Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge    As a pre-sales solutions engineer I am constantly faced with the tasks of understanding my  clients’ business drivers and being able to translate those drivers into digital solutions that  drives business outcomes. A part of my job role requires me to be able to plan my year in  order to predict how much business I will do with my clients over the course of a financial  year. This planning involves working very closely with one, or sometimes multiple account  managers. I’ve found that planning strategies for a large set of accounts can be extremely  challenging, especially when it involves decisions that need to be made by multiple people  who need to agree on what is possible for a specific client.     Traditionally, this type of planning would be done by looking at historical sales data for each  client and by trying to predict future sales by numbers alone. This has not been as effective  as I think the business would like it to be, primarily because it reduces the clients’ needs to a  number and the sales process to a monetary goal.     Selection    I decided that there had to be a better way of visualizing the problem and simplifying the  scenario surrounding each client. Spending time with each client was a good start to  understanding their needs, but I also needed to be able to translate those needs into a  roadmap for the digital transformation efforts that would come. This could not be done  until I had a better view of what the digital estate of each client looked like and also be able  to share this view with others such as the account managers and regional sales managers.     Mind mapping seemed like a great way to visualize the situation. More importantly, it  provided the ability to look for patterns within the large quantities of sales data and the  engagements that were constantly occurring between the account teams and the clients. I  knew that the first step to building a relevant roadmap for each of my clients would require  me to create a bridge between what is and what if using mind maps as a tool to get me  there.    Application    I worked closely with one account manager before taking this process to any of the others. I  setup some time with him to look into building a mind map for our five most important  accounts. We looked at all the data we had based on four digital areas, the enterprise  network, the datacenter, their cyber security estate and their collaboration tools. We then  mapped out which of our solutions had been deployed in their environments and which  solutions had been purchased from competitors. We included the sales data such as, when  each of the solutions were purchased and when they would become outdated. We mapped  their current business drivers alongside their current technology footprint and then began  to connect their goals to their estate in order to see where the gaps were so that we could  predict what business we would be doing with them for the coming year.

Insight    Many of my clients have been affected quite dramatically by the worldwide pandemic and  one of the most common business trends was that they needed to be able to do more with  less resources. What was immediately apparent from the mind mapping exercise was the  diverse set of technology solutions that the clients had deployed. As an engineer, this  sparked an idea around how they could best bring all of their solutions together in the most  efficient way in order to try to reduce their operational costs with better integrations and  less overhead in terms of man hours.     We were also able to clearly define which aspects of each client needed the most focus. For  example, one client did not have full security cover across all the different vulnerabilities  within their environment. We could easily decide that their business goal of risk mitigation  would be achieved by building a security roadmap for them. Another client had mentioned  that they were working on an internal application, the performance of which was difficult to  gauge. The map allowed us to see that a network analytics and monitoring tool together  with an application visibility solution would fulfill their needs perfectly.    Approach    A more traditional approach could have been used to analyze the needs of each of our  clients. We could have applied the tried and tested method of gaining an internal view of  our clients by simply asking them what they needed or trying to update their existing  technologies with newer models. But this approach does not truly connect the dots of what  drives the behavior of our clients and therefore remains unpredictable. It also provides no  real simplicity that can be easily replicated and scaled, and each client would have to be  handled on a case-by-case basis. These challenges seem to have been solved by employing  the mind map to provide a more efficient method of building a strategy for a group of  clients. It helped to simplify and visualize the otherwise contextless sales data that was  previously used.

