Enabling the sales team of the future.

Looking to make a change in the way they approach their digital sales offerings, IBM partnered with VSA to help them evolve their current sales process to stay ahead of the competition. Leading a digital team of five cross-functional designers, I worked closely with the internal IBM sales enablement teams to modernize their digital sales experiences to minimize seller pain points and fatigue as well as streamline the sales cycle.

We were leveraging IBM’s leading cognitive technology to create relevant, personalized, and customized content to guide IBMers through the long and complicated sales journey. Our approach was to provide the sales team unprecedented insights into prospective buyers with a flexible and scalable app that was intuitive and offered an approachable user experience.

Our team dove into solving the unique set of pain points of the IBM seller by understanding their sales process across all of IBM's product portfolio. We began by conducted multiple rounds of IBM Seller discussion panels in New York with sellers from various account-types as well as varying levels of experience in sales and within IBM.

From these initial interviews and shadowing exercises, we began to see that the sales team needed a solution that would help them answer the following questions, “Who have I sold to and who influences them?” And how can I guide the conversation to help win more sales opportunities?” After the discovery phase, our team started to translate these insights into meaningful opportunities for design and innovation. Our primary findings were that sellers were frustrated with the content volume, accuracy, and relevancy, as well as accessibility to IBM’s sales enablement tools and platforms. After we mapped their sales journey, we discovered they had too many tools and not enough insights into their clients. It was apparent that the sellers did not want new tools; they wanted tools that would work.