Sales as Design
Why Fancy Showers and Sales Funnels Create Unhappy Customers
Here is my hypothesis: among technology startups, the sales team is adjacent to many departments. It should place itself near the interactive design teams. Doing so, it will learn techniques and principles that will create a better experience for customers and increase their win rate.
Part 1 of this article, explains why this is important. In Part 2 we put theory into practice, and outline 4 key ideas that will apply to most sales teams.
Whether you produce platforms, content, software, websites or apps— and those lines are very blurry these days — the principles and practice of interactive design have a massive impact on your customers’ relationship with your product. Content is rearranged to optimize and scale for mobile. Features are highlighted (or hidden) on the home page and inside menus. Help sections roll out to explain new functionality.
From early wireframes to the final product, teams use ideas from the field of interactive design (let’s call it design, for our purposes) to meticulously tinker with the experience of the end-user to create something that’s useful, beautiful, and makes life just a little bit better.
Why don’t we think about the sales process in the same way? What happens if we do?
Sales is a natural part of the customer journey. Good companies will focus on creating good “products” along that journey, whether it’s the landing page for your price or marketing material. Tools like the sales pipeline found in most customer relationship management (CRM) platforms does not help deliver value. The pipeline gives no direction about how to add value for the customer as you work together. It shouldn’t, since it was designed as a forecasting tool. Pipelines lull sales teams into a false sense of security, blinding them to customers’ needs.
I propose that design thinking will help us create a better sales team, a better sales process, and ultimately win more deals. Good design creates products people want to buy, and good interactive design can create a sales process your customer will value.
Before we proceed, let’s take a second to talk about design. When I say design, it’s easy to assume I’m referring to aesthetics. Beauty (or aesthetics) is often confused with good design. Apple iPhones are well designed, and also aesthetically beautiful. But these two are not always connected. Let’s think about hotel showers for a second, which is a great example used by Seth Godin.
Expensive hotel showers are often very beautiful, but impossible to understand for first-time users. Picture the three separate knobs (which you probably turned indiscriminately) which randomly caused the shower to spew scalding hot water. That’s bad design because it didn’t think about your needs as a user. You have never operated this particular shower before, and this wasn’t taken into account when the shower was designed. It was simply designed to be beautiful.
“Our Sales Team Is Already Winning Deals”
Sales teams focus on their client pipeline, since this directly impacts their quota, contributes to the bottom line, and generally dictates their success or failure. It’s one of the few departments in a company that has natural and easy to measure pass/fail criteria.
What gets measured, gets done. And what gets done in many organizations is a massive outreach to current and potential customers until it culminates in a sale. This approach can be profitable. We’ll call this efficiency.
Traditional measurement of win rates (how many clients sign a contract divided by the number your pitch) doesn’t take into account the total addressable market (TAM). As a result, it’s unclear if this approach alienates other customers who simply decide not to engage with the company, because they are put off by a bad sales process. This is the effectiveness measure.
Let’s put it another way: if your sales force brings in $6 million, having pitched $18 million of business, you probably feel pretty good. But, what if in the process they alienated almost $6 million worth of potential business? That team is efficient, but not effective.
As a senior leader, if you have never worked in sales, you might think of the sales forces as what Lars Dalgaard of A16z affectionately terms, “coin operated idiots.” Dalgaard’s point is that sales aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it part of business. Sales teams can provide so much more value! They can provide early feedback on products, content, and strategy. The good salesperson lives among your clients, has (hopefully) true empathy for their problems, and understands their current and future needs. (The topic of empathy in sales will the subject of a future post.)
The management team needs to listen and internalize the knowledge of the salesperson, leveraging it to improve the company strategy and business model. Thinking of sales holistically as part of a bigger customer journey will drive a smoother customer experience, improve your brand, and create long-term dominance of market share.
Let’s go back to our hypothetical product and market, the $60 million of potential customers who want to buy software. Let’s say we have two companies competing for this market: there’s the Always Be Closing (ABC) Corp. and Empathy Industries. ABC and Empathy start with a similarly sized sales force and similar products. Their sales teams have a win rate of roughly 1 in 3. In a year, they’ll reach out to $18 million worth of clients, netting sales of $6 million.
