Happy selling!
Innovation designers can enhance sales and refresh your go-to-market strategy by creating meaningful solutions with the latest technologies
to provide real customer value.
Let me tell you how …
The sales goal
IBM Technology sales teams strive for exceptional customer experiences throughout the whole process of selling and providing technology to customers. Like Thomas Watson Jr. once proclaimed in 1973: “Good design is good business.” So does that mean a well-designed sales experience with impactful outcomes can lead to better customer relationships, more retention, and long-term satisfaction?
Watson Jr.’s is still a valid statement, after all I have experienced in my years at IBM. I will always advocate for taking innovation designers into your sales teams to increase effectiveness and to inspire and delight your customers with fresh perspectives. By including innovation designers in your sales teams, you ensure that the solutions you sell are intuitive, user-friendly, and meet the expectations and needs of your customers. Because the most important part of technology is and will always be people, at the beginning of every problem and the end of every solution.
Market innovation… Finding new ways to show meaning with the latest IBM technology
Joining IBM 2.5 years ago meant taking a position as a designer that is based in technology (pre-)sales. Before, I had worked for consultancies, innovation hubs, and advanced design units at large companies—however, I was never in a sales organization.
Back in 2021, IBM set up a new sales team, now called IBM Client Engineering, as a part of IBM Technology Sales. One of the reasons I joined was my curiosity about this unusual go-to-market strategy consisting of bringing diverse professions like designers, engineers, and business experts together in interdisciplinary teams, building solutions with new and emerging technologies together with clients in a meaningful way. Our goal is always to prove business value from 3 lenses before customers purchase IBM technology: technological (feasibility), business (viability), and human (desirability).
Innovation Designers?
Innovation Designers in IBM Client Engineering are thought leaders in human-centered design. They apply lean user research, collaborative design, and UX best practices to bridge the gap between human needs and cutting-edge technology toward value — enabling our clients to achieve tomorrow what they can’t today.
As Innovation Designers in Technology Sales at IBM, we create new products, services, experiences, and systems through a creative and strategic process. Our work is centered around identifying and solving customer problems, often through a user-centered approach that prioritizes people’s needs, desires, and behaviors. Let me illustrate some of the key responsibilities:
Research and Insight gathering
We are responsible for lean design research, planning, and conducting user research to empathize and understand client and user needs better. Additionally, we identify use case patterns across clients, industries, and markets to distribute innovation to other clients — also known as cross-selling.
Collaborative design
We lead our colleagues and clients through the innovation process. We design and deliver tailored activities and methods to bring together diverse perspectives and ideate solutions for solving customers’ challenges. Through creative thinking, innovation designers generate novel ideas and think outside of the box. On top of that, innovation designers aim to develop new methods accelerating time to value.
Lean UX and UI
Via design of mockups and click-prototypes, innovation designers create meaningful experiences for people enabled by IBM technology. We work effectively with cross-functional teams, including engineering units and business strategists to bring IBM technology’s value to life.
Communication
By applying storytelling techniques, we articulate the value and purpose of created solutions, resonating with decision-makers, business partners, stakeholders, client teams, and end users. We always strive to adopt innovations in new and unique ways.
Commercialization of inventions: Turning a new idea or invention into a marketable product or service with an interdisciplinary team and client co-creation
Technologies like Generative AI are pretty exciting for companies out there. However, to find out if the technology works for a company and if it makes sense to invest in such a technology is often a bit more complicated.
By helping our customers find out if a technology could solve their challenges first, we bring more light into the dark. Innovation designers strive to uncover and prioritize the client’s challenges first—before jumping into solutions.
By understanding a problem and creating a hypothesis that we build and rapidly test with customers’ feedback in the loop, we prove that solving customers’ problems with a particular technology could work (or not) before customers decide to invest in it.
Sometimes our customers have already purchased licenses for software, but do not know how to use it best within their company. So we’ll also help out by building customized solutions for chosen use cases to show how these could be applied by stakeholders at the client site.
The sales mantra
One thing that stuck with me is the mantra, “happy selling,” that is being called out after each quarterly all-hands meeting across all markets in the sales organization of IBM Technology.
“Happy Selling” made me reflect a lot — each and every quarter of the year.
What does it mean to me as a designer? What does selling mean? Am I happy when selling a solution to our customers? When is a customer happy? Before or after the contract has been signed? When are sellers happy? Only when we made revenue through sales or beyond? How can our customers be happy beyond sales?
