REFLECTION ABOUT VISUALISATION

Challenge and selection

I worked into the marketing department of one of the most recognised beauty company. Since at the  beginning of my involvement as brand manager, I had to secure to sales representants the best  effective way  to introduce, develop and support the brand during sales cycles. Everytime they went to  customers for presenting novelties and promotions they had a tons of printed copies (as products  insights) to be showed for sellinng and introducing new items. In this way, we had a wide wasting of  time to prepare all materials printed, sharing that instruments that seemeed not to be very practiful for  doing the right job. We discovered, discussing with some sales reps that usually they didn’t show all  materials and often some customers asked were scared by too much information to be explained,  refusing to hear boring speeches. So there was something to be find for improving the interaction and  get all persons involved more engaged.

So I decided to follow the way of visualization as the best tool to define what the real situation was and  to  extrapolate more insights for building a new and powerful way of communication for sales cycles to  sales reps and customers. Why that tool? Firstly because visualization offers a better chance to see  the "whole" as Prof. Pink describ in his book "A whole new mind", as cross-working of both parts of the  brain, second as for the opportunity to have a deep immersion into the meeting between the Sales rep  and customer

Application and Insights:

At the beginning, we conducted a survey through the sales team and customers where we asked their  opinion about the critical points about the printed sales cycle materials:

-  Practicality

-  Ergonomics

-  Attractiveness for customers

With the results we designed the situation of the meeting betweeen sales man and customer where  the material for the sales cycle could be showed

The main insight outcomes were very powerful: usually the space where reps could leave the printed  copies was too small and It was difficult to handle the sheets during the presentation but the baddest  news were customers are always tight to hear from the rep so they started feeling very impatient if  they saw a lot word to be read, for that reps lost sales because of that problem.

With this insights, we built a brand new magazine, printed for every cycle, slim, with a short  introduction for novelties and promotion and always full of images and photos to create engagement  for sales and customers. Better than that, we noticed and increasing of sales during the first visit of  the rep for the cycle.

In my opinion, design thinking can definitely help to find better solutions, also in this case because It  can easily help to figure it out the situation and give more power for translating data into insights and  solution. With a clear state of art, your brain can work in a fluent way and discover more

Approach:

Thinking about a next opportunity to use visualisation,I will prefere drawning a “pre- state of art”  before every survey because I think you can affect data and results, I noticed that can be better  having more pure mind about things  e giving “open space” to creativity in every part of the process  of th design thinking.

