Reﬂection Exercise - Visualization

The Challenge: The challenge that I’m working on is developing an improved sales process for our ﬁeld sales  team. There are multiple stakeholders including, the sales reps, sales management, inside  sales associates, ﬁnance and marketing. The problem is that currently the process is too  complicated and interpretations of the stages vary across departments and individual  members. This causes signiﬁcant variability and quality issues with the data and results in  unreliable reporting of our sales pipeline, therefore eﬀecting forecasting.

Tool Selection & Application: The tool I selected to highlight in this assignment was Visualization. I selected this tool to  achieve a shared understanding of the problem among a diverse group of stakeholders. By  oﬀering images of our ten-step sales process and of the variations of how diﬀerent  stakeholders were interpreting the stages, I am seeking to create a common understanding of  the problem through visualization. Getting all parties to understand the problem in the same  way  is paramount in deﬁning “what is” in order to generate useful ideation and insight during  the “what if” process. I will also use visualization later on in the process to illustrate the new  options of the sales process when we seek to determine “what wows”.

Two representatives from each of the stakeholder groups listed above were involved in the  “what is” session. Each were presented with a graphical representation of the sales process on  a piece of paper. They were asked to deﬁne in their own words the diﬀerent stages. This was  an exercise that helped to further understand the variation in how stages were interpreted and  provided great insight on possible trends and ﬁxes during the “what if” session. When we got  to “what wows” we provided the team with three diﬀerent models of new processes, all had  color coding and easily identiﬁable shapes that helped users properly interpret and identify the  stages.

Insight & Approach: The visualization tool allowed me to extract some very useful insights. In fact the visualization  tool we used ended up becoming part of the solution to the problem. By utilizing colors and  shapes in the prototypes of new sales process stages, stakeholders were able to more easily  interpret the stages and reduce the amount of variability between members. But more than that  the visualization were essential in helping everyone understand the issue in the same way so  that the stakeholders could generate good feedback about why the sales stages were not  working and ideate good solutions. For example we were able to focus in on two stages that  were especially problematic when we illustrated the multiple interpretations that these two  stages received from diﬀerent stakeholders. The illustration used to present to the group during  the “What wows” stage was extremely eﬀective in helping compare options and interpret the  diﬀerences in the solution.

An alternative approach that we might have used for this exercise using visualization would be  to have the participants draw their interpretation of the existing sales process from scratch  instead of providing it to them. This might have given us some diﬀerent insights when just  getting started as is might have demonstrated more variation, or the way that members  thought of the process could have been more deeply revealed. This demonstrates that  visualization as a tool can be varied by how much freedom or responsibility you give to the  participant. For example, are you giving them an illustration to interpret or asking them to  create an illustration based on their interpretation?

Result: Ultimately, we were able to arrive at a new more simpliﬁed sales process that all stakeholders  understood and deﬁned in the same way. Team members were now able to consistently  categorize their stage in the process consistently. This resulted in signiﬁcant improvements in  reporting and forecasting accuracy, which is a huge win for our company when it comes to

Reﬂection Exercise - Visualization

hitting our quarterly revenue estimates. The visualization tool used during our design thinking  sessions to create the new solution was paramount in helping us arrive at the right solution.

