Honda Lead Management System
Redesigning how Honda's car dealership sales teams manage, prioritise, and convert customer leads.
ROLE
UX UI Designer | Researcher
TIMELINE
6 Months
Team
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UX UI Designer & Research (Myself)
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Business Analyst
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Developers
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Product/Strategy Consultant
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Dealer Principles
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Sales Managers
Year
2025
Platform
Salesforce Experience Cloud, Honda Dealer Portal
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Miro, Salesforce, SAP
Project Overview
Honda's car dealerships across Australia receive enquiries through multiple channels — website forms, test drive requests, marketing campaigns, and walk-in visits. All of these flow into a centralised lead management portal that sales teams are expected to use every day.
The platform was intended to help dealerships capture enquiries, track follow-ups, manage test drives, monitor their pipeline, and convert leads into opportunities. In practice, it wasn't doing any of those things reliably. Dealer feedback was consistent: the system didn't match how their teams actually worked, and as a result, adoption was low and reporting was unreliable.
I joined the project as the sole UX/UI designer, working within a cross-functional team that included a business analyst, a product strategy consultant, Salesforce developers, and representatives from Honda's dealer network. The brief was to fix the experience — which meant first understanding exactly where it was failing.
THE CHALLENGE
The system's problems weren't technical. The Salesforce infrastructure was functional. What wasn't working was the layer between the technology and the people using it — a gap that had built up over years of iterative development without any user-centred design input.
Sales consultants were managing leads with sticky notes, personal spreadsheets, and memory. Managers had no reliable view of their team's pipeline. Honda's national marketing teams were working with reporting data that didn't reflect reality. Everyone had found a workaround — and the portal had become something people opened and closed without trusting.
WHAT MAKES THIS DIFFERENT FROM THE DMS PROJECT
Both projects involved Honda dealerships and Salesforce. But they had different scopes, different stakeholders, and different problems.
The DMS Motorcycle project focused on the portal architecture — the system structure, lead routing, and the overall dealer portal redesign. This project went deeper into the day-to-day operational experience of the car division sales team — specifically how individual consultants and managers interact with leads from the moment of capture through to conversion.
It was a longer engagement (6 months vs 4) and involved more direct time with dealership staff on the ground.
DISCOVERY & RESEARCH
I approached the research in two phases.
The first was internal. I ran structured discovery sessions with Honda's sales and marketing teams to map the system architecture, understand how leads were supposed to move through the platform, and identify where the intended process had broken down. These sessions surfaced the gap between what the system was designed to do and what was actually happening on the ground.
The second phase took me outside the office. I visited dealerships across Victoria and NSW to observe sales consultants in their actual work environment — watching how they opened their day, how they found and prioritised leads, how they logged follow-ups, and how they handed off information to their managers. What I saw confirmed what the internal sessions had suggested: the system wasn't trusted, and the workarounds were deeply embedded.
Across both phases, research involved stakeholder interviews with Dealer Principals, Sales Managers, Sales Consultants, and Honda's internal sales and marketing operations teams, as well as structured workshops and direct observation of real dealership workflows.
Who I spoke to:
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Dealer Principals
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Sales Consultants
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Honda Sales Representatives
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Sales Managers
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Internal Honda Operations and Marketing teams
WHAT THE RESEARCH Found
Sales Team Insights
During internal discovery sessions with Honda's sales teams, a consistent pattern emerged. Lead assignment and management relied entirely on manual updates, causing data to become stale and inconsistent almost immediately. Activity tracking within the lead record was unreliable — follow-ups were frequently managed through phone notes, personal calendars, and external spreadsheets rather than inside the portal.
Consultants reported that the portal homepage gave them almost no useful information when they arrived in the morning. There was no way to quickly understand which leads needed immediate attention, which were overdue, or which had been sitting untouched for too long.
"The system is fine for entering data. It's useless for actually selling cars."
- Sales Manager, Honda Dealership (NSW)
Dealership Visits — Victoria & NSW
Visiting dealerships in person revealed a layer of operational reality that internal workshops couldn't surface. What we found was a workforce that had largely given up on the portal as a reliable source of truth — and had built workarounds that, while functional, created serious problems for data quality and management visibility.
The most common workaround: a printed lead list, updated manually at the start of each day and marked up with a highlighter as calls were made. That sheet — not the Salesforce portal — was how leads were being managed.
Key Findings
Consultants kept printed lead sheets on their desks — tracking leads with a highlighter because they didn't trust the portal.
60%+ of interview themes pointed to the same recurring friction points across capture, processing, and follow-up.
Dealership teams had built their own workaround systems — spreadsheets, personal call logs, sticky notes.
Problems Identified
6 gaps that made the portal unusable
No Lead Prioritisation
All leads in a flat queue — no urgency, no intent signals. A 3-day-old lead looked identical to one just submitted.
Missing Qualification Data
No trade-in, finance interest, or purchase timeline fields. Consultants had to manually qualify every lead before assessing its value.
Duplicate Leads Everywhere
No deduplication logic. Customers submitting multiple enquiries created multiple records — leading to double contact and wasted effort.
Activity Tracking Nobody Used
Logging interactions inside the portal was slower than keeping personal notes. Records showed almost nothing about what had actually happened.