The answers lie in the way we look at and embrace client challenges to turn them into valuable solutions for humans, always aligned with the business goals of our customers. Designers play a crucial role in that process because they profoundly translate human needs into desirable solutions that solve business problems.
The emerging technologies
There have been and always will be new technological inventions. But as Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder of Apple, once said: “Technology is always there, but it’s up to us to figure out how to use it.” Technology is an enabler for innovation. However, designers can help to identify and bring the most promising use cases to life in a way that’s easily digestible, understandable, and accessible for all stakeholders.
The real customer problems
Part of our work is to first find out what business challenges our customers and, potentially, our customers’ consumers have. Innovation designers are usually the ones who ask the questions that seek to find out more.
It helps our sales teams to look for the root cause of a client’s problem by applying empathy and solving the problem in a constructive cycle of observing, reflecting, and making. Designers help sales teams to understand a client problem rapidly by planning/applying lean user research such as field studies by observing and shadowing activities at the client site or conducting interviews to uncover insights. This way, sales teams can efficiently find out what the real customer’s business problem is and match it with the IBM technology portfolio — not just selling for the sake of selling. Because we do not want to sell something to our customers that is not used in the end, or worse, that makes everyday work more complicated for business users.
The practical activities
Designers also create some inspiring output:
- Persona Profiles
- Inspiring stories communicating the current customer journey with all its findings along the way
- Videos painting the future that show how clients and their customers could profit from the technological solution in a meaningful way
- Experienced based roadmaps for client success, always with high business value in mind
- Executive one-pagers based on customer value
Further, designers plan and conduct activities to uncover the most important aspects of the client initiative in close collaboration with the client teams. We do, for instance:
- Planning and effective facilitating of hands-on innovation workshops — virtual or onsite
Designers ensure that all stakeholders from client teams as well as the present IBM pre-sales and post-sales reps (account leaders, SMEs, customer success managers, sellers, engineers, business leaders, data scientists, etc.) are aligned on the initiative, the problem and the solution as well as establishing metrics to measure the success of the outcome after a few weeks.
Innovation designers can help sales representatives strengthen their customer relationships authentically with human-centric ways of collaboration and partnership. By inspiring customers by showing the human experience, we also help to get more airtime in the very competitive field of IT services. This way, our whole team gains more credibility and continuity with customers.
The strategy part
Even if it may not seem obvious at first, innovation designers are also very effective when decisions about investments need to be made.
When we apply a strategic mindset to design, initiatives are better aligned with customer needs — so customers and IBM (post) sales teams waste less time and effort on initiatives that simply don’t work for clients in the real world. We at IBM Sales would like to stick to our sales promise to ensure customer retention and long-term satisfaction after purchase.
Planning and conducting activities with outcomes captured on executive one-pagers, value proposition canvases, growth frameworks, strategy maps, etc. that support clients and IBM sales leaders to decide on what to do and what not is a creatively effective approach to saving costs before they even arise. These are ways to align and help decision-makers make more informed decisions about investments in emerging technologies like AI.
The prototypes and pilots
In my experience, one of the most powerful ways to win a customer is to show (not tell) how technology works — beyond just slide decks.
Designers help to bring a paper solution to life by creating artifacts and prototypes that show how the tool or service could work and look. Also, these artifacts serve to collect customer feedback, validating if the initial solution is valuable.
We also collaborate with engineers to build tailor-made pilots that demonstrate that the technology works for a particular topic/user and in a specific customer context with particular data sets in a real environment on-premise or in a hybrid cloud.
The art of the possible
Another way designers approach a roadmap for successful implementation of emerging technologies is to paint an informed picture of how these technologies could evolve for the customers that will use them — always looking from a human lens at the latest technological inventions. We analyze signals and trends, showing how different scenarios could unfold or illuminating how possible future outcomes could affect the customers offering margin and innovation endeavors.
The potential
If you think of the potential of thinking and working like this, there is even more room for fresh approaches for customer value and satisfaction — especially in post-sales, but also in more innovative solutions in product placement, for instance.
Happy creative selling!
If you like to collaborate and prove value for your business or discuss the topic of innovation design, please leave me a comment, or engage with me on LinkedIn: Anja Popovic
Thank you.
I want to thank my sparring partner Jeff Ginsburg from IBM for supporting me in writing this reflection. Thank you Lauren Swanson, Lauren Brewer and Jack LaMarche for your publishing support.
Further, I’d like to thank Norbert Riedelsheimer, who inspired me over the past years by driving innovation design within IBM Technology Sales.
Anja Popovic is a Design Lead at Client Engineering, IBM Technology Sales based in Munich, Germany. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
