Sales as Design
Using Design Thinking to Help Clients and Understand Why They Walk to the Fridge
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.
Sales as Design
Thinking of “Sales as Design” is a helpful way to break the bad habits created in salespeople by the business pipeline. A sales pipeline is an essential forecasting tool, and good salespeople stick to using it for that purpose. The rest of the time, they actually use practices from interactive design (usually without knowing it) to create value for their customers.
Sales teams and designers have actually been secret collaborators for a long time. We just didn’t know it. If I was to give you the quote: “Focus on people’s goals”, would you attribute it to a sales manual or a design book? It’s been used by both fields. (We’ll give this one to Interactive Design, referring to the theory of Goal-Directed Design.)
In your company, people who use interactive design principles are part of the user experience, design, strategy, or service design teams. In the following sections, we’ll look at how salespeople can learn a lot from these teams.
Value is About Context
If you spend any time reading about interactive design, it’s clear these teams have empathy for their customer. Empathy is not a particularly common word in business writing, but I suspect research would show it’s a core idea behind what makes many customer-facing companies successful. Empathy means you think about your customers, understand what they want, and provide it (generating value for them) and a sale for you.
Empathy for customers is all about understanding context. Think of context as the overlap between the user, their tasks, and their motivations. This actually makes the process of creating a product very difficult. The writers of About Face (a good interactive design manual) put it this way:
“There is no such thing as an objectively good user interface. Quality depends on the context: who the user is, what she is doing, and what her motivations are.”
— About Face, 4th Edition
Of course, this same challenge applies to sales. There is no such thing as an objectively good sales process. A good sales process is one that understands the current context: Who is the customer? What do they want to do? What is their goal? We’ll better explain these ideas shortly, but let’s use an example that has continued to undermine the good that sales teams can provide: the Wolf of Wall Street.
The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie about Sales Super-Villain, Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. If you worked in sales at the time the movie came out, every well-meaning family member probably asked you some variation of “Sell me this pen.” You probably felt awkward, laughed uncomfortably, and tried to carry on with your life.
In the course of the movie, the words “Sell me this pen” essentially become Jordan’s catch-phrase as he fleeces people of their hard-earned money. Everyone pays attention Leonardo DiCaprio’s charm, so they can be forgiven for ignoring that the metaphor is all about the importance of context to sales.
It’s the only thing that the movie gets right about sales.
The idea of “sell me this pen,” appears in the movie when Jordan is testing his old friends for their salesmanship. Everyone is hesitant, nervous about failure. One of them asks to see the pen, starts to examine it, and sounds like he’s about launch into a pitch. He casually asks Jordan to write down his name on a napkin.
“I don’t have a pen,” Leonardo’s character shrugs. There is a dramatic pause, and then his eyes go wide — he realizes he’s been sold on the pen. The scene is meant to have the quality of a magic trick. This is understandable: the skills of master salespeople have almost a magical quality to them. Everything an elite salesperson does has a prescient quality — it’s because they’re master readers of context.
Although Wolf of Wall Street is about sales super-villains, it gets one thing right. Good sales is about context — paying attention to what the customer wants and what their goal is. Jordan wants to be pitched, his goal is to show up his friends. And his friend (somehow) knows he’s not the kind of guy to carry two pens.
In any other context that pen has little value, but for a second it’s been made into something the client needs. “Quality depends on the context: who the user is, what she is doing, and what her motivations are.”
How Can We Understand Context?
Most people would agree that good sales people are good listeners. They take the time and effort to connect and understand the client and their goals. But, that’s not enough.
Being a good listener is necessary, but not sufficient, for good sales. You need to put on your designer hat, and learn to understand context. You must listen to the customer, but you have to practice empathy and understand their actions, goals, and motivations in a specific place and time. Essential interactive design techniques will help you understand the important details that create context.
Great sales people are a joy to work with because at every point, they provide a content (e.g., information, advice, materials) that is just right for their customer. They’re empowered and ready to understand and meet the client’s needs in a specific context, eventually resulting in a sale. Design thinking can help us understand context and create value for customers. If we can get sales people to think like designers, we can train them to become value-generating powerhouses and great salespeople.
3. Applying Design Thinking to Sales
Sales teams are unique to companies and markets, but the following are four key principles that most sales teams can use:
1. Distinguish Between Tasks and Goals
Salespeople are taught early to think about customer’s needs, but this doesn’t necessarily empower them to provide value. That’s because salespeople are rarely taught to distinguish between tasks and goals, and how to uncover them correctly.