No Follow-up Management
No reminders, no SLA timers, no escalation. Leads aged silently until they were eventually marked as lost.
No Bulk Actions
Every status change, reassignment, or note had to be applied individually. High-volume queues became impossibly time-consuming.
Problem Statement - and how it shaped the solution
The existing lead management system fails to support dealership sales workflows in the moments that matter most. Lead prioritisation, follow-up tracking, and pipeline visibility all depend on manual effort — which means the system isn't trusted, and the data it holds isn't reliable. Sales teams have built their own workarounds. The redesign needs to bring their real workflows back inside the platform.
Design Goals
Improve lead visibility
consultants should be able to understand their lead landscape at a glance, without opening individual records.
Simplify lead triage
reduce the number of steps required to qualify, assign, and action a new lead.
Better follow-up management
make logging interactions feel like a natural part of the workflow, not an afterthought.
Pipeline insights for managers
consultants should be able to understand their lead landscape at a glance, without opening individual records.
Reduce manual work
make logging interactions feel like a natural part of the workflow, not an afterthought.
DESIGN PROCESS
I began with low-fidelity flow mapping in FigJam, working through each key user journey before moving to wireframes. The priority was to understand the shape of the experience before committing to visual decisions.
Wireframes were shared with Honda's internal sales team and a group of dealership contacts for early feedback. The main insight from that round: consultants wanted fewer clicks between seeing a lead and taking action on it. That shaped the layout of the lead list view and the follow-up flow significantly.
High-fidelity designs were built in Figma using Honda's brand system — dark navigation, red accents, and a clean white content canvas optimised for data-dense screens.
The Redesign
New Features Introduced
Homepage — Operational Control Centre
The homepage was the most visible failure of the original system. It showed almost nothing. The redesigned dashboard transforms it into an operational overview that gives every consultant and manager an immediate picture of where things stand — active leads by status, overdue follow-ups, pending approvals, and today's scheduled activity.
The goal was to make the first thing a consultant sees every morning useful enough to replace their printed spreadsheet.
Redesigned Homepage Dashboard
Transformed into an operational control centre — active leads, overdue tasks, pending approvals and today's schedule visible immediately on arrival.
In Progress Leads View
A dedicated view of all actively-worked leads with last-contact timestamps and next-action indicators — replacing the printed spreadsheet.
Overdue Activities & SLA Timers
Automatic escalation when follow-up deadlines pass. Visible to both consultant and manager — nothing goes unattended without a flag.
Customer 360 View
Every lead now shows previous enquiries, ownership history, and interaction logs — so no consultant ever starts a customer conversation from zero.
E-Diary Integration
Test drives, follow-up calls, and appointments managed directly inside the portal. Consultants never need to leave the system to schedule.
Lead Scoring + Bulk Actions
Leads scored Hot / Warm / Cold on intake. Bulk status updates, reassignments, and actions — turning a 20-step process into a 2-step one.
Lead Lifecycle
The redesigned lead workflow
Lead Capture
Customer submits enquiry. Qualification fields collected at point of capture — finance, trade-in, timeline.
Validation
System checks for duplicates. Lead scored Hot / Warm / Cold based on intent signals and routed automatically.
First Contact
Consultant receives notification with full lead context. SLA timer starts. Activity logged automatically.
Follow-up
Reminder system tracks next actions. Overdue leads escalated to manager. All interactions recorded in timeline.
Opportunity
Qualified lead converted. Vehicle stock synced from SAP. Pricing and config visible in-portal.
Prototype & User testing
The redesigned interface was developed to second-stage prototype. Testing is currently underway with:
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Sales Consultants
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Dealership Managers
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Dealer Principals
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Sales Administrators
The testing phase focuses on validating workflow improvements, confirming that the new dashboard surfaces the right information in the right order, and identifying any edge cases in how different dealership sizes use the system.
OUTCOME
The redesigned system addresses the core reasons dealership teams stopped trusting the portal. By surfacing the right information at the right time and building follow-up logging into the natural workflow, the new experience is designed to bring lead management back inside the system — where it can be tracked, measured, and improved.
Key projected improvements based on workflow analysis:
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Estimated 40% reduction in time spent manually scanning for priority leads, through status indicators and the new Today View dashboard.
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Duplicate lead reduction through deduplication logic built into the capture flow.
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Improved reporting reliability for Honda's national marketing teams as activity logging becomes a natural part of the consultant workflow rather than a separate task.
REFLECTION
This project reinforced something the Honda DMS work had already shown me: when an enterprise system is failing, the problem is almost never the technology. The Salesforce infrastructure worked. The integrations were functional. What had broken down was the design layer — the part that determines whether real people find the system worth using.
The most valuable moments of the project happened outside the office. Watching a sales consultant start her day by opening a personal spreadsheet — before even touching the Honda portal — made the problem concrete in a way that no stakeholder interview had. That image informed every subsequent design decision.
If I were doing this project again, I'd push for usability testing earlier in the process — specifically on the dashboard layout and priority logic, which went through several more iteration cycles than they needed to. Early testing on wireframes would have surfaced those issues before they were built into high-fidelity designs.