Alter a seller‘s mindset within 12 weeks

Javelin, Enterprise Design thinking for sellers.

Summary: Within twelve weeks, I coached a multidisciplinary selling team of 15 IBMers to adopt IBM Enterprise Design Thinking habits to leverage them during customer interactions and selling account collaboration. This coaching was extremely successful concerning the habit adoption that changed how the sellers were interacting with each other and the customers. It also helped boost the signings during the following selling cycle.
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Year: 2018
Company: International Business Machines (IBM)
Project: Javelin
Set-Up: As a Javelin coach, I belonged to a selected few that coached the Javelin leads of a specific sales account over twelve weeks. 

Table of content

The challenge
Role and leadership
The workshop
Kick-off in Munich
Weekly coaching
Outcome

The challenge

A 12 weeks sellers coaching prototype was ran in the USA by the account experience team. The resutls showed that if a selling account uses enterprise design thinking habits, they could not just sell a product but also sell an opportunity room. They were able to help solve their clients' problems by understanding the underlying problem and then finding new solutions to it. Providing a customer with a way to better understand their problems gave IBM the unique opportunity to act as problem solver without just pushing our products. Besides that, the enterprise design thinking habits helped align people and helped to collaborate and communicate more visually.

The challenge was to bring the successful prototype to germany and make it successful as well.

The coaching experience

Desired outcomes

These are the focus areas

Role and leadership

My task was to start working with the sellers leads upfront of the enabling workshop that last for three days. After that, I was coaching the sellers leads over twelf weeks on a weekly basis to enable them to adopt enterprise design thinking and making them fluid on the activities.

Most of the coaches were seniors in their position and had at least 10 years of coaching experience. I was by far the youngest at that time who was leading a sellers team coaching. Thankfully, I had a lot of practice in coaching people on IBM enterprise design thinking and quickly adapted to the new challenge.

The workshop

In a three days enablement workshop, we provided the three key sellers per selling account a deep dive into IBM's enterprise design thinking methods with their specified business problems.
The business problem was something I had to work out with my seller's team upfront of the workshop.
During the workshop, I could form a deep realtionship with the three main sellers. I established myself as an expert and could already start the coaching and explain why we are doing these things. The sellers heard for the first time something about user-centered design. In general, the sellers were, of course, very user focused. A habit change is something that only happens over time. Thats where the crux was. The short term driven sellers had to adopt habits that were only paying off in the long term. Keeping them engaged and guiding the alpha-type human beings was a huge challenge and a lot of fun.

The goal is to alter key behaviors and habits

Engage with user-centered story telling

In all thinking, the client need is always first

Build empathy to get better solutions

Kick-off in Munich

To get to know the 15 men strong selling team, I traveled from Stuttgart to Munich with the ICE for a one day workshop to hook the whole team.

The seller's lead and I were playing back what has happened in the three days workshop. I quickly want to highlight how significant the investments of the selling team was. Sending three people away for a three days workshop means that they were not generating business for three days. Therefore, we were in a huge spotlight where suddenly, the managing director wanted to be part of the workshop to see how things are coming along.

We continued deep diving on the business problem. My role was to enable the three selected sellers that have participated in the three-days-workshop. At least, that was the theory. The seller team had a different problem. They were exceptionally hierarchically driven and could not align with key rules of enterprise design thinking like, quantity over quality. Instead of having the highest in the chain standing in front of everyone telling what is possible and what is not, we want to use all the brains available. And we had exactly that situation where the managing director was getting up and made a "reality check". I had to mark a physical presence, stand up, and tell the group what is happening. The whole team was standing still because I was counterweighting the managing director to also show him that he needs to use everybody instead of just playing the hierarchy. We were continuing with the activities. During a playback of the results, it became apparent that the intern provided an idea that everybody agreed, that this is something with huge potential. I was so happy because not just the managing director but the whole team could feel tha maigc of enterprise design thinking.

Design thinking session: Diverge

Design thinking session: Playback

Result of the ideation session

Reflection of where design thinking is being applied. 

Weekly coaching

After my Munich visit, I had weekly coaching calls with the sellers to coach them on their progress, what they could do better, and showed some tricks.

During the first four weeks, the progress was very minor and they had a tough time walking the talk.
Then, they had a specific situation that was made for enterprise design thinking. They told me about an upcoming customer meeting where the outcome was usually unclear and everybody had a different impression of what will happen next. To get my sellers prepared for the meeting, I encouraged them to work visually and quickly make the things they were deciding on visible.
In the next coaching call, they were telling me, that it worked beautifully. They were trying to agree on a specific offering componets. Instead of sitting at their table as they would usually do since it was tradition, they got up and started to visualize with text and boxes on a whiteboard what they were discussing. The whole room was on the same page, and even better, they reached an agreement. The customer was so delighted about the outcome. that he was asking to see next time a prototype the achieved solution.

The sellers understood the value of enterprise design thinking and were very open to trying out new activities and adopting more habits.

Outcome

My selling team successfully graduated from the Javelin program and was now confident leveraging enterprise design thinking habits and had various activities at hand to use them when needed.

When the Javelin leadership had to report to the IBM Cloud President about Javelin's success, they were using my selling team example as best in class.
This was extremely cool. All the hard work and hours of coaching and showing the individual sellers the bigger picture paid off.