Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge:

I work in electrical cable manufacturing industry as a sales support professional to help sales figure  out potential clients and generate relevant opportunities that in turn helps in increasing the  business revenue. I deal with a lot of inputs or data on a daily basis both from sales as well as from  customer interaction to reach to a conclusion as to which customer is relevant for the business,  what is the potential of the customer in terms of the projects that they will undertake and whether  our products fit their requirements and budgets in turn giving us good business relations and  revenues in the long run. The challenge, therefore, was to understand broadly whether we are  reaching the right customer with the right basket of products with less wastage of sales’ time and  efforts to drive more meaningful and relevant business results.

Selection:

I selected the mind mapping tool for my challenge. Mind mapping as a tool allows interaction with  stakeholders to explore their existing perceptions and experience and consolidating all the inputs  to let some themes or patterns emerge to reach one step closer to possible solutions (in form of  what ifs) of a problem. The reason I zeroed on this tool is because it allowed me to gather relevant  and structured information from customers as well as my colleagues which in turn helped me to  present suitable possibilities to address the challenge that I had on my hands.

Application:

The first step in application of mind mapping tool was to work on the data/ ideas (sales inputs) that  I already had with me with regards to existing or possible customers for our organization and  associated opportunities. I segregated the data based on the region and which industry they  operate in and what are the opportunities that require immediate attention. Once this was  completed, I started reaching out to each customer one by one with various trigger questions to  understand their pain and gain points (customer inputs). I repeated the above with my colleagues  as well to understand their challenges and success stories as well. The next step was to analyse  the inputs that I gathered which helped me in seeing the relevance and potential of the existing  opportunities and in turn helped me figure out a way to classify new opportunities as well based  on their relevance and potential. My colleagues and I, not only ended up with more relevant  opportunities than before but also increased our market visibility.

With increased opportunities basket, I was finally able to work on building possible solutions (what  ifs) to reaching out to our potential customers (like targeted sales pitch; readymade samples to  assure quality of our products; tuning our prices accordingly with minimal impact on our margins,  localization options etc.) and proposed the same to sales for further action (what wows and what  works).

Insight:

A very valuable insight that I gained from use of mind mapping tool is that every set of data is  important in order to move to what if stage. Also, involving all interested stakeholders helps in  gathering detailed insights to the problem at hand. I was very sceptic initially with regards to how  to apply to sales and marketing the methodologies of design thinking, but the use of design  thinking tools proved me otherwise.

Approach:

I will use Mind Mapping as a tool always - to qualify potential leads for driving meaningful  business results and to come up with various what ifs. The reason for the same is that it makes  me organised in my approach and brings more productivity. I can also rank potential customers  using this technique and in turn help sales achieve their goals effectively.

