered potential to increase conversion of competitive leads and streamline onboarding.

My Role

I led end-to-end product design for the web and mobile app interfaces, from early concept mapping of a generic onboarding flow to delivering a prototype leveraged for user testing and engineering LOE.

I collaborated closely with sales, architecture, and product teams to scope MVP and future iterations through weekly sync-ups and rapid iterations.

With research, I co-ran validation sessions and synthesized feedback for iterative refinements.

This workflow outlines an exploration of future enhancements, which includes the original questionnaire concept from discovery, along with item recommendations from prospect menus.

tl;dr

Situation
Sales consultants (SCs) are spending anywhere between 3–8 hours manually creating order guides for prospect customers, resulting in over 60% of new accounts never receiving one.

Task
Design a tool that leverages a competitor's invoice to instantly generate an initial order guide on lists, streamlining onboarding and increase first-purchase conversion.

Action
Partnered across product, engineering, and research to craft an AI-powered invoice-to-list workflow, support variable use cases, and ensure traceability. We also collaborated closely with legal and sales teams to account for broader compliance implications for the business.

Result (projected)
Prototype testing showed strong SC enthusiasm, with up to an estimated 95% reduction of time creating an order guide per prospect. Shipped version will support attribution, funnel tracking, and list performance analytics to validate market share expansion.