Turning $300K Loss into Multi-Year Sales Success
Reversed $300K in annual sunk costs by uncovering that 85% of sales pain points were process-driven, not technology-related. Launched a multi-year transformation grounded in human-centered research, technology backlog analysis, and digital enhancements to unlock ROI.
It makes sense to ask a technology leadership team for technology that works. However, technology is often the easy part. Underlying business structures (people, training, process, culture, etc.) frequently need a closer look before they are ready to support the streamlined inputs required by advanced technology. Millions can be wasted 'fixing' the technology when in fact, the opportunity to fix is a business-first one. But how to spot the difference? Find and validate real problems.
The Ask
"Please transform a 10+ year old instance of Salesforce to make it work." A small but dedicated tech team trained in agile and design thinking had been working for 2+ years on improving the sales experience and available sales data, but with limited to no tangible outcomes.
"Can you just make the system work for us? We just need the basics" – Chief Sales Officer
It was clear that both the technology team and the Sales team were exhausted. Fortunately, Human-Centered Design found the true root cause early in the transformation roadmap, and we were able to co-create and deliver the results below.
The Approach
ONBOARDING & IMPORTANT CONTEXT
Through a series of meet and greets across the sales team, I formed an understanding of the current state experience and built a relationship with the Chief Sales officer. Below are select takeaways gained during onboarding activities that highly informed our roadmap.
Sales Team Frustration - All sales colleagues expressed the sentiment: "I've already shared feedback and needs for the sales experience multiple times; how will it be different this time?"
Lack of Documentation & Data - Sales colleagues had a wealth of institutional knowledge about customer experience issues, and localized data/insights, but they were not documented or prioritized centrally.
Shifting Priorities - Executive goals for the end-to-end sales experience shifted frequently, reflecting urgent strategic gaps across the bi-annual sales lifecycle and economic trends.
KPIs to Identify Excellence - Our digital product lead worked with the business product owner to curate a list of key data and metrics that the organization should be able to track in real-time. Later, an executive-on-loan from a fortune 100 helped to refine this list in partnership with the full executive team.
Image Slider: KPI Process Excellence Details
The Reframe
Based on knowledge gained, we aligned with the Sales Product Owner, Chief Sales Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and Chief Information Officer on the critical focus for our roadmap: An earnest commitment to align on and solve a key set of end user problems so that the organization could structurally enhance sales outcomes.
"What are the most important customer and business problems to solve so that we can reliably nurture, sell, and manage partner relationships/accounts?"
Team Formation & Roadmap
Now that we had our critical question to answer, we built a team with the right expertise, relationships, and passion to collaborate to build a roadmap to answer the key question.
Image Slider: Approach, Team, and Roadmap details curated for different audiences
The Work
DISCOVERY
Image Slider: Prework template and final validated result to 'Think of a specific story from this sales cycle that best describes your experience supporting Sales at Year Up'. A big thank you to Twig & Fish consultants for their close partnership and research leadership in this phase!
JOURNEY MAP DESIGN
Image Slider: From the design inspiration to the sketches, work-in-progress, and final design
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Image Slider: Samples from the full findings deck
Finished MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
After two months of agile teamwork, we launched our MVP and The team gathered enough user feedback to continuously improve ROI and the product for three additional months. The result ended years of low return in technology investment on top of poor process, initiated our long term Sales Transformation roadmap partnership with the Sales organization, and significantly remolded our book of business.
Image Slider: Customer Account, Account Creation, Dashboards, and process flow
Results
Outcome | Status | Description |
1 Centralized Demand Generation & Sales Process |  | Defined and implemented a 7-stage sales process for digital experience through process mapping, page flows, and dynamic page content to support critical sales scenarios. |
Defined Top Problem for executives to align on & solve | | Alignment on Top Problem: Lack of defined centralized process and digital experience. 85% of journey map pain points and 90% of tech backlog needs were contingent on having clearly defined and adopted processes. |
Centralized Data & Insights | | Real-time insights and dashboards showing demand and sales pipeline |
Enable Demand Forecasting | | Enabled demand forecasting for over 900 customers versus historical 40-60 partners |
Improve Sales | | 3 sales products identified with increased demand; 276%, 55%, and 35% increases respectively, resulting in new student enrollment pipelines to meet the demand. |