A Best Kept Secret: Harnessing Design Thinking in B2B Sales
10 minutes
Luca D’Urbino
Would you build your 3-story dream home on a foundation of mud and straw?
Sales leaders in B2B enterprises grapple with a pressing challenge: how to meet relentless growth goals when clients have more choices than ever before, technology’s promise is so far reaching that it demands the involvement of many decision makers, and the development of complex, strategic solutions take considerable time to architect?
Conventional sales models typically prioritize short-term revenue gains at the expense of enduring customer relationships. Compounding this, the relentless pressure from investors and shareholders can trap companies in outdated sales strategies, even when they no longer yield desired results. To thrive in this dynamic landscape, sales leaders must leverage new approaches to creating value with clients and growing revenue.
Enter Design Thinking—an innovation methodology long celebrated for its transformative impact on product development. While Design Thinking has been a mainstay in the realm of product and service design for decades, its application to the sales process remains largely unexplored. However, the inherent tools and principles of Design Thinking hold immense potential in unlocking revenue and customer value.
Applied in a sales context, a Design Thinking approach, emphasizes empathy, encouraging sales professionals to immerse themselves in the world of their clients and their customers, gaining a deep understanding of their challenges, aspirations, and motivations.
By adopting a customer-centered approach, sales teams can uncover unique insights into the needs of their clients’ customers—insights that traditional market research or AI algorithms may overlook. And a Design Thinking approach leads with a bias for co-creation, which means the customer is involved earlier in the process and is more likely to want to buy what they help create.
What’s Different and Unique
After a decade of collaboration with industry leaders such as Microsoft, Salesforce, C1, Akamai, our research and hands-on experience has crystallized into a transformative blueprint for Go-to-Market leaders. This approach involves:
- Embracing the role of a “Customer Anthropologist” employing design techniques to conduct deep discovery into your customer and their customer.
- Generating insights about your customer’s business that includes the human, technology, and business elements to help reframe the problem/opportunity.
- Co-creating with your customer at every stage in a deal cycle to cultivate increased levels of commitment and engagement.
- Leveraging the strategic use of tools such as Abstraction Laddering, the 5 Why’s, Customer Journey maps, Vision mapping to learn together and align on solutions that drive value.
- Building a mutual success plan with your customer to jointly agree on milestones and deliverables.
It may seem obvious, but these strategies are alarmingly different from the way most people and teams sell. The pressure of quarterly results and quota’s lead account executives into transactional behavior, listening just for the problem they can solve, leading with product versus questions, and driving for a rapid close, often leaving larger opportunities on the table.
What About Those Short-Term Time Pressures
Recognizing the relentless time pressures faced by sales leaders to achieve quarterly revenue targets cannot be overlooked. To navigate this challenge while also fostering Design Thinking in sales, organizations can adopt these techniques starting with their most strategic accounts — those with high potential and valuable executive connections. By applying Design Thinking principles to these key accounts, the highest return on investment is possible. Ultimately, this focus can lead to a profound shift in sales methodology and mindset across the board.
Example of Application and Results
A world leading software company, and hyper scaler, has embraced a design thinking approach on multiple levels. For their most strategic accounts, they created a specific team who engaged customers in a 6–8-week co-creation process to envision the future together and articulate the business value of transformation. The results were wildly successful: average contract values increased by 7X, close rates jumped from 12% to 50%, and close times reduced by 70%, from 18 months to 4 months.
At the individual level, a team of 33 enterprise account executives went through a 3 month process to learn and apply innovative discovery strategies to increase pipeline, build relationships outside of the IT C-suite and to build customer value. As a result, the group added $18 million in Stage 1 and Stage 2 pipeline, $900,000 in closed (formerly unsighted) revenue and increased the number of executive decision makers by 146.
The dissemination of Design Thinking skills continues, as the organization pursues various strategies to build the Go-To-Market team’s (19,000 people) aptitude for these consultative skills, including a new model for sales engagement that has Design Thinking principles at its center.
Invitation
Start small. Customer centricity is as much a mindset as it is a toolset. Build the co-creative/customer centric muscle of your GTM teams and leaders by asking them to determine how they can start co-creating with their customers immediately.
Encourage your Account Executives/GTM team members to get creative and find ways to put themselves in the shoes of their customer, and/or their customer’s customer. Can they be a customer of their customer? Can they interview an employee of your customer? This data from this discovery will help them keep the customer’s point of view front and center as the team engages with the customer.
There are many ways to get on the same side of the table as your customer, short circuiting a transactional mode of selling, and driving for greater value on all sides.
Co-Founder at Somersault Innovation