Explaining technically orientated solutions to business leaders is hard. And sales teams used to talking about speeds and feeds have it the worst. They haven’t had to talk about business benefits, or their value to their customers’ customer. Having to talk about that scares them.
It’s all the more terrifying when they have to sell stuff that doesn’t work together. And when the separate engineering teams didn’t have an overarching vision to unify and guide their product development, you end up with a lot of support headaches – and steamed customers.
The customer service teams got really good at the diving catch to calm customers and fix their problems. But it was really expensive and it made the sales team afraid to sell these fractured solutions.
This is where marketing can step in. There are two major types of marketing organizations, those that help sales, and those that blaze new markets. Ours traditionally supported sales, but Doug Merritt, then the new SVP of Solutions Marketing, currently the CEO of Splunk, wanted to define markets and build innovations to meet demand.
To see if his ideas worked, Merritt asked McKinsey & Company to define the business and technology transitions and see what industry needed. He tasked our experience strategy team to turn Cisco’s unique offerings and value into a customer-experience driven solution. So the fearful sales teams could confidently talk to business decision makers, and engineering teams could understand the real problems they were actually addressing with their products and decide what mattered most while they built the tools to help the customers get what they needed.
The result – a digital storytelling presentation to show how we could change their business. Each of the dozen presentations was a collection of vignettes that brought to life the potential customer experience our customers’ customers would have. Now sales could simply pick the vignettes that spoke to their customer’s opportunities.
What we gave the sales teams
When creating the presentation file we assumed the salesperson had never heard of our work. So we gave them a primer to help them squeeze the most juice out of the presentation. All followed the same basic structure: The value of CX, How to use the deck, A primer on the industry.
Our presentations taught the sales organization customer experience-driven ways to sell.
Introducing customer experience
The quality of the experience end users have when they interact with our customer’s company. This is the experience our customer’s customer has. For this reason, this deck uses empathy to illustrate the end user experience.
Through the use of visual storytelling, we show our customers that we understand how to help them create positive experiences for their customers. This increases wallet-share for our customers.
3 reasons to create a great experience intentionally:
- 53% of successful deals are attributed to a differentiated sales experience
- Gartner CIO Survey 2012 reveals Customer Experience as a top care-about
- A great sales experience builds trust by establishing us as the advisor
We tested each presentation with customers and sales get the best results. And we recorded a tutorial to show them how best to tell the stories in the presentation.
Introducing Cisco Stories: FSI (Financial Services Industry) Retail Banking
This is a digital storytelling deck designed to show how Cisco is changing retail banking businesses.
There are seven vignettes or scenarios to help viewers imagine what is possible in modern retail banking:
- Digital social engagement
- Personalized greeting
- Remote expertise
- Multi-device collaboration
- Enterprise collaboration
- Mobile worker
- Mobile office
Getting started:
- We recorded a 5 minute overview on how to get the most of this deck.
- Then customize this deck for your audience as needed by re-ordering or deleting scenarios.
- Stay current. Download it here.
Instructions were simple: how to use it, and why.
Use this deck to:
- Spark executive dialog with your insight about the market and the specific business within your accounts
- Engage non-technical business buyers through easy to understand scenarios made possible by our technology
- Expand influence and create new relationships by showing how we can drive business value for them
This an opportunity to:
- Frame a common perspective of business challenges and customer care-abouts
- Show what our technology makes possible
- Demonstrate how we can drive business value
Example: retail banking personalized greeting vignette
This video shows the personalized greeting solution of the retail banking presentation. Below is a contextual primer used to give the presenter the needed context to use the vignette and talk with the customer.
Customer care-abouts – personalized greeting
Startling starters: Study by EyeView showed that when content is personalized (e.g.based on industry, localization, etc.) they saw an increase in favorability of 37% and an increase of likelihood to recommend at 73% compared to the non-personalized content.
Customer care-abouts: Utilization of time to arrive on location. A personalized experience is expected not only upon entering the building and arriving onto the campus. The customer wants to know where to go and how to get there.
Business care-abouts: Improving customer Intimacy and experience. Delivering a richer experience to customers who “opt-in.” Manage customer generational shifts with on-demand service.
Technology play: Mobility, collaboration software, instant video communication, any to any/ BYOD, secure authentication.
Our solutions: Digital signage, Jabber, BYOD, VXI, Remote expert, Geo location awareness.
Our services: [we provided a link to collaboration services solution overview]
Primary research: [we provided a link to supporting research]
Solutions marketing: [we provided a link to marketing material]
Plays: [we provided a link to marketing play books]
It’s possible to be too successful
No, really it is. Like a heavy storm after a drought, we overwhelmed the Sales organizations. Ultimately gave them a dozen presentations. Our pilot sales teams used them with great success, too much really. The sales teams grabbed the customers’ attention so well, that they overwhelmed the sales support industry experts. With no industry experts to call upon, the final mile of closing the deal was very difficult, and salespeople went back to selling speeds and feeds.
The silver lining was that the engineering UX teams took over the program and used the presentations to help spread the UX vision across the solution portfolio. They developed more stories. Happily our proof of concept evolved and lived on.