Case Study: Client Design Thinking Workshop
Goal: Guide a client team through the loop and establish an achievable roadmap, to hit 2H sales goal.
My Role: Lead Design Thinking Facilitator and organizer of a 2-day workshop
Workshop Prep
I scheduled two prep calls with the lead client leader to get acquainted with the workshop goals, discuss the scope and objectives. On those calls, she briefed me on their current positioning in relation to their overall sales goals for the year and stressed the importance of the workshop outcomes. I guided her through my workshop agenda for both days and we aligned ahead of time, so when we arrived the day of there was no surprises.
Workshop Day 1
Areas of growth white-boarding activity
The lead client leader wanted to use day one to level-set with the group on where their sales numbers were for the first half of the year. Being that the group was flying in from all over the country for this workshop, alignment was crucial to get the outcomes the leaders were looking for. The group white-boarded to identify areas where they could use extra support to drive the revenue they needed to meet their goals. They talked through the common areas and wrote problem statements to set themselves up for day two.
Problem statements
How might we a make money and drive revenue through structured pricing models?
How might we decrease the number of "one time purchase" sales revenue?
How might we prevent reversals of monthly licenses?
How might we better help our client reps to consume our vast product portfolio?
Workshop Day 2
There were 24 client executives participating in the workshop on day 2. I broke the group into four teams so I could manage the amount of teams and bounce around since I was the only facilitator.
Many of the participants in the room had not been exposed to design thinking methodologies before. With that in mind, I set up the workshop so that the client executives could converge as a group to learn the design thinking exercises and then diverge and practice implementing the activity to their given problem statement.
Mapping out the user journey
Being that the teams already knew that their target persona was sellers, I had each team start off with stakeholder maps so that they could better understand the external and internal groups that would impact their persona.
It was important for the teams to clearly outline the As-Is experience for their seller persona and identify the user pain-points so they had specific themes to ideate on for the Big Ideas exercise. The big ideas exercise was an important part in the workshop in order for the clients to reach their goals post workshop.
I jumped around the breakout sessions to facilitate any questions, challenge the teams to ideate more, and to reinforce that there weren't any wrong answers.
Team playbacks
Because I divided the group into four sub-teams, I knew that misalignment was a potential risk. To mitigate that, I scheduled frequent playbacks so the team would maintain alignment and ultimately drive toward a cohesive outcome.
Outcomes
Each of the breakout team left the workshop with a clear 30/60/90 day roadmap that they could confidently execute on. The participants were aligned on the overall goal for the second half of the year and the executive team left motivated to help their teams reach these goals at all costs. The outcomes derived from the workshop significantly impacted 2019 business results.
“We continued to follow through on the actions for all four areas up until about a month ago. [Our new pricing structure] has taken off and we seem to be growing our content in VUE deals. Our deployment focus area has probably been the most successful by bringing in a positive 16M in revenue versus the negative hits we were taking in prior quarters.”