Revolutionizing the Sales Landscape through Design Thinking

In this Throwback Thursday edition of The Disruptor podcast, co-hosts Jan Almasy and John Kundtz interview Ashley Welch, co-founder of Somersault Innovation and author of “Naked Sales.”

They discuss how design thinking can transform traditional sales techniques by building empathy, uncovering insights, and accelerating revenue growth.

Ashley explains how she helps sales teams move from pushing products to co-creating solutions tailored for each customer.

Quotes:

“Design Thinking Tools in the Hands of Sales Professionals is like putting Miracle-Gro on plants.” The iterative process helps you discover customer needs.

“When the buyer's process and the seller's process align, you are actually both working towards the same goal.” Remove friction by understanding motives.

“Stop playing the forecast game.” Obsess over customers, not projections, to drive organic business growth.   

Key Points Discussed:

• The fundamentals of integrating design thinking into sales.
• Techniques to foster deeper customer relationships.
• The importance of empathy in understanding customer needs.
• Real-world examples of successful design-thinking applications in sales. 
• Future trends in sales strategies and customer engagement. 

Dive Deeper:

Check out her book, NAKED SALES: How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue, and how it helps teach the client about big-picture visions found through baby steps.

Connect directly with Ashley Welch on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and share your experiences or questions about Design Thinking and Sales.

Read our Meium.com Story, “How to Get from Empathy to Transformation,” and learn about the five-step process tha

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ashley Welch: Wait a second. You're not teaching us how to sell. You're teaching us how to fall in love with our customers. And I was like, when you fall in love, they love you back.

[00:00:11] Jan Almasy: What is up Apex Chasers? Welcome to another episode of the Disruptor podcast, which will be a segment underneath the Apex podcast for now. 

But if you remember, We've got Mr. Disruptor himself, John Kundtz, right in my direction here. I'm starting to get better at that. One of these days, I'm going actually to remember which side to point to.

Today, we have a guest that John handpicked himself, and I'm super excited to have her on, but I would like to allow John the privilege of introducing who we will be talking to today. 

[00:00:52] John Kundtz: Thanks, Jan. Yeah, I'm actually really excited as well. This is segment number seven of the disruptor. Today, we have a really cool person, Ashley Welch.

She is the co-founder of Somersault Innovation and the co-author of Naked Sales, How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue. As Jan mentioned, I handpicked Ashley to come on the show, and I wanted to start by just explaining why with a little story. 

Back in 2015, the company I work with went out and acquired a company based in Austin, Texas. It was a technology services company selling software as a service platform. 

It was really cool. 

It was really disruptive. 

It was really innovative. 

The net of it was we went out to sell it initially. After we made the acquisition, my job was to enable our global sales teams to put this technology and services into their sales portfolio.

And we had a lot of initial excitement and a lot of initial meetings. Some of that was probably because we had this little shiny new box to tell people. We got a number of second meetings, and then suddenly, our sales and our processes just Ground to a halt, and we couldn't figure it out.

NetNet flew down to Austin, Texas, and met with a bunch of distinguished engineers and a couple of other really smart people, way smarter than me. And we came up with the idea of taking design thinking techniques and applying them to our sales process. So we did that for about a year, had. Ran about 20 workshops, and it was starting to pay off.

And so I'm like, wow, I wonder if anybody else is doing this. As a result, I went to look through the internet and found that very few people were doing this, but the one that was Ashley. 

So I'd like to bring Ashley. And talk about her journey and her passion for design thinking and sales.

I'm so happy to have you on the show because it's something Jan and I have been discussing for a while now. 

I'm curious about your story behind Somersault Innovation and what prompted you and your co-founder to this idea of combining sales and design thinking.

[00:03:20] Ashley Welch: Well, first of all, I want to say you're the unicorn. You're like the third person in the world who's ever Googled design thinking and sales. So thank you. We're looking for more unicorns. 

So, what inspired us? Well, I've been in sales for over 25 years, and I had worked for another company selling for many years and had then been introduced to the world of design thinking, just like you, all of a sudden saw the power of this methodology to transform how people were solving problems. Essentially, that's what it's used for most of the time. And it's a creative, fun process. My current business partner, Justin, was also working at the firm.

And together, we said, well, what if we left, started our own firm, and just did design thinking? And we became teachers and coaches of this methodology. Because we love it. So we did; we started Somersault. 

And then it was pretty quickly after starting the firm that we said, wait a second, there's all this synergy between the world of design thinking, really the tools, mindsets, different processes, and the world of sales.

I think because I had a sales background, I thought, well, the characteristics of the best designer are the same rabidly curious; they're insight hunters. They look to co-create with their clients, and they are constantly customer-centric. So we played with this notion, this hypothesis we had that if we gave some of the tools from the world of design, not all of them, but some of them, we could pick the best tools that would help sellers in three spaces, discovery, insight, and acceleration.

We believed it would transform how they sold, but we didn't know. So we started playing with this notion at Salesforce, and I can tell you many of the stories. But all of a sudden, it was like this magic pixie dust we were sprinkling on these sellers, and it was transforming how they sold. And importantly to sales, it was really increasing revenue and pipeline.

[00:05:12] Jan Almasy: So me and John connected about a year ago, as I was trying to figure out how to use design thinking and processes in marketing, and it started off with a physical building. 

John basically was like, that's a dumb idea. You should not have a physical building. You should go into services. And that was like the best thing that ever happened to us.

Now, this pixie dust, I think, when you're dealing with a group that has to interact with humans on a daily basis, and that's like their number one goal. Not sell products, but form relationships that end up selling products. It's like adding one extra step in the middle. I've talked to plenty of people and marketers, too.

