Cross-Functional Collaboration

Challenge 

Sales Executives weren’t closing deals at the rate they were accustomed to. The business-side of the operation believed that their technical “products” had become unwieldy, difficult to onboard, and confusing. After a short review of the process, we agreed. Training and organizational process approaches hadn’t kept pace with the rate of innovation— Sales Executives didn’t even know how (or why) clients would use some of the technologies. Not to mention, every Sales Executive had their own onboarding processes, checkpoints and procedures.

Approach

Business Requirements and Lo-Fidelity

We mapped all documentable organizational touch points while simultaneously sketching out a first draft using preliminary business requirements given to us by our managers on the project. We’re not ashamed to say that it’s a bit of a design thinking red flag when a client provides business requirements for a design product or design when we have no other supporting docmentation pertaining to research or strategy. But we’re also not ashamed to say that we got to work creating minimalist, low-fidelity workflows in Miro within 48 hours of our client giving us this assignment.

SME Workshops

Once we had a rough sketch of the kind of process the sales team was telling us to build, we went to great lengths to validate the particulars of those assumptions by holding 12 hour-long sessions with technical SME’s. We used these technical workshops with SMEs to meticulously document he steps necessary to onboard clients into complicated financial services that require numerous contracts, approvals, due diligence, etc.

High Fidelity Prototype

After we assembled and organized all the working knowledge available on the project, we increased the fidelity of our prototype until we had a fully interactive, clickable path to pass back to the business for prioritization and release based on their internal product roadmap agenda.

Results

While attempting to help our client create an MVP for an idea they had, we ended up helping them learn invaluable things about the way their business was actually running (whether they liked it that way or not)— you never know what you find when you start asking questions.

SMEs had so much to tell us that we (honestly) had a hard time processing it all. We don’t know what we don’t know, and organizations (sometimes) aren’t aware of the sheer depth of knowledge their employees have either. We documented and digitally translated the experience of over 75 traditional, individual touch points in which client-side or business representatives might touch base with their client within the first year of service. In doing so, we ignited a fire in the Sales team.

The simple act of experimentation with one shared vision of technology onboarding, rather than 50 + disparate individual processes, changed how our client thought about selling new customers forever. In less than 60 hours, we took this project from a client’s idea to a final design— including a fully functional, clickable prototype.