Reflection — Learning Launch  Guiding a Digital-First Mindset Shift in an  Online Enterprise SaaS Business

By Santosh Kumar

Challenge    Enterprise businesses offering digital SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products often rely heavily  on traditional Sales workflows. This means, the selling process is entirely manually driven with  individuals, or even whole teams of Sales and Pre-Sales professionals being involved in  helping a customer make a purchase decision and closing a deal. While this has worked  traditionally because of such digital products usually being expensive, high dollar-value items;  it comes at a great cost to the scalability of a business, especially when entering and capturing  newer or larger markets.    As a member of my organization’s marketing leadership, my team of cross-functional experts  and I were faced with the challenge of proving the market demand for a scalable, fully digital,  “try-before-you-buy” business model to our Executive leadership who had grown accustomed  to the traditional methods of doing business and reflected a fixed mindset1, convinced that  the market, or the customers, didn’t voice such a need for change.

Selection    My team and I have decided to employ the Learning Launch tool as we have already gone  through several Design Thinking activities and tools such as co-creating a Journey Map2 of  “What Is” our customers’ current state of engagement with our product’s website to  understand what is or isn’t working in helping them express interest in buying our product  and starting a purchase-conversation with us.    We have also engaged in mind-mapping3 activities building alignment on the “What If”  scenario of our proposed solutions and we feel that a Learning Launch, being an  experimentation tool, will help us quickly gather valuable data4 in testing our hypotheses  and validating market-demand for a fully digital, instant “try-before-you-buy” experience of  our product as outlined in the “Challenge” section above.

Application    For our Learning Launch aimed at validating market demand, we focused on curating and  improving the information architecture5 of our product website. In particular, we wanted to  see if we could accelerate our customers’ journey, i.e., reduce the time they need on our  website to get them to understand the core value propositions of our product and sign-up for  a trial. For this we co-created an experiment, bringing together stakeholders6 from Design  and Engineering to prototype7 and implement a prominent call-to-action button that read  “Start your 30-day free trial” which led to a simple sign-up form that customers could fill up  to get on a priority waitlist for the product trial experience.    This would test our assumptions8 that (1) customers wanted to engage with us and try our  product before they bought it and (2) if given a fully digital route to try the said product, they  would express interest quicker by signing up on our website.

Insight    By applying the Learning Launch described in the “Application” section above, we found over  a 14-day period, that our customers were up to 6.2x more likely, on average, to engage with  us and sign-up for our product if a fully digital, “try-before-you-buy” experience were on offer.  We uncovered these insights by comparing the click-through rate on the new call-to-action  button against the number of e-mail Sales inquiries initiated by customers during similar 14- day periods at various points in the previous 12 months when the new call-to-action button  did not exist.    Upon further data analysis, this Learning Launch also helped us to definitively highlight  behaviors that led to the traditionally low interest from our customers, and therefore, our  Executive leadership’s misassumptions regarding market demand. It did so by confirming the  truth9 that our customers are fast-paced professionals and did not prefer their first  interaction with a business or a product to be a Sales call or an email thread, and therefore  avoided it unless necessary.

Approach    We found our experiments from our Learning Launch to be highly effective as they were fast  and inexpensive10 and helped us gather strong and definitive data points in setting the

direction for our next set of efforts. We plan to conduct more of such experiments and  incorporate the findings from these Learning Launches into a Storytelling format to  disseminate to an organization-wide audience in building a cohesive growth plan together.

References to video lectures

1  The Story of George & Geoff (10:48)

2  The Good Kitchen Story (3:36)

3  Mind Mapping Tool (10:06)

4  Learning Launch Tool (6:22)

5  Strategic Opportunities (4:27)

6  The Good Kitchen Story (7:46)

7  Introduction to Design Thinking (10:21)

8  Learning Launch Tool (15:09)

9  Learning Launch Tool (5:39)

10  Introduction to Design Thinking (11:18)

