Learning Launch

Challenge   I am a member of my organization’s inbound sales department, and our teams challenge is to lower the  number of unqualified leads sent to sales reps, thus leading to increased sales.  The project scope  includes the inbound sales department composed of twenty employees, as well as the marketing  department and IT department, that we work with daily. The project is limited to internal resources (i.e.,  budget and employee time). The project should not exceed 45 business days and the solution should try  to include a equal amount of working hours among the team.  The focus will be on striving to discover  what our team members, as well as key stakeholders within the marketing department and IT  department, consider to be factors leading to leads not being properly qualified.     Selection   The team has tried several design thinking activities/tools, and have decided to use the learning launch  tool for this project. Generally speaking, the learning launch is an experiment meant to quickly test an  idea and prototype.     Application   We started first while focusing on the structure/execution of our inbound sales pipeline tasks/processes.   Specially we wanted to see if we could adapt Scrum project management to our entire inbound sales  lead handling process, as to become more agile. This tested our assumptions that the lack of proper  buyer personas and lack of internal CRM automation were the main causes of sending unqualified leads  to sales reps.  The team was already versed in Scrum, so we then spent ½ day a week for the 2 weeks,   to structure every task and processes in a more agile way.     The second step for our learning launch, was done on two more ½ days, one per week and was to test  our assumptions that if we had more defined buyer personas and CRM automation to better match  those personas was the main cause of why unqualified leads were being sent to our sales reps.   Marketing and IT departments were involved in those sessions.  Then we had key stakeholders from  inbound sales, marketing department and IT department to complete a survey based on our proposed  process within a week of the last workshop.    Insight   In applying the learning launch tool, the team was able to identify our assumptions and designed  launches to test these assumptions.  After developing clearer buying personas with marketing, IT was  able to better develop an semi-automated mapping tool for our inbound reps to better qualify the  inbound lead before sending it to our sales reps. The results we very close to what we excepted.     Approach   Due to the fact that our team had already gone through a couple design thinking activities, the learning  launch was the appropriate tool.  We will then need to review the insight gained from our sessions in  order to make sure they are a part of any future launch designs. Future launch designs are best to make  sure that all insight gained, learned activities are working towards the most viable solution for  implementation.

