Peer-graded Assignment: Reflection        August 25, 2019

Design Thinking Tool: Storytelling (Module 2)

Challenge

I am technical manager with organization and sales responsibilities for a new line of products within the

company. The new line of products requires highly technical information and the sales process lies

heavily on the partnership between the technical manager and the sales manager. There are several

sales managers located in specific territories within the country, and they interact with their customers

on a weekly or monthly basis. Even though application and contacts are most of the time the same, the

sales group has experience and training on a different line of products than the one I am responsible for.

Therefore, sales managers feel “forced” to get out of their comfort zone to explore new sales

opportunities and interact with different stakeholders. This task had created a discomfort in the group.

As sales managers are not comfortable with the new products and concepts, the interaction with the

technical team gets compromised and ultimately compromises the business. The main challenge when

the new products came in the portfolio was to motivate sales team by giving proper training,

demystifying the barriers with new products, and building trust with technical team members.

Selection

Storytelling was the tool of my choice because the goal was to address the “difference between solving

a problem and creating a cause” described in the “Storytelling Tool” video by Manu Do. The idea

was to use storytelling to avoid the classic meeting set up of PowerPoint and problems listing and

discussion between the technical and sales group. Meetings had been usually interesting and ideas were

generated; nevertheless, past the meetings, the ideas discussed did not go into action. Following the

description that “a cause is something that ignites people and unites people”, storytelling could

potentially help solving the challenge of creating a team work between technical and sales to shape

knowledge and access customers. Inspiring and motivating the sales group was the main step towards

reaching the sales opportunities.

Application

Within the sales group, one of the sales managers, before retiring, had a different approach and broke

out of his comfort zone with the new product, by using his knowledge and contacts in combination with

the technical team skills. This generated a good story of a successful partnership between technical

members and a sales person that led into sales and further product usage expansion. The story was

reinforced with trial data and sales figures and used to get the attention of the rest of the sales group.

The idea was not to “sell” it as a formula, but to be an inspiration and serve as an example where

someone with the same “limitations” trusted a technical counterpart and worked together to achieve a

goal. However, sales team convinced themselves that such story was only true because their

counterpart had more time than they actually had and the accounts were smaller with easier changes of

success. Even though some facts were relatively true, sales group convinced themselves that this

scenario would not work for them and went back to status quo.

Insight

Even though the successful story could catch their attention, it was clearly not enough to create

motivation. As described in the video of George & Geoff, “we approach things that are pleasurable and

avoid things that are painful”. For several reasons, this topic was still “painful” and unachievable by the

sales team. The technical team had to transform their view of the challenges into a view of

opportunities, something rather “pleasurable” to be able to achieve successful sales.

Approach

Next approach is to present new possibilities and show that there is a way to get this solved. By

“transforming” their mind into thinking they don’t need to have all accounts at first, but rather focus on

small wins. Small wins could be very similar to the wins from their counterpart story and would lead us

for bigger wins in the upcoming years. Also, to raise the level of engagement when the comes to

technical, one next approach is to change the presentation of trials results into a more visual image, to

get the concepts easily “digested” by sales team to help them increase their confidence on the new

products.

