The challenge

A Fortune 100 shipping logistics company hired us to reimagine their internal process for matching salespeople to customers. The company serves 55 million business customers of all sizes, from mom-and-pop shops to giant multinational corporations. They have a staff of 6000 salespeople spread across the globe. Additionally, they had recently acquired a European-based shipping company, absorbing its sales staff and customers. Their multi-stakeholder planning process that determines which salesperson serves which customer—which ultimately impacts a salesperson’s compensation—was incredibly complex, time-consuming, and often seen as unfair by the on-the-ground salesforce. Our client asked us to streamline the planning process to reduce the time spent on it by all parties, provide equity and fairness to the salesforce, and restore trust between strategists at HQ and salespeople in the field.

STAKEHOLDERS

Salespeople
Regional Sales Managers (from both parent company & new acquisition)
Global Sales Operations team
Vice Presidents of business units
Analysts who match customers to salespeople
IT team who runs the matching engine

My Role

The team included a business strategist, a UX designer, a visual designer, and myself. I led the research components of the project.

Approach

Discovery research: workflow shadowing, tool audits and walk-throughs, in-depth interviews, process mapping, survey
Co-creation: insights-driven concept development with key stakeholders
Benchmarking: assessment of competitive landscape of salesforce planning offerings
Concept validation: creation and user testing of prototypes of new process workflows and digital tools

outcomes

We delivered recommendations for a streamlined process in the form of a blueprint with step-by-step tasks and backend systems, a suite of digital tools to facilitate the process, and a roadmap for rolling out the new process and tools. When implemented, we hope the new system will save the sales organization up to 350,000 hours of corrupted sales time every quarter—freeing up the sales team to make more sales and the HQ teams to focus on strategy.
 

methods

• Workshop to align on goals and map out the process

• Workflow shadowing to understand the steps each role takes as part of the process, including an audit and walk-through of existing tools (and workarounds!) used at each step

• In-depth interviews with stakeholders at all levels, from salespeople to Vice Presidents, conducted both in-person and remotely

• Survey across the sales organization to validate learnings and quantify the scale of the pain points identified in qualitative research

key insights

Through our research, we discovered that the existing planning system was:

• Slow to respond: changes in customer assignments could take up to 6 months to become implemented in the real world

• Short on useful tools: users created their own tools to make the process work for them, and many were drowning in gigantic spreadsheets

• Lacking intelligence: tons of data was available, but there was little automated analysis

• Opaque in its logic: users had to go on a time-consuming hunt to figure out why a decision had been made (and often did not get answers)

• Imbalanced: those most impacted by the results perceived themselves to have the least control and agency in the process

As a result, the current sales planning process demanded a disproportionate amount of resources, requiring repetitive manual tasks and demoralizing users—and corrupting 350,000 hours of sales time across the organization. 85% of salespeople saw inaccuracies in their customer assignments, so no one trusted the system. The process appeared purposefully cryptic, pit teams against each other, and even drove high turnover in the sales organization.