Tasks are performed by people and are easy to identify, while goals are the drivers of those tasks. Goals are harder to identify, but are also more stable over time. Me going to the fridge is a task, but it’s driven by the goal of sating my hunger. The modern fridge is only about 200 years old. Humans have been trying to sate their hunger since the dawn of time. Interactive design teaches us that: “Since goals are driven by human motivations, they change very slowly — if at all — over time.”
It might seem tempting to ask people their goals (“Are you hungry?”) but research repeatedly shows that people are bad at telling you what they want. Entrepreneurs starting a new company, designers, and sales people have all experienced the challenge that if you ask customers about their goals, the resulting answers don’t explain their actions or decisions. This happens because people may not be ready to articulate their goal, they may be imprecise in their explanation, or they will answer with “imperfect honesty.” The point is that the customer will not directly help you understand their goals. Most of us don’t have a reason to think about our needs in those kinds of precise terms.
When you talk to customers about their “needs,” you’ll find that customers are exceedingly good at explaining the tasks they want to accomplish. Leverage this advantage. The role of a good salesperson is to understand all the discrete tasks the clients wants to accomplish, and develop an ongoing hypothesis about their goal, using research.
2. Use Qualitative and Quantitative Research to Understand People
It might be surprising to think of designers as researchers, especially in a quantitative sense, but there is no substitute for the hard and constant work of trying to understand people if you want to build something they will use.
First understand the user and context, then provide value. Sales is no different. There is no substitute in sales for a team that’s constantly improving their understanding of markets, customers, and products.
Naturally, the danger here is analysis paralysis. Sales teams should be goal-oriented, and research should be directed accordingly. The goal is to do enough research so that each customer has the best possible experience based on their individual context. This is a tricky balance, and interactive design helps provide some guidelines.
First, it’s important to recognize and understand the difference between quantitative and qualitative data, and to know how to gather this data.
Quantitative data is information that can be boiled down to fairly objective numbers: “Is your customer’s revenue rising or falling year-over-year, and if so by what percent?” Increasingly, a lot of this information does not have to come from customers directly and should reflect an aggregate understanding of your market and research. Client and market surveys, aggregated data, internal company metrics, public information, and many other data sources are there to help you better understand your market and individual clients.
Qualitative data is information that helps you understand the what, how, and why of each customer: your insights into the behaviour, attitudes, environment, vocabulary, and history of each client. In business to business sales, for example, you’ve done your qualitative research when you understand the workplace culture of your client.
A simple example helps highlight the difference between the two:
Put yourself in the shoes of a diligent salesperson at Empathy Industries. You get a call from Jennifer Smith (a decision-maker at Quick Corp) and you chat for 30 minutes. You provide a price for your product and that afternoon Jennifer happily signs your contract. You’ve won a new customer! Congratulations.
But, from the outside, this looks like either a lucky break or a bad sale. Either you were in the right place at the right time, or you missed an opportunity to find out if Jennifer and Big Corp could benefit from Empathy’s other products.
Of course, it’s not that simple.
Let’s think about this a bit more like a diligent designer. As a sales team (and company), our goal is to provide the most value to our customer. So we have to understand Jennifer’s purchase in context.
First, let’s tackle quantitative data. Sure, you weren’t directly present during the customer journey, but you were able to understand Big Corp and its market share, revenue, and other data until you had a pretty complete picture of them as a client. In fact, you gathered enough information to venture a guess that Quick Corp knows about Empathy Industries (we’re a market leader, after all!) and is aware of product lines that could be useful to them. Ok, we’ve got quantitative data buttoned down.
When Jennifer calls, you’re ready to test the data and do some qualitative research. We ask the right questions to test our assumptions, confirm that Jennifer has already done a lot of research about us and our products, ask some probing questions, and start to understand that at Quick Corp the culture favours a flat power structure.
Jennifer is free to make purchasing decisions without a lot of review, and the best thing is for us to be quick, nimble, and understand the speed and trajectory of this customer’s journey, stopping them just long enough to provide as much value as possible.
This kind of dynamic interaction is only possible if you’ve done your homework. As a sales team, one big question is how to do this at scale.
3. Create Customer Personas, and Use Them Appropriately
No matter how large or diligent, a salesforce can’t perfectly research the context of each individual customer. This is why customer personas are very helpful.
