We’ve all been experiencing a new kind of March Madness thanks to COVID-19. We hope you and your loved ones are healthy and safe. We also want to share with you how we’re taking advantage of this time to “re-Design” the way we work and provide value to our customers. Our proposition to you: It’s never been a better time or opportunity to use Design Thinking in your business strategy, too!
Design Thinking is a creative problem-solving process innovators use to navigate complex issues and find new solutions that work. Covid-Complexity is our new normal, which is a perfect time to use Design Thinking to tackle your most challenging issues. Below is our take on the Design process.
Design Thinking Steps 1 & 2: Project Orientation and Design Challenge
At our business, one of our offerings involves teaching sales professionals how to use Design Thinking to find and solve problems for their customers. Needless to say, the landscape of how sales pros engage with their clients just changed substantially. So, our Orientation and Challenge is something like, “How can we enable sellers to stay connected with their customers and provide value, virtually?”
From there, we’ve engaged directly with our sales customers to research what their experiences have been: What’s challenging for them right now? What are they using to overcome these challenges? And, how is that going?
Design Thinking Step 3: Empathy
We’ve empathized with them and connected as closely as possible (virtually!) for inspiration and to gain new insight (step four). For instance, we’ve heard that it’s more exhausting and unpredictable to work in this way due to both virtual tools they’re unfamiliar with and the heightened stress from business and social pressures.
We’ve heard from CROs who say they’re struggling to forecast revenue and recover their pipelines, and they’re looking for tangible guidance they can give sales teams and managers.
We’ve heard from managers who are likewise scrambling to help their teams lead empathetically with their customers and to build comfort and confidence with virtual tools.
Design Thinking Steps 4 - 6: Insight, Synthesis & Ideation
We’ve been amazed, as is often the case in Design, with the candor and passion people have shared with us for overcoming their challenges and with the fresh perspectives we’ve gained. And, we’ve quickly been able to identify a set of new solutions:
- Launching a series of short webinars on best practices for using virtual collaboration tools that invite client participation on-screen.
- Hosting roundtables for CROs by industry to enable executives to share their challenges, expand their networks and offer ideas to each other.
- Providing Live-Cast series on general skill building for sellers who suddenly find their calendars open and want to build their skills.
Design Thinking Step 7: Storyboard and Experiments
We’re energized to try all these ideas as experiments with our audiences immediately—as in next week! We’re letting our clients know this up front while inviting them to help us learn and improve these solutions with them ASAP!
So, what’s in our story for you? Try it for yourself! For whatever complex issue you face:
- Start by thinking about who your customers—or end users—are, and connect with them.
- Learn from their experiences and let those inspirations guide you toward new solutions you can try out immediately—even during these unprecedented times.
We’re working right now with our client, a major advertising firm, on how they can use this time to develop buyer personas so they can be even better in their go-to-market engagement. We’re also talking with a global professional services firm about how they can use this time to reimagine an employee and customer app.
Of course, we can help you drive your projects entirely virtually if you’d like our help. Our main advice to you is this: in these complex times, using Design Thinking in your business strategy can help you regain control of the moment and make lemonade that will refresh and empower your business.
Want to learn more? Let's schedule a meeting to see how Sell by Design Online can benefit you.
We at Somersault Innovation would be delighted to help you. Mostly, we invite you to fill your virtual cup and drink up. Cheers!
