Turn Customer Stakeholders into Discovery Heroes

Your company closed a new client with an unusual challenge. They grew rapidly by acquiring other companies with complementary products. The client’s VP of Sales sees an opportunity to cross-sell these new products to customers. Yet, each acquisition has its own sales management system that makes collaboration nearly impossible. Moreover, the acquisitions, now divisions of the client, refuse any integration attempts, believing their systems are the best. 

Frustrated by the pushback and politics, the VP of Sales brings in your company to consolidate all the sales data in Salesforce Sales Cloud. She wants fast collaboration and accountability between division sales teams. She sponsors the project, leaving the details to your company and the division managers. 

Complicating the project, the client lost a lot of information technology talent during the acquisitions. The remaining IT managers don't have the resources to consolidate the sales systems into one. They focus on keeping them running with the staff they have left.

Before you schedule a discovery meeting, you collect all the information you can on each division’s sales management system. The division managers express skepticism about Sales Cloud, saying their system works best for their products and customers. One manager claims that her system supports sales operations better than the others, another says his system excels at forecasting, and another says hers has great territory management.

Once you have all the documentation, you analyze the similarities and differences between the systems. At a high level, the systems have a lot in common. Yet, they have different naming conventions for accounts, contacts and opportunities, so you create a glossary with a proposed naming convention. The managers review the glossary, negotiate and agree on common terminology.

For the next step, you develop a basic prototype of each sales system in Sales Cloud. Each prototype works in a way similar to the sales system it will replace. The managers join you on a teleconference to see a demonstration of the prototypes. During each demo, you highlight how the Sales Cloud can integrate the best aspects of their current systems. You identify the gaps between the prototype and their systems, and propose how to fill them.  A demo based on the best forecasting system intrigues the managers. They see this way of forecasting as a means to increase revenue. Finally, they see the growth opportunities the VP of Sales has talked about for months.

The VP of Sales joins you and the division managers in a summary meeting. The division managers recognize the revenue potential and efficiency from a consolidated system, championed by the VP of Sales. She looks forward to cross-selling products between the divisions. You ask her about her longer-term goals for the system. She would like to extend the same collaboration between the sales teams, marketing and customer service. You suggest that Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud could help her with that. “I think you just cross-sold us!” she says. Everyone in the meeting chuckled.

When the division managers recognized the potential of the consolidated system, they emerged from their silos as sales heroes. They looked forward to boosting revenue through cross-selling and up-selling between divisions. The VP of Sales realized that she could go beyond that with collaboration between her teams and ultimately to other divisions within the company. She becomes a hero to the CEO for realizing the potential income of the acquisitions.

Make customer stakeholders the heroes of discovery by focusing on what matters to them and their company.

For more about making the customer the hero and other business analysis ideas, see Adriana Beal’s book, Tested Stakeholder Interviewing Methods.

This is the third in a series of posts about unknowns in the discovery process.