However, the ABC sales team’s process is not optimized for the customer journey, and it’s having incipient long-term effects.
For ABC, let’s say that 10% of potential customers have a bad sales experience and decide not buy their products for a while. Maybe customer’s won’t say so outright, but the threshold to buy those product just became a huge hurdle to jump over. ABC’s sales people will have to discount, beg, and borrow just to overcome that bad experience.
There is a wealth of research suggesting that bad customer experiences often have long-term impact on buying preference. An Australian study by EY found that companies lost on average $720 for every single negative customer experience. Bad experience are sticky and stay with us, influencing how we see the company.
So, this is how this market will play out in the course of just 3 years:
Assuming a very conservative impact on potential customers, ABC Corporation will kill a year’s worth of potential deals with a bad sales process. They will take three steps forward and one step back.
“We Already Listen to Customers”
It’s tempting to think that you’ve avoided this pitfall.
You’ve invested in sales training, you hired good talent, and you fire under-performing staff. But remember: from the outside both organizations look roughly the same, with the same win rates. Unless you’re investing in measures like the Net Promoter Score or actively reviewing customer feedback, you won’t pick up on this signal.
Even if you’re paying close attention, it can be immensely hard to isolate for this particular problem. If I go out and survey potential clients, they’ll likely identify price, features, or some other factor in the value-to-cost calculation as the reason they went with your competitor. (This is actually a huge issue in interactive design. We’ll talk about it in Part 2.)
You can’t put a check mark that lets you clients indicate “Your Sales Process Put Me Off.” Yet, there is good research to indicate that a holistically good customer journey is essential to long-term market growth.
Exceedingly good data will sometimes help you pick out the problem. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Adele K. Sweetwood talks about using customer data at SAS to diligently map the customer journey and identify gaps in that experience. Here is how she describes the attention they pay to customers, even as they think about buying their product:
“As we engage with customers today, we make sure our interactions are more meaningful. We are able to identify all of the contacts for a customer (and there may be many), the products or solutions they need, where in the customer journey they fit, and we provide messaging and information that aligns with their needs. After the sale, we engage them with relevant activities — invitations to join our user communities and support functions or provide other technical resources.”
There is a lot of focus on getting sales people to better manage the purchasing process and optimize their pipeline. However, that purchasing process is narrowly defined, primarily focusing on the one-on-one time sales people have with customers.
Sales people learn how to identify potential clients, how to better understand their problems, and how to better present the product. When sales people fail, we focus on fixing this process in isolation, trying to find the leak in the pipeline.
The industry doesn’t think enough about this process as a part of the larger picture of the customer journey. As we’ll explore in part 2 of this series, success here is all about understanding context. Many organizations have already started to think about this, because they recognize that when clients reach a sales person they’re already 70% of the way through their purchasing decision.
“We already train our sales team”
If you’re reading this article, you’re already investing in improving your team. But, very few companies train their salespeople while paying attention to the complete customer journey.
In a recent webinar, Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan, and Conor Jones of McKinsey, say that instead of managing touch points (e.g., marketing) you need to manage the entire process: “What matters even more is a customer’s complete, cumulative, end-to-end journey.” In the examples provided, the winning companies reaped the benefits of “enhanced customer and employee satisfaction, reduced customer churn, increased revenue, lower costs, improved organizational collaboration, and competitive advantage.”
It’s the holy grail of business, but it’s unclear if many companies are searching for this treasure.
The practice of interactive design embraces the holistic customer journey. So far, I have been purposefully vague, because interactive design is not usually a team in a company, but a practice that blends, as Alan Cooper puts it, “theory and techniques from traditional design, usability, and engineering disciplines.” It might be your design, strategy, or User Experience team, but you can be sure they are paying attention to the customer’s journey.
While most companies will invest in improving the discrete parts of the sales process, or blend marketing and sales teams, very few are thinking about the entire customer journey in the way that interactive designs are taught to do. Our relationship with our customers is worse for it.
In Part 2 of this article, we will explore exactly what interactive design principles we can use to improve this relationship, understand context, and train better sales teams.
