COURSERA – University of Virginia, Darden School of Business - Design Thinking Assignment    Dharmendra Asiri    Washington,DC / March 8, 2019    email djones@gmail.com  linkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmartinez      Challenge    Develop short marketing campaigns towards specific verticals with greater potential in terms of  demand generation by engaging different personas in those companies related to their  cybersecurity challenges.    Selection    After several internal discussions with our marketing team, we defined the scope, marketing  disciplines that we would establish actions and the campaign boundaries in terms of coverage,  deadlines, and a first view about the personas profiling.    Once we finished the first draft internally with the team, we used the visualization tool to engage  the sales team to illustrate our initial ideas, not bringing solutions, but showing our challenges in  terms of execution, but also all alternatives in terms of marketing activities in a simple a visual  way for all involved on this new campaign format. That helped to organize the interrelationships  between the various activities, the motion of the new campaign format mixing all different  marketing tactics, the timeframe that we were expecting to build to compose and how we might  be allocating our resources in marketing, but also in sales to be more effective and achieve the  objectives defined by the leadership team.    Application    In order to establish a sense of agreement on this new approach, cadence, shared  responsibilities, and also all-around important milestones that would be key to prove the  effectiveness of the new process and worthiness of the ideas proposed here.    The use of the visualization was fundamental to have a better group interaction, especially to  define a new motion required for marketing and sales teams in terms of execution, where we  were looking to also reestablish a more productive engagement in engaging and executing  vertical campaigns.

Once we defined a visual "prototype" of what the campaign's motion would look like, we  proceeded to detail each activity that was to be carried out over 45 days. Those campaigns were  named “Sales Plays” where, we considered 15 days for design and produce of all marketing  materials used to engage key accounts within each vertical defined as focus, and also have a  deeper understanding about the available data related to these accounts to help us to generate  insights to change the way that we were engaging in the past, identifying with this new approach  new message patterns that we would like to bring to these potential new customers (here we  use storytelling as a tool to customize our message for each person).    The next 30 days we used to execute the various activities established through the visualization  exercise and at each iteration, we were analyzing all outcomes in real time to ensure that the  new motion met, first the scope and secondly and most importantly, that we would be able to  make all adjustments in time to ensure that the objectives established in terms of pipeline  generation were achieved during that short period of time.    Insight    During the visualization application process, it became clear that the motion initially described  only through words in several discussions had not been clear. Visually engaging in a collaborative  way the new motion was instrumental in breaking the doubts, but more importantly establishing  a sense of agreement that these shorter campaigns require since demands a real and synergistic  approach between sales and marketing to be more effective (to guarantee a better and qualified  pipeline) and less costly (since the elements of the campaign were jointly produced by all the  team).    Approach    I would extend discussions to external stakeholders to our organization, engaging channel  partners and end users (customers in our installed base on those verticals) to go deeper in terms  of engagement, ensuring an even better understanding of the personas requirements related to  cybersecurity, producing with this a mind mapping process and naturally guaranteeing with this  a better execution (learning launching).      === Dharmendra Asiri ===

