How Top Sales Teams Use Design Thinking to Win Customers Faster with MURAL and Somersault Innovation

seen a few sessions or you might just be hopping on, but I am happy to welcome Mariano, the CEO and co-founder of Mural, as well as Ashley Welch, co-founder of Somersault Innovation. They are joining us today, and thank you very much, to discuss how top sales teams use design thinking. Again, thank you for joining us, and I'm going to pass it over to you, Mariano.

Thank you very much and good morning, Good evening, afternoon, night to everybody out there across the world. Thanks for joining us today. I'm pretty sure that it's gonna be a fun session that you get to actually learn something, but also take something home and start practicing, practicing right away. Because we all want in a way to win more customers, more relationships that last forever. So my name is Mariano Suárez Batán. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Mural. And Mural is software and services company that has a digital workplace that allows people, teams all over the world to collaborate visually to solve important problems. And generally design thinking and agile methodologies were best used or more used by design teams, product teams, engineers. But in the last few years, we've been seeing more and more sales teams, pre-sales teams embracing these methodologies and taking advantage. So that's why I invited Ashley today. She'll tell us more about her in a second. And I invited her because I read her book a couple of years ago and I reread it last month in preparation for this event. Because the interesting thing that struck me about Ashley's thinking and observation about the sales practice was that most of the time salespeople were focusing on the feasibility of their solution. So the features, functions, the possibilities from the engineering side, or the viability, how much does it cost and the financial impact. But sometimes they skipped through a very important part that designers understand and appreciate, which is the desirability. What are the needs, the pains of the customers, the customers' customers, also their fears and wants, right? So in her studies, she also saw that again, the sales process had certain steps that could be mapped to the design thinking process. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And then we're going to get into a little exercise that Ashley does with the people that she teaches and also with her own clients. And hopefully you can copy and steal that from us and use it yourselves in your next customer engagement. So welcome, Ashley. Thank you for joining us today and hope to have a great conversation.

All right. Thank you, Mariano. I'm really pleased to be here. And as Mariano said, this is going to be very practical. So we are going to give you a tool at the end of this to use. And I want to say that we'll be taking questions at the end. So please be chatting your questions in along the way, and then we'll reserve the last 10 minutes or so to answer them. So to set the stage a little bit, as Mariano mentioned, I'm the co-founder of Somersault Innovation, and we're a sales enablement firm. So we work a lot in big tech. Our clients are Microsoft, Salesforce, AT&T, ServiceNow, and others. And we are, as you said, teaching sellers in the whole go-to-market community some of these tools from the world of design in order to help them really stay customer-centric and explore what do customers care about and what do their customers care about. And I can tell you, and I know because you're all sellers here, uh, this matters and makes huge revenue impact in your portfolio. So just to give you a couple examples, by teaching these tools, there were 4 Salesforce reps who actually were, were able to drive $13 million of net new revenue across 4 accounts into their organization. And we see numbers like this all the time. So what we've done is taken this model— discovery, insight, and acceleration— which maps to your deal cycle and looked at what are the strategy, tools, and mindsets within each of these areas that sellers can use to be more effective and to really stay in this space of customer centricity. And I'll say it sounds, you know, obvious that we should be paying attention to what our customers care about most importantly. But there's a lot of reasons we don't, right? There's the pressure of pay— I'm sorry, the pressure of sales and the promise of pay that keeps us sometimes moving to the space of, okay, what's the solution I need to sell and how much money can I make? So we're trying to keep you out of that space and keep you in a little bit longer in the discovery space. So one of the tools we're talking about today is visualization, and that means visualizing with your customer what they care about or different things that you're talking about. And really the power of visualization is that you're able to gather more information, you move into a more co-creative stance, you're able to collaborate more effectively. So we want to show you what this is all about. But first, I want to tell you a story. So we were working with a big tech research firm, and Lori was one of their top account executives, and we— she was going through our Sell by Design process, and during that process, we taught them whiteboarding and how to use a whiteboard. This is pre-COVID, so we were still in the room with our customers. So she had a meeting with an executive at an insurance firm, and she literally said, she said, you know what, I just learned this new tool of whiteboarding. I'd love to try it out with you. She said, may I use this whiteboard? She got up, she started to draw. She was in the discovery phase, so she started to draw out the different lines of business and started to ask about, you know, what are the connection points here? And even invited her customer up and said, hey, can you you know, help me really understand the landscape here. Customer got up, the customer got so excited that she said, well, you know what, hold on a second. I want to bring in my colleague who's a VP here to see this and also lend her, her knowledge to what we're creating here. And so through this process, Lori got so much information and she got a connection to another person, another executive in the organization. So that's just one example of the power of doing whiteboarding. So our invitation to you is to, you know, find a way to create a collaborative workspace for you and your customer. And this, you know, in the old days, this could be just a napkin, right? This could be the back of an envelope. But there's so many other ways right now to do this in our digital environment. And, you know, we have gone digital because we've had to. We've sort of had this accelerated experience via COVID. But in many ways it's a good thing because we should have been doing this all along, is finding ways to collaborate with our customers online. And there are actually many benefits we'll talk about of doing this online. So even though it feels hard, it's actually not that hard. And just, if you just find some ways to start to create with your customer online, it really changes the game. And it creates more, distinguishes you as a seller. So we are going to go into an example right now and we're going to role play this, Mariano and I. And so I'm going to play the seller and Mariano is going to play my customer. We're actually going to demo this for you. We're demoing this on Mural, which is a digital whiteboard. But, you know, you could find a way to do this on whatever you have access to. So let's jump into the canvas. And I'll just tell you that this is— this is— let's just say this is a canvas around discovering what Mariano cares about in his business. And because we only have a few minutes with you now, we're going to truncate this conversation and we're going to mostly focus on business priorities. So are you ready, Mariano?

