Challenge

I am working in a Multi-national IT company as a Sales Manager dealing with various kinds of  organizations (or customers) in diverse industries. I came across this Manufacturing company who is  looking to address an IT issue affecting the business: ERP System Performance. While this is a normal or  typical challenge in organizations having old or what we call “for refresh” systems, I dug deeper into  customer’s IT department and uncovered a few more issues they have not realized they have. The  primary challenge is ERP System performance, and so we started the conversation on how we address  the similar challenge among our other customers.

Selection

In my work, I always choose the path of “Solution Selling”. As I see this as the most effective way to gain  trust of customers, and ultimately address all issues, whether current or near future which in turn  translates to business revenue. In Solution Selling approach, one of the most commonly used tool  (which I use always) is Visualization, or Visual Thinking, or sometimes simply called Whiteboarding  session. Visualization is a tool where each areas of a problem within an organization is laid out, and  encourages all stakeholders to contribute to the visuals to form a more meaningful, information-rich  display to easily identify solutions. It also shows different views of each stakeholders, and how each can  easily understand a common way in addressing the challenge. I selected this tool easily because I  noticed the stakeholders in this Manufacturing company is more active and participative in powerpoint  slides (when I went there the first time to do an overview pitch, prior to knowing their issues). I started  getting to know whiteboarding a few years ago via an article/video from Tom Fanelli which is until now I  still use his tips in all of my whiteboarding activities with customers.

Link: http://www.tomfanelli.com/how-to-whiteboard-5-simple-whiteboard-techniques/

Application

So after I learned about their ERP System Performance issues, I went back to them and invited the IT  team including the CIO, to do what I call “Mind Sharing”. I use this term to invite them for an hour or  two of sharing best practices of similar IT pain points. But before any sharing happens, I pull up a  whiteboard and start outlining and digging deep on the organization’s operations starting from IT, the  known challenge (which is system performance issue) and went on to get to know their 3-year business  plan and what are the things they are planning to do to help on the 3-year plan initiative of the  management. I started lining up on the left side, the challenges they know now, and on the right side of  the board are the identified plans of the organization. Then I started connecting the challenges to the  plans and how they hinder those plans, and listed in the top, their identified initiatives and how they can  address or help on achieving any/all of the plans listed on the right. After that I started drawing options  in the middle part of the board, in this case I am now “sharing” what was done by other companies with  similar challenges or plans, and how it is fit in their own setup. This created an image summary of most  of the necessary things they have in mind that they have not documented. This resulted in a much  clearer view of the gaps and tasks at hand and where they are as of that moment in achieving the goals.

Insight

The challenges they faced historically maintaining their systems were key to come up with solution  options. One that was stand out was, previously when the server went down unexpectedly and the ERP  was not accessible, the vendor who supplied the system before spent 6 hours just to pin point the root  cause and make the system back up and running. The cause of delay was that the software vendor and  the hardware vendor were pointing at each other as to where the issue happened and therefore these  two suppliers were saying that the other has to fix the issue and vice versa. During the visualization  session, all agreed that there has to be a simplified approach to avoid this scenario and therefore  concluded that one solution is to get both the software and the hardware from a single vendor/brand.  This approach led to the company savings of about $60,000 USD annually migrating from the old  virtualization software to the “single vendor approach” unified brand of software and hardware which  includes virtualization software. It was pointed out during visualization session that since they only have  a handful of IT personnel, plus the group has limited budget annually for IT initiatives, the approach to a  “single vendor system” will greatly benefit not just IT but the business as a whole. This approach  resulted to reduced deployment from 30 days to 3 days, and the company was able to allocate more  funding to other initiatives such as Disaster Recovery deployment with the savings they got from this  initiative.

Approach

While the visualization tool approach worked in this scenario, I think if we have also used Learning  Launch tool together with Visualization, we could’ve strengthen the justification to the project which  may also result to faster order from customer. With visualization tool alone, we have spent 3 months  before we got the customer buy in and the actual order (we spent two additional weeks convincing the  customer that the new solution proposed works) and I feel that if we have done a Proof of Concept or  an equivalent of Learning Launch, we could’ve lessen the sales cycle to less than 2 months.

