Global Sales Enablement
The right content at the right time to 60,000 sellers
In a Nutshell:
We adapted human-centered design methods to create the definition, vision and buy-in for a company-wide sales content ecosystem, including Cisco SalesConnect, the most dowloaded Cisco app.
Cisco SalesConnect - Today
The Challenge
Cisco relies on channel partners to for the majority of its sales to customers. 62,000 partners from 150 countries bring in 90% of Cisco’s revenue. Before SalesConnect, partner sellers would spend valuable time combing through multiple disconnected content systems to identify relevant demo, training and marketing content to close deals.
In 2013, the discontent regarding sales content availability reached an inflection point. The Sales Enablement initiative was launched and announced at the annual Cisco partner summit.
Need for a Vision to Unify Teams
A few months later, however, progress was halting. There was no vision, no North Star to incentivize the many silo’d marketing and IT teams to come together and execute on a unified experience to the partner sales force.
This was the moment at which I got involved with my small team of user researchers, designers and project managers.
Understand the Human Problem in Depth - Create “what-if” Scenarios
We conducted 4 weeks of rapid field interviews with multiple sales teams. Throughout the research we were quickly able to discern behavior patterns and key moments of sales situations.
I directed my team to synthesize the critical findings and produce storyboards of what an ideal sales experience could be. We invited the same users we interviewed previously back and presented our storyboards to them. We were surprised by how much our primitive storyboards resonated with our users and eagerly incorporated their feedback.
Designed Scenarios as North Star
We iterated the scenarios based on the feedback and designed them. I set the direction for my lead visual designer: We wanted to convey how technology would seamlessly augment the sellers in their work.
And we wanted to lead with the human experience focussing on key technology interactions, without suggesting a specific product.
In Parallel: Elicit a Shared Definition with Stakeholder Workshops
We recognized that the many owners of the disparate sales content and training tools had to agree on requirements. We assembled a group of 8 senior managers and directors across functions with decision-making power and knowledge of the existing sales content systems.
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From the stakeholder workshop kick-off deck
Epic User Stories as Human-Centered Definition Tool
This being the early 2010s, agile methodology was still new and emerging at Cisco. The user story approach of “As a <specific user>, I want to <user goal>, so that <benefit>” appealed to us, because it seemed tailor-made for a user-driven approach to product definition.
While user stories are small bits of functionality for development teams to execute in 2-week sprints, “epic” user stories articulate a broader end-to-end scope — using the same format.
SVP-Level Buy-In
In four 2-hour sessions we had created less than 20 epics as a group. The executive leader asked me to go in front of the SVPs to present these epics to ensure buy-in at the top. The power of the simple, human understandable story format, along with the demonstration of middle management consensus achieved in the workshops prior, resulted in the SVPs giving the green light in the 30-minute presentation.
These epic user stories guided the requirements development for the rest of the project and broke the alignment log-jam of “what” to build.
Accelerate Execution "March Madness"
At the annual partner summit, the global sales leader for Cisco demonstrated progress on the sales enablement initiative with a video based on our scenario vision work.
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The video was a huge success on stage in front of 1000s of attendees. Based on the partner excitement in response to the video, the expected release date was moved to March,
6 months earlier than planned.
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Thus the term known as “March Madness” was born amongst the 7 IT teams involved. With executive imperative and deadline in place - implementation of the content management system and the partner mobile app kicked into high gear.
SalesConnect became the most downloaded Cisco app shortly after its release. The new sales content management system, integrations and processes enabled Cisco partners and sellers receive the right content at the right time.
My Role:
This project was run as a cross-functional initiative in a start-up-like fashion.
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With my UX team, I ended up being responsible for defining the vision for a new sales enablement experience for the company and creating buy-in amongst stakeholders who owned disparate legacy systems.