Yes.

Alright. So thank you for having this conversation with me. I'm excited to talk about sort of your expansion into Asia Pacific. And I've done this research already on your company. I've talked to a few people. And I understand these are some of the key stakeholders. So today what I'd really like to spend time on is talking about your key business priorities and then with you rank these priorities so I can understand what's really important to you. So if you look at, if you think about Mural's expansion into APAC, I'm wondering what comes to mind for you as some of your top business priorities, and I'll capture them here as you go. Feel free to just say what's on the top of your mind.

Sure, so we're a product-led company, so I wonder what's our distribution of the product or what can we do to seed the market before actually Having salespeople on the ground.

All right, catch this: seed product distribution, seed market. I just wrote marketing. Don't worry about spelling, all of you watching me. Okay, what else? What else comes to mind?

Well, we, we probably need to find great leadership, right? A leader that, that, I mean, it has a good culture fit.

And what's a good culture fit? What is that to you?

Well, I mean, in our particular case, we care that how we sell is as important as what we sell, for example. So someone that embraces this modern way of selling, for example.

More than what selling?

Modern way of selling.

A modern way of selling. Okay. Great. And what else? As you expand, as you think about your expansion, what else is a priority for you?

Well, we need to make sure that we have enough funding for them to be successful, right? So financial plan.

Always important. Okay. And how about one or two more?

Well, definitely, I mean, culture, but also, yeah, how are we going to be communicating with them given the time zone situation?

Communication pathway. Given time zones. Great. Anything else come to mind?

Not right now.

Okay. If you think, look at this bullseye to your right, the middle is meant to be your most high priority. Of these. Like, so I want to place these based on what's most important to you, and then the outer rings are getting out to what's a little less important to you. So what would you put in the middle of this bullseye? What's most important to you?

Well, most important is finding the great leadership, right? But the thing that I wonder is, yeah, product distribution is necessary, needs to come before. So they're both in a way Both in the middle a little bit. Yeah, and of course funding, financial plan, come second. And I say that on the communication pathway, we should be able to adapt, so that's—

yeah. Where would you put that communication?

I mean, it's important of course, but I think we— it's not as critical, so I'm gonna put it out a little bit.

Yeah. And, um, okay, as you look at this, is there anything missing?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I know I see it that way. Probably partners, right? Like a lot of things with, with consultants like you, and I'm not having this in my radar here. So, that partner, yeah, I mean, partners to go to market together. It might be smarter to do direct.

