BACKGROUND

The product’s Head of Design had seen what our last project did for their Customer Success org and wanted to bring the same clarity and user insight to Sales. Our initial goal was to understand our client’s sales experience from the customer’s perspective, identify pain points, and spot opportunities to stand out against competitors.

To better serve the customer and still meet business objectives, I urged our client to flip the framing from sales process to purchasing journey and focus more on questions, like:

• How do small businesses evaluate their options?

Since this company was siloed, it was vital to bring different departments into alignment and highlight where internal disconnects might be creating friction in the customer experience. So even though our main client team was a Head of Design, a Research Ops Lead, a Design Lead, and a brand-new Program Manager, our stakeholders also grew to include execs from across sales, product, marketing, and CS. They stayed close to the project from the start, and timing was critical: we had roughly 3 months from kickoff to wrap in time to inform the client’s yearly planning cycle.

PROCESS

Our research team was small but mighty—just two of us from the agency and one freelancer we had never worked with before. I played a key role in designing and executing the project, specifically in leading the recruitment process, writing our discussion guides, facilitating the workshops, moderating half of the remote interviews, analyzing large chunks of the data, co-authoring the report, and running the final presentations.

With a lot of eyes on this project, communication mattered. We kept stakeholders looped in via thoughtful Slack updates and timed our meetings to build momentum without creating fatigue.

To capture as much breadth without going too wide, we spoke to customers in our client’s biggest customer segments. To further capture the variety across business revenue, size, type, and competitor interest, we decided on a sample size of ~30.

We knew recruiting during peak summer months would be tough, and after a slow start, our recruitment approach revealed that the sales team was inadvertently missing out on key leads. This insight alone reframed how the client thought about lead generation. We shifted our recruit strategy, expanded our outreach channels, and refined our screener to capture a broader range of experiences. This resulted in a more nuanced and complete picture of the journey and happier stakeholders because we evolved, rather than stick to a broken plan.

Before interviewing customers, we facilitated workshops between Sales and CS teams. Since this was in part a service design project, we wanted to hear directly from the people on-the-ground, working most closely with customers. With a mix of digital whiteboard activities and group discussion, we ran 3 workshops with 6 participants each, being mindful about creating an environment that helped participants feel safe enough to speak up about both the good and the bad. These sessions sparked some real “aha” moments and started the internal process of alignment and empathy building across teams that rarely spoke but regularly overlapped from the customer perspective. Armed with what we learned from these workshops, we were able to go into customer interviews with more pointed, informed questions.

Shameless plug: read my blog posts to learn how I approach planning and facilitating workshops.

When it came time to synthesize, we tried out a collaborative analysis approach, which long story short didn’t work. Because our stakeholders had been so deeply involved, our intention was to continue that momentum by building greater customer empathy and giving them a look into some of the insights before the final report would be ready. We learned our lesson here: very clearly set expectations for this type of workshop and gauge interest in this level of involvement with all the people you invite, not just some. It doesn’t always align with their seniority: some people who are higher up really want to dive in, while others see it as a waste of their time.  

IMPACT

The research resulted in an actionable journey map detailing pain points, channels, and competitor comparison to name a few. We highlighted the most pivotal, stress-inducing points in the purchasing experience and how both sales and all other client channels can support business leaders through this stressful experience.

We presented the journey map, insights framework, and video reels to a large, executive audience a handful of times to ensure all interested parties could watch and get their questions answered live.

Our research resonated, big-time! The insights helped shape annual planning across multiple orgs, armed execs with justification for budget requests, and broke down long-standing siloes. According to our client, the report made it to the CEO and helped catalyze a company-wide reorg that prioritized user experience in a much more tangible way.

Since then, I stepped into the role of account lead and built up the client relationship, by pitching the agency’s services and staying appraised of internal changes post-reorganization. I’m proud to say that they have since commissioned more work.