Challenge & Selection:

I am responsible for driving pipeline across the sales cycle in the IT industry, from an operations  perspective. My work lies between 3 defined teams with different functions: pre-sales, sales and  marketing. Marketing creates the awareness and interest in the market, pre-sales (a group of technical  experts & engineers) provides thought leadership in the market and helps build the final offer to the  clients, and sales which creates trust with the customer and walks them through the buyer’s journey.

After much analysis of pipeline reports, I discovered that the teams are not aligned on criteria and  processes for leads and their handoff between departments. This misalignment impacts our collective  KPIs and creates friction between the working groups.

I first approached this challenge by sending a questionnaire to the teams asking them to define a lead and  when they felt they should take ownership of it in the sales cycle in the hopes of finding common ground.  This proved to be problematic when the results showed the chasm between departments. I called a team  meeting to discuss the results of the questionnaire and the gaps I was seeing, but that devolved into an  argument and apathy to even identifying a problem. I needed to try something new, something that would  help the teams empathize with this misalignment but also start a different type of conversation.

I chose to apply the visualization tool with the teams, but I wanted it to be interactive, and in the form of  a physical exercise.

Application:

I facilitated a sales funnel exercise, using real people, for the teams to actually see the sales funnel in  person rather than on a screen/spreadsheet.  The assumptions/rules established for this exercise are as  follows:

-  We are in a fictional addressable market where our company is already positioned well as a brand

-  12 people will physically represent our prospects from the addressable market

-  Accepting that prospects will drop off and for the purposes of this exercise, the reasons would not be  explored

-  When prospects drop off, they will physically leave the room

-  We will achieve 2 qualified leads and 1 sale (i.e.1 person remaining from the original group of 12)

The experiment:

12 people are brought into a room facing representatives from sales, pre-sales and marketing. As the  facilitator, I pose the question “what are we going to do to make 1 of these individuals buy what we are  selling”.  Members of the team are to propose actions, assign who executes and after each action is taken  the same question will be asked for the remaining prospects until we end with 1.

# of  Prospects  Actions  Team   Results

12

Social listening & digital  campaigns

Marketing  (proposed &  executed)

All agree on suggested actions and that they are  contacts, not leads

Email campaign w/ thought  leadership asset to download

Marketing  (proposed &  executed)

All agree on suggested actions and that they are  still contacts, not leads. No one knows when to  hand off or to whom.

Phone calls to further qualify  prospects interest

Marketing   (proposed &  executed)

All agree on suggested actions. Marketing  believes the people are leads, but Sales &  Presales does not.

Campaign w/ call to action:  Offer free workshop or  assessment or a lunch and  learn w/ a success story

Sales  (proposed) &  Marketing  (executed)

All cannot agree on suggested actions, the type  of lead (i.e. warm lead) or if they should stay with  marketing or go to pre-sales and/or sales

conduct workshop or  assessment

Sales  (proposed) &  Presales  (executed)

Marketing agrees on suggested action. Presales  argues that it is wasted $/effort w/o a high  probability for closing a deal. Team agrees the  people are hot leads, and that sales should own  the cycle from here

Requirements are gathered  at workshop/assessment.  Offers are proposed.

Sales &  Presales  1 sale is made

Insights:

This exercise allowed all parties involved to experience the gaps I saw from the questionnaire. In the  beginning when there were more people in the room, everyone relied on the ideas from marketing, as if  they were not vested in the entire end to end process. As the numbers of prospects began to dwindle, the  sales and presales teams became more engaged in generating ideas (i.e. not just relying on marketing but  rather opening up to different suggestions).  Conversely as the numbers dwindled, marketing became less  engaged in the process.

Using people, instead of data points in a CRM, led to the teams speaking differently. For example, the  conversation went from “handing off a lead” to “what is the handshake point” between our teams on  where we take this potential customer.   It also created a creative environment for all of us to ask questions  objectively, such as “what do you consider a warm lead vs a hot lead” and to agree on a criteria.

We did not finalize the process, but rather discovered that we need to explore processes further, which  was a surprise to all. We even uncovered a problem no one had considered- what happens to the 11  prospects that did not buy, and do we have a process in place to stop funnel leakage and pull them back  in the funnel? At the end of the day three different teams came together and left as one team with a  mission to further explore processes and improvements, bringing us one step closer to the “what is” phase  in design thinking.

Approach:

I feel this approach worked because it moved the problems to a collective setting rather than an individual  departmental one that no one wanted to champion.  I originally thought of mind mapping the roles of  each department, but after the initial meeting, I realized that the teams needed to empathize with each  other and that mind mapping was only facilitating me to empathize with them. In the end the visualization  approach built a bridge between the teams that was necessary for us to identify problems and work on  the solutions together.