And where would you put that in relationship to these?

Hmm. I guess it's somewhere where you just put it there.

Okay.

I think that I'd write to go direct, but it's something new that I had not thought of before.

All right. Great. All right. I'm going to stop action with you. Thank you, Mariano. And so we'll come out of our role play. You'll get a sense of this. If this was real, we would have gone much further into this. Probably, I probably would have pulled out some more priorities. And then I would have dug in and started to talk about, so why did he place these here? Why is this important to him? And it's amazing how much information you're actually able to get in this way. But I want to just ask you, Mariano, like, what was your experience of that, doing it in this way? If you were my customer, how did that feel to you?

Well, first of all, it's like, it's a moment for thinking and putting it out there, right? So instead of like having inside my head, and the fact that I did not consider right away partners, for example, something that it's a reaction to visual thinking and seeing the thing. In your case, I mean, I guess that you got out of me what you can play with in order to sell me something later because you now know what I'm— maybe you didn't talk about what I fear, right? I'm concerned about this cultural situation. So you probably would have poked a little more there, right?

Yeah. And we might have gone into impact of what, like, if you solve these, what do you get? And if you don't solve these, what comes up for you? And I want to say, like, this idea that you added partners, for example, happens all the time. I was talking to someone in pre-sales at SAP, and they were saying it's amazing what happens when you create a whiteboard like this and you create white space, literally white space, and you invite your customer into it to complete, um, how much information they give and the sort of feeling compelled to fill that white space with information. And of course, you have to do that with authentic curiosity and strong empathy, but there is sort of this impact of causing more information to show up by using this kind of method. The other things that you can see on the screen in terms of benefits of using something like this is one, sort of this, this idea of dialogue. Dialogue actually means two people or more coming together and creating an understanding that's greater than either of us knew from the beginning. And so that's what starts to happen with a method like this. You get greater commitment because you have your customers' sort of fingerprints on this. There's something called the picture superiority effect, which means as human beings, we actually remember visuals more than we remember the spoken word. So with something like this, we're creating a visualization of what we care about. And because of doing all this, it accelerates the deal fa— deal cycle where we're more likely to win faster deals by doing things like this. So there are so many reasons to create an opportunity to collaborate online with your customers. And so we want to invite you to try this out. We're going to offer you a link to this Canvas or Canvas like this that— so that you can start trying this out with your customers. And if you don't have access to something like this, even if you can use a Google Doc and invite them in to contribute to it. At a minimum, if you can put even a Word document on your screen, let's say you're using Zoom and you're recording what they say, and then they have an opportunity to correct you because they can see their words on the page. There's so many ways to practice this and try this out with your customers.

Yes, and there are many other techniques that Ashley has put out there. There's of course customer journey maps that you can do together with your customers that are super important because it aligns also— and a customer journey map is an alignment diagram— and stakeholder maps also to understand who's who. And all these techniques are trickling from design into sales. I encourage you guys to, to, to try this out. We are giving away a 90-day extension of our, of our product so you can play around and see if it's useful for you. Um, and we'll send you the links right after.

And, you know, just to give you an example, to all of you on the phone, um, we're working with one of the largest tech firms, um, to help them think about how can they use customized frameworks in a digital whiteboard fashion with their customers. And really the intent of this, we're training 900 sellers, is to transform how they sell. That's the bigger picture. Like, this is a co-creative, collaborative stance with your customer in the age of being customer obsessed. That's what we all need to do. So that's one example. I'm talking to another client later today about how to use this kind of tech, this kind of methodology to really change the buyer experience. So a lot of people are starting to do this and we just encourage you to try it out because it's your opportunity to distinguish yourself as a seller and to co-create with your customers.

So one of the core competencies that we teach people on is on facilitating meetings. And facilitating meetings remotely is really hard. I invited today someone who's part of our team, Hayley Temple, She's been collecting some of the questions that came in through Q&A. And Hayley in general was also part— I mean, former at SAP, and she helped people in pre-sales in SAP use design thinking to sell. Right? So hello, Hayley.

Hi, guys.

Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So yeah, Mariano and Ashley, people appreciate the links that you're going to share, especially the hands-on practice is always really helpful. So first, I want to— pose this question from the chat that was, what would you say is the best way for sales teams, small or big, to start deploying this approach across the enterprise? And Ashley, I'm going to ask if you can share some thoughts first, and I'll go over to you, Mariano.

What's the best way for them to start deploying it? Um, well, I think, you know, what I like, sort of our invitation, you'll see this at the end, is just to try something. So I think Partly sometimes the barrier to this is people think— people are nervous, like, I won't be able to do it right, and I won't do it right in front of my customer, or it's going to slow down my deal cycle, or I'm not very creative because I can't draw. And our invitation and suggestion is like, it doesn't matter if you're creative at all. Like, just by putting something, even like a stick figure on a piece of paper with your customer, is, is going to be beneficial. So I think the place to start is just to figure out what's the easiest entry point for you as a seller to do this. And then I think it's talking to your enablement function. And depending on how large your organization is, there are, you know, this may already be happening. I talk to a lot of sellers sometimes and they don't even know that they actually have access to something like Mural or other whiteboards. And then they figure out that they actually do. I just talked to someone yesterday, actually. VMware about this. And so figure out whether you actually have a digital whiteboard that you can use internally and then start playing.

So my recommendation is always to start small, as Ashley was saying, but in particular getting super practical. So it's— if it's a, again, as I said, customer journey map or experience map of how the current situation is for your client, and poking around that to see where the pain points are. I think that's a great methodology. The other methodology that I think it's great is also, as I said, stakeholder mapping to understand who are the parties, how are they connected to each other around decision-making. So it's methods first. Now, around scaling that comes later, the nice thing about going digital is that we're starting to see people realizing that this can be templatized. And once they're templatized, it can be copied and pasted. We're seeing a lot of folks that are more of the early adopter side prepare their methods, iterate a little bit, and then share out with the rest of their organizations. So there's knowledge transfer at a higher velocity because of the pandemic situation. Another sales guys have not been comfortable with this. I mean, of course we all prefer to be in person and the remote work component for them was relevant because they're flying around, but they were always close to customers. Now they don't have that luxury, at least in the US for a while, right? So we are seeing that that's the cohort of people that are trying to adapt the fastest because they didn't have to before. So I think that embracing the fact that this is here to stay, trying small, templatizing, are all best practices to later scale.

Just to say also, I think you can start also with just a blank canvas. I just did this the other day. I was talking to a champion of mine or ours in a system, and he knew I was playing with the whiteboard, and he said, let's do, you know, like, let's try to create a power map. So I said, great. So it was just about who were all the different people in the organization, how were they connected? And I just started with something blank, just like this. I started putting up stickies, and then he added to them, and we created our own map. So, um, you can again start small where you're most comfortable and then grow from there. There are so many great templates out there to use as well.

Wonderful.

Thank you guys.

So of course we're talking about shifting— this shift that's happened from when we used to be in a room, and now we are all virtual. What— and I'll ask Mariana for you to start— what have you seen as some of the benefits to being completely virtual and doing these types of discovery sessions with customers?

Well, the discovery sessions are necessary regardless of remote or not, right? So the fact that sales guys are embracing design to sell better, I mean, finding the right customer needs and mapping their solution to those needs. That's, for what it's worth, super important. Now, as I said, what people are starting to do is realize that it is okay to do this remotely. The first reaction, and another story from a group in the CIO organization, but that's internal workshops, but it's similar reactions is like, before the pandemic they said there's no way we can do, again, high-stakes workshops remotely. I mean, it's not how it's done. Of course, the forcing function of the pandemic is making us all realize and adapt that there's new ways of working and that they are okay. So they said, thank you for helping us survive. But as I said before, the nice thing that they say, you know what, I just realized, or we just realized, that before going digital, we were able to do one workshop per week. Now we can do 7, right? Because they don't need to travel, because they don't need all of the prep time before the meeting because they have the templates, right? And they're saying even post-pandemic, even in person, we're not seeing the digital go away. Because of these benefits, because of the flexibility, because you don't need to be in person for every single cycle. And of course, discovery also takes time, right? You cannot aspire to have everything in the same— in the first session. So the possibility to keep iterating, keep leveling up, and even in a way, you know what, the possibility to pass it along to customer success afterwards, right? It's also like a living document that persists. So that's what we're seeing, that people are unlearning how to do it the old way and relearning. But it's also true, it's two learning cycles at the same time, right? These methodologies and doing it remotely, and it's not easy.

