Sales Enablement

• MISSION - Design and develop a tool to empower the sales team in the context of a OneCorporate initiative

• TIMEFRAME - Spring 2016 to Winter 2017

• CLIENT - A major contract research organization (CRO) for the pharmaceutical industry

• TEAM - INVIVIA

• RESPONSIBILITY - Product and UI/UX design, design consulting, assistant project management

Note: This case has been anonymized to protect client confidentiality.

CONTEXT

When our team was first approached by the marketing division of Company A, a large contract research organization (CRO) in the pharmaceutical industry, we were briefed on the company’s new OneCorporate initiative that sought to increase cross-silo communication, and our mission was to deliver a digital platform within the division that champions the spirit of this initiative.

Our key contact at the division envisioned a tool anchored around the sales experience, enabling salespeople to present the service offerings of the company as one coherent package and generate more profitable RFPs through cross-selling across departments. While the sales team presented a good point of intervention pragmatically, we wanted to be diligent in our user-centric design philosophy, so we began with an in-depth client ethnography.

RESEARCH

In order to understand the company’s existing communication infrastructure, their sales training program, and the value they wish to deliver to their potential clients, we conducted extensive ethnography on the company. Through over twenty semi-structured interviews, we spoke with members—ranking officers as well as initiates—from different departments to understand their work and communication patterns, gather insight on their perspective on the company, and see how their perspective might be communicated while interfacing with prospective clients. The CRO industry has a few big players, and we dug into the literature and decks of some key competitors to understand the style of communication and emerging trends in marketing for this field. My senior colleagues also requested access to Company A’s own decks and internal tools to arrive at an evaluation of the capabilities and infrastructure.

Our ethnography revealed several large issues at the root of what they were asking us to do. Internal communication across departments was poor, and if a channel was established, it was often the case that those in one department would not understand the work and scope of others. This siloed structure translated to how the sales team understood the company, its offerings, and the interconnections among them. They were often not equipped with the skill of relating services to one another, hampering their effectiveness in communicating a holistic picture to their clients, and clients walked away from the table unsure of their investment in the company’s work. This was critical since upselling and cross-selling through another silo had been shown to lead to a higher-value RFP from a prospective client. The particular touchpoint of a sales meeting as the point of design intervention was attractive because it was often a prospective client’s first impression of interaction with Company A, and in the context of the new marketing campaign that the division was planning (a strategic consulting project that was occurring in parallel between our studio and Company A), it offered potential for conversion into a deeper engagement with the company’s resources.

APPROACH

Thus, we set as our top goal for the project: to improve a prospective client’s understanding of the comprehensive service package of the company through empowering salespeople. To do that, our proposal anchored on three key features that the tool needed to demonstrate.

1. Conversation with the client should be situated within the larger context of the drug development timeline. While different CROs interpret their services differently, all clients—the pharmaceutical companies themselves—understand the same timeline and set of regulatory hurdles used in drug research and development.

2. The client should see at a glance how the services Company A provided lined up with the portfolio of the client. It is through identifying which steps along the timeline the client has already taken and where the gaps were that a salesperson can most accurately suggest a tailored solution.

3. The tool should present a clear architecture with a detailed dependency tree that a salesperson could easily navigate as the meeting progressed. No one person could realistically memorize all of what Company A had to offer; thus, it was more important that they knew how to find it or, if they could not find it, knew who to ask.

In discussion with our contact, we evaluated the feasibility of the second feature in the context of obtaining company-wide access for historic client data, escalating costs, and need to accommodate different portfolio architectures. Ultimately, we decided to park the alignment feature for a later phase and moved forward with the other two ideas.

With this set of guidelines, I helped plan the project development roadmap (which included subsequent phases beyond the tool where collected data would inform updates to the company’s internal organization platforms). Our internal team did not have anyone who was a SME in the CRO/pharma industry, so we maintained regular and frequent communication with our contact to gather feedback.

DESIGN ITERATION

I worked with our team to begin drafting ideas of database architecture for how we would present the complexity of Company A’s hundreds of different service offerings in the context of a larger drug development process. We understood that it was important that services should be nested within their respective workstreams, and that those should be visible along one singular timeline, so we thought that a tree diagram with its branching structure would most succinctly demonstrate that hierarchy.

When our client saw the drafts, they agreed with our approach but raised an issue with having a clear hierarchy: it wasn’t supposed to be clear. The same service could fall into multiple workstreams, and if it didn’t, it might have related services that sat in completely different workstreams at another point along the timeline. This permeability across vastly different workstreams was in fact a strength of Company A that, because of its perplexing overlaps, ironically made the salespeople’s jobs a lot harder to do.

In collaborative sessions with our contact where we shared many free-hand drawings back and forth, we designed a system of suggestions and filtering. The feature would be similar to how an online retailer like Amazon would suggest related products and filter search results. We envisioned that when a salesperson was browsing any given service, they would see a list of recommended services to inform them of potential cross-sells. This would be done with a clear context of the workstream/timeline so that they would not get lost in the navigation. All the results could be filtered through tags that associate services not by keywords in their descriptions, but rather more descriptive relationships such as shared company values. This could show the sales team different ways of approaching and navigating the same architecture tree—all while keeping the interface free of clutter.

With these features, we drafted the user experience flow with interface mock-ups, refining the design iteratively between our team and our client. To ensure the longevity of the tool in adapting to future updates to the list of offerings and/or solution architecture, we designed the back-end data model with clear structure and guidance for new users. At the same time, our internal developer began working with our design requirements to build early versions of the MVP that would be shared many times with our client for feedback on bugs and usability.

RESULT

We shipped our finished MVP in a pilot test with a select group of salespeople and executives. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. A large majority of respondents found the tool very helpful, there was a near-consensus on the tool being easy to navigate in general, and many shared new insights on how their company’s service offerings were interconnected. For the next phase of this sales enablement project, we have plans to look deeper into the client meeting journey, particularly through the client’s perspective rather than the salesperson, and explore new design features, structures, and systems that would better engage and deliver higher value to both parties.