Sales Enablement for Financial Advisors - CX & Product Strategy

Challenge:

The sales advisors had been ingrained with age-old practices of interacting with clients using manual/minimal technology, thus spending more time and effort on lower-value activities. All these activities led to lower quality and quantity of client facing time, eventually inefficient operational model. Furthermore, the workshops and additional desk research helped to understand other problems like siloed technology centers of excellence, not considering front-line sales opinion (core users) but only their managers being stakeholders. Also, the alignment of priorities between business and technology was a mismatch, and technology tended to be in the back seat by providing solutions.

The sales process within this business unit did not only want to achieve sales targets but also;

VISION:

• Help sales to prospect customers, prioritize leads, and reach customers faster

• Identify opportunities without relying on memory and manual analysis

• Continuously improve the recommendation model by understanding what products and content the sales team is using, when in the cycle, and with what level of sales success

• Embed micro-learning moments within the experience to help educate and improve sales executive performance

• Focus on operational efficiency while delivering manageable chunks of innovation

Sales efficiency, sales effectiveness, employee engagement, and partner integration was the key.

Solution:

To succeed with the vision and goals, the organization required efficient information gathering, AI-powered knowledge management, centrally located actionable insights, automated/efficient - meeting scheduling, effective content sharing, and better Business Process Management. To solve this multi-faceted problem, my team decided to transform the business unit digitally while keeping the customer experience of the financial advisors at the core. Thus, a multi-disciplinary approach along with a product strategy mindset helped to solve the problems.

One can pretty much buy any technology, but the ability to adapt to an even more digital future depends on developing the next generation of skills, closing the gap between talent supply and demand, and future-proofing one’s potential.
~ HBR Article: Digital Transformation Is About Talent, Not Technology - May, 2020

My Role and Deliverables:

My role within this engagement was unique and challenging. I was part of a pilot phase model proposed by our business and organizational consulting division. The model leveraged a product management team, and I worked as a UX Strategist and Lead Designer within that team. The other key members, responsibilities, and the model are shown below.

Deliverables:

• Primary and secondary customer research

• Stakeholder interviews

• Empathy Maps & User Profiles

• Customer Journey Maps

• Experience strategy and vision

• Prioritized feature list

• Service Maps

• Prototypes

• Product Management status meeting reports

Multidisciplinary workshops:

From the desktop research, I realized it was crucial to bring all the different stakeholders, including the customers (sales executives), to the same room. So, I orchestrated a half-day workshop to bring business, user, and technology perspectives together. This workshop aided me in empathizing with the sales executives and understanding the end-to-end sales journey. These exercises helped me build empathy maps, user profiles, and customer journey maps (as a starting point).

User profile and empathy maps:

The workshop output was converted into digitized empathy maps and user profiles that served as a tool throughout the design and development process of the pilot phase. At every design stage, the profiles were referred to to resolve the pain points and frustration. Though the sales executives had different specialties and domain expertise, based on their fundamental activities, they were grouped into two categories.

1. Internal sales executives - who sit in an office and interact with end clients

2. External sales executives - who travel and meet the end clients in person

Another interesting fact the team learned was the frequent collaboration between Internal and External Sales Executives to gain clients and bring in more business.

Customer journey maps:

Through the workshop mentioned above, I helped to start a fire [conversation] between the teams by creating a customer journey map for the sales executives to bring all the teams on the same page. The customer journey map aided the teams in being customer (sales executive) centric while allowing them to see different perspectives coming from technological feasibility and business outcomes.

(Click on the image to open the full-size image)

This customer journey map was an iterative process that aligned with the different steps and phases a typical sales executive would have to go through to complete a sales cycle. At the macro level or 50K feet height, the customer journey map can be broken down into managing relationships, managing opportunities, managing engagements, and ongoing development. The emotions section was attractive as it showed the sales journey's overall sentiments, insights, and opportunities to improve. Towards the bottom of the journey map, it depicts the business goals the company wanted to achieve along with the current levels. This artifact was printed huge to fill up an entire wall 8ft x 16ft in the war room and use it for any alignment conversations.

Storyboarding for vision:

As a UX Strategist, my next step was to create a visionary storyboard to help the technology and business team think futuristic and create an ideal experience. I made a storyboard to demonstrate how a sales executive could achieve results in the future through intelligent interactions and automation. I used this storyboard to host a series of workshops that helped to capture 100+ ideas. (Click on the image to open a full-size image)

This storyboard allowed various teams and stakeholders to create a list of ideas and capabilities that would enable the sales executives' efficient and effective sales process.