Customer personas are not a new idea, although I suspect strategy, sales, and marketing people will be surprised to know that they are used in interactive design. Personas are the culmination of a lot of work. Like good writing, creating something short and useful requires more effort than a long but meandering article. If you already understand the idea of personas, skip the next paragraph:
What are personas? Personas (often represented by cards) are easy ways to understand potential users and their needs. Personas are meant to solve a major design mistake. Specifically, any successful product you create will have a lot of different users. Users each have their own needs, and those needs can be solved with specific functionality. So, it’s occasionally tempting to make the functionality of products as broad as possible to accommodate the most people. Project managers, designers and writers will tell you that this is a quick recipe for a disaster. It creates a product that pleases no one. The same applies to your sales process. If you design it for everyone, you will leave everyone unhappy.
Creating personas is not enough: they must also be used properly. A good salesperson will use personas to create value for customers, rather than save time for themselves.
Yet, many salespeople fall into the “Hammer Trap.” Here is the issue: when you have a hammer, all you see is nails. The same applies for personas. Very often, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to make a real person “fit” into a proposed persona. This will frustrate both you and the customer. A persona is meant to be an inherently empowering tool that benefits the customer: it helps you highlight what their peers are trying to do with your product, making their common tasks and goals easy to remember.
Do you remember our age-old problem of hunger, solved by the relatively-modern task of going to the fridge?
As a sales person, it’s easy to start assuming that everyone who walks to the fridge is trying to satisfy their goal hunger. This can be frustrating for customers. You’re not providing value to them! This is a good time to ask an open-ended question: “Most of my clients go to the fridge to make a sandwich. I know you’re not — what are you trying to do?” Maybe they’re there to make a sandwich for their friend (a good time to sell produce) or maybe they’re getting ready to flee a nuclear explosion (if you’re Harrison Ford in the last and worst Indiana Jones film). At that point, it’s time to find shelter.
4. Understand How to Conduct Interviews
Speaking and interacting with customers is at the very core of sales, so it’s no surprise there are a lot theories about what makes a good communicator. Put down your copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People and let’s think about this like good designers.
Speaking with customers is ultimately in the service of understanding them. Interactive design principles are useful because they provide some much-needed and objective best practices regardless of one’s communication style. A good interview process yields essential insights into the goals and needs of the user, and the same can be said about the process of understanding your customer as a salesperson.
There are several helpful ideas here.
- Focus on context. Interactive designers will often interview users in the place where they will use their product. The setting puts them in the right mindset to think and explain their needs. Similarly, make a point of visiting your customers in their workplace or (since this can’t always be done economically) tailor your questions to put customers in that mindset. If a customer tells you they want the software to run reports (a common task) ask them to explain situations when they are asked to generate them (Is it on a Friday, as they plan to leave work? Are they rushed?) and use context to better understand their needs.
- Interpret information and confirm assumptions. Strike a balance between making untested assumptions and taking information at face value. Conversations with clients are an evolving partnership. During meetings take notes, but also take time afterwards to draw out assumptions, ideas, and develop a hypothesis. Use subsequent conversations to test and improve those ideas.
- Avoid a rigid or fixed set of questions. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on specific questions or information (price will always be a factor in purchases, for example) but rather that the discussion will not yield as much information if it has the feeling of a static checklist. Use question to guide the discussion, rather than set it.
- Don’t make technology the focus. Unless the person you’re speaking with is a specialist, discussions of technology need to be closely tailored to the knowledge of the person. Different people have different mental models about how to use technology and how technology works in general — so be tempered in your use of technology jargon and focus on the tasks they want to accomplish.
- Use Open-Ended Questions and Avoid Leading Questions. Another fine balance: don’t limit your customers to a checklist, but also make them aware of what their peers worry about. Here, personas are helpful in teasing out potential areas of discussion. Also, be aware that leading questions can deeply shape what your customers say to you.
- Encourage Storytelling. You will always get better information from stories than a laundry list of requirements, because they come packaged in context. Questions that encourage storytelling “Tell me about a time that your current program didn’t do what you wanted?” are better than “What features is your software missing?”
- Assume the Role of the Apprentice. When learning about your clients’ needs, assume the role of the apprentice to master. Your client knows their domain better than anyone else (and is the expert), and if properly encouraged will often take time to educate you about their organization, role, and mission. This will yield a lot of information about their context and how you can help.