One of the important things that I've noticed is I think it democratizes access in some ways, like, or democratizes ability to give information. Because when you invite people into a Canvas, they can just share their ideas on a sticky like this. They don't have to raise their hand. So the power dynamics are lessened a bit. And I think you get more information from more people this way if you were in a group setting than you might if you just had a whiteboard in front of the room.

Yeah, and then there's other benefits around— sometimes executives cannot go into your workshop. Mm-hmm. Oh, we're missing that person. Or as you said, maybe the introverts are not participating as much. And there's all techniques to be able to like address everybody in the room and so on that also benefits regardless of the methods that Ashley just walk us through and many others that she has gracefully opened up, open source for everybody, for you guys to take advantage of.

Yeah, that's wonderful. And I love that notion of democratizing and definitely seen that in our work as well. So we have about 3 more minutes. I'd love— this question came in from, from the Q&A panel— is with people going around to so many different meetings, with a way, a challenge to get attention from prospects, and do you have any advice, or how, if you found any success in getting people, your prospects, to focus and sit down with you for a discovery session, what's your advice there? Or what have you seen work well? Ashley, I'll ask you to start.

Yeah, well, I think it starts before you even get the meeting. And, you know, we started this conversation saying that doing great discovery and really figuring out what your customer and their customers cares about is the name of the game. And so if you've done that discovery, I think offering sort of a tidbit to them in your email or in your voicemail, however you're reaching them in your LinkedIn to say, hey, you know, I've been— I've learned some interesting things about your customer, or I've learned some interesting things about XYZ, or I've had an experience of your brand. I'd love to talk to you about it. For me, when you're talking about them versus talking about you, that's the way to engage interest. Because if you're talking to me about my customers, I'm interested. So that's where I would start. And then once you've connected with them, using a canvas like this to start to share your information and gain theirs would be the next move.

I would second that, right? I talked in the beginning about the Venn diagram, viability, feasibility. It's about desirability first.

Yeah.

Right, and understanding what are the pain points, the priorities, and also helping the customer understand how to see the pain point and give impact to that pain point. A lot of customers say, or my say, or excuses, there's no budget for this. Well, there's always budget, right? It's about allocation of that budget. But if you don't spend the time understanding the pain points and helping them understand their pain points and how to measure that impact, it's really hard for them to prioritize that versus the most urgent thing that's more evident to them.

I was just listening to Mary Shea this morning, who's an analyst at Forrester, and she was talking about this world of customer obsession. And she said it's incumbent on us as sellers now to offer our buyers something they don't know. And doing, you know, offering them something they don't know is getting harder and harder because there's so much information online. And so one of the things sometimes they don't know is the experience of their customers or the experience of their employees further down the chain than they are. So those are all great places to start in terms of gathering information.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for—

There's also one thing that I think is super interesting, which is called the empathy map.

Hmm.

Tries to help you, force you to get inside your customers' and hearts, right? What are they feeling right now? What are they thinking about right now? And so on and forth. One thing that I always tell our own sales guys is, I mean, we are all the time thinking about the ROI of Mural, right? But the customer is not, they wake up in the morning and say, oh, what's the ROI of doing these things remotely? It's no, right? So the reality is that you need to educate them and as salespeople, you are probably one of the experts in pattern finding and seeing what other people like them are doing to solve similar problems, right? So that's the other thing, but doing it from the perspective of them and empathizing highly.

All right.

Awesome.

Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you guys so much for sharing this really human-centric, empathic experience to selling and especially doing it in an online space. Really appreciate you sharing today. And those of you who are new to working this way, Try it out, start simple, and enjoy every minute of it.

And if you decide to go with Mural, you can also raise your hand and get this 90-day free trial extension. And there's also the possibility to participate in other events that Hayley and team runs to give remote facilitation confidence.

Thank you. We are going to run off to the next session and we will check back soon. Have a good one.