Prioritized feature list:

After capturing different ideas and capabilities, I ran another set of 3 half-day workshops to prioritize the features based on business value and the level of effort required to implement the feature. This again allowed the product management team, business stakeholders, and the technology team to be in the same room and align on priorities. The below image gives an idea of the prioritized list of 100+ capabilities. (Click on the image to open the full list)

Building product roadmaps:

After prioritizing the capabilities, the next task was to map them on a timeline. I and other product management team members started building a product roadmap in the war room. This exercise was performed over a week’s time frame in chunks for 4 hours. This product roadmap would help the team to get through the vision and reach a milestone in a few quarters. The visual exercise contributed to bringing together business priorities, user needs, and technological dependencies. This was an ever-evolving document and changed per business priorities or user feedback. Also, getting a buy-in from the business stakeholders at specific milestones was imperative.

I converted the workshop outcomes into a digital roadmap to be printed and taped on a wall in the war room. As seen in the below image, the different capabilities were mapped over different quarters and years. (Click on the image to open the complete roadmap)

Product portfolio:

The above workshops helped the product management team develop five different pillars for the product portfolio.

1. Personalization: Technology enabler for the automation and personalization of content recommendations based on attributes and activities of advisors and sales executives across the sales lifecycle.

2. Content Discovery: Functions for storing and distributing sales materials and playbooks to end users; operational processes for maintaining sales materials, such as versioning control or expiration notices.

3. Content Delivery: Capabilities for delivering sales materials to recipients, including customized email messages, secure microsite landing pages, virtual web conferencing, and in-person presentations.

4. Book of Business: Capabilities for integrating CRM systems, particularly for recording sales activities with specific deals. It also includes content recommendations embedded in opportunities.

5. Sales Performance Optimizer: This entry point into an AI-based ecosystem provides a daily view of tasks, activities, reminders, and recommendations and leverages emerging tech capabilities to enhance productivity.

As the digital transformation was about acquiring the right skills in the right team, the product portfolio also helped the product management team identify the focus and skill set required for every pillar. The chart below helps identify the right skill set to build successful teams.

Service design maps:

The customer journey map was a 50K feet view of the end-to-end sales executive process. Every step had its nuances, and it was essential to double-click into every step of the journey map to understand the intricacies of business processes, the technology involved, and manual tasks. The pilot phase allowed the setup of a guideline for the product management team to get into the details using service maps. One such example was step #21 in the journey map post-meeting activities. The service maps benefited in understanding the current process, underlying technology, and human interventions. It helped different teams align on the current processes, and the pain points the sales executives have to go through. It helped the technology team to understand legacy systems and where intelligent technologies could be adopted for automated business processes. The artifacts below show the post-meeting activities’ - current, pilot, and future state. (Click to open details)

This digital transformation and pilot phase used an approach of failing fast to succeed later. Thus, it allowed me to experiment and test prototypes with all the involved stakeholders, including the sales executives. The above futuristic service map was used to create a prototype that will allow the sales executives to record notes/activities that will directly capture the notes in the CRM system.

coNCEPTUAL PROTOTYPE for POST-MEETING NOTES:

The link for the prototype can be found here: Link

Agile process for product strategy and design:

A strategy is the foundation for the entire lifecycle of the product and product family.

By defining the desired end state and how it achieves target business outcomes, Product Management teams can more effectively communicate the value of the product(s) and manage the alignment of priority features, functionality, and capabilities within the product experience across stakeholders, product teams, marketing teams, and customers alike.

As an advocate of design, I pushed the design process and guidelines for the product management team to follow.

Outcomes:

• Products and not projects:
  This transformation introduces the concept of Product Management into the organization. Product management is moving from project initiatives to more holistic (and long-term) ecosystem thinking. Projects are temporary and episodic, with success metrics primarily focused on dates and timelines. Products are durable and longer lasting, focused on outcomes.

• Product mind-shift:
  In this new world of product management, technology products are organized into distinct product lines associated with value streams. The business, IT, and marketing departments co-own these lines, and the entire product management process cultivates a rich relationship between them.

• A balanced approach:
  Approaching challenges equally across all layers of product and service invariably improves the interaction between an organization, its employees, and its customers, making digital transformation more successful.