It's why I'm so intrigued as to where the conversation will go on the sales side. Because on the marketing side, what we're really pushing for is using this design thinking as a way to say, Stop trying to market something that you're trying to sell, and actually market. The relationship that you're trying to form with the end user and study the end user in order to understand what that messaging needs to be.

Build those personas, build those empathy maps, create a buyer's journey, and use those tools. Inside of marketing, because marketing and sales are really hand in hand at this point, and the way that technology has boomed in the last decade, if you're not proficient in both, being a good seller is being a good marketer, and being a good marketer is being a good seller at this point.

And that pixie dust just allows people to rise over into the next echelon, which is amazing. So to 

[00:06:50] John Kundtz: To be fair, Jan, I don't think I told you your idea was bad. I think what I did was we sat down in a workshop with one of the economic development and entrepreneurial organizations here in Cleveland.

We actually did an empathy map of Jan's team and his client, and once we started digging into how they feel, what they say, what they do, and what they're thinking, classic empathy mapping and design thinking, I think that's, to be honest, that's when the light bulb went off in Jan's head that maybe the track he was going down was maybe better suited by addressing the needs and the uncovered needs that he didn't really know existed and therefore pivoted.

[00:07:34] Ashley Welch: To address those. I will say something interesting that just came up. I got a text this morning about how we worked with a team at a big tech research company. We had been doing our process called sell by design, and we had taught them these things, and one of the sellers that we had worked with who had been very successful wrote us and said, Hey, where are you guys?

You guys aren't in the system, and we're losing our customer centricity. We're doing all these things about personas, but that's marketing. That's not about how we sell. And what I think she was saying in that is, yes, we can do these empathy maps. We can do these personas so that we understand who our end user is, who we think our end user is, and what we think they care about.

But in the sales process, we also have to engage face-to-face. And it's the level of curiosity that, in large part that's going to distinguish us as a seller in a different way. And it's our ability to ask questions that aren't just about. The solutions that we're trying to sell, but really trying to open up the aperture greater in terms of, like, tell me all about your business and what you care about.

And let me go there and really think myself in that's beyond, I think, or in addition to the empathy, empathy map, and the personas that I've built, I have to test my assumptions with you. 

[00:08:50] Jan Almasy: I love the fact that you use the word aperture right there because an aperture is something that controls a level of light.

It's not like a door that is just like a barrier between two rooms. It's not that you could have used a window right there, but an aperture specifically allows more light to come in to get a clearer picture. Yeah, exactly. 

[00:09:13] John Kundtz: You have a great quote in your book, “Design Thinking Tools in the Hands of Sales Professionals is like putting Miracle-Gro on plants.”

Yeah. It's amazing what happens. And in our world, we weren't actually working with the salespeople per se. We were indirect, but we went right out to the clients, got them in a room, and started taking them through the process. Essentially, it means having them co-create the vision and the solution.

So as they move forward, because as in, in the world of transformation or innovation, I always love it when the client says, well, where have you done this before? And we'll go, well, if we had done this a bunch of times before, it wouldn't be innovative anymore, right? Yeah. The reason you're innovating is so you can do something that nobody else is doing, and so that helps the client realize that, oh, there is a big bit, big picture vision.

But also, what we were trying to do was get them to look at how to take little baby steps. And so a lot of what I've. Discovered, and it's not so much the prioritization of all of these things. At least what I found was you keep obviously nobody can do everything.

There's not enough money, there's not enough time, there's not enough people. As we used to say, “time, people, and money, pick two” or whatever that's saying from the sales side. 

And so we were able to put things down in, in an agile sort of approach. Based on the prioritization. Based on their user-centric needs, this is a really cool way for the client to start to see the light if you will.

But what I really like about what you've done is you've actually taken into the salespeople themselves. I think both are important. Yeah. Yeah. So that, to me, I think that epiphany when the salespeople, Jan, you have a saying I want to, it's about going fast. Oh, 

[00:11:13] Jan Almasy: smooth, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

It's something that they teach military members when we're learning shooting drills. And so, you get, if you start, if you think about moving quickly, your body tends to get nervous. But slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. So you take everything, and you rehearse it so many times that it just becomes muscle memory.

At that point, you can move extremely slowly, but if you're accurate, it's actually better in the long run. You waste less ammo. You're able to take out more at that time, you're trying to take out enemy troops or whatever you're trying to teach you to do, but in the sales world and in the marketing world, at least in my side, I use that analogy a lot when I'm thinking of structuring people's campaigns or getting to know the client and like you don't need to try to rush through that discovery phase.

That discovery phase is actually probably the most important. The other half that I use outside of that slowest, smoothest, fast is rather than trying to build a foundation. Take it one step further and try to find high-quality concrete first. If you can find high-quality concrete, then you'll have a high-quality foundation.

And this is where your process, I think, is really helping people find that concrete. 

[00:12:28] Ashley Welch: Exactly. Find it in a relationship with the client; figure out the priorities that they care about, not what you care about, and through that, you're going to grow something much bigger for both of you and add greater value.

[00:12:41] John Kundtz: I always say that we, as salespeople, are relatively lazy. We like to get from point A to point B as fast as we can because the faster we do it, in theory, the more stuff we sell. But at the same time, I see this churn, and then you come off as just somebody pushing stuff, and you have no idea whether or not they even client says, I'm not even sure I need this stuff.

And I've been really trying to get this idea of going back, understanding the desirability by the client, our technical feasibility to deliver it, and then the viability of the solution. And those three things are the pillars of design thinking.

[00:13:20] Ashley Welch: There is incredible pressure in sales, right?

Depending on what type of company you're in, that could be public pressure, stockholder pressure, or shareholder pressure. You get paid when you sell. And I really think that money corrupts us, corrupts how we think. And so when you have the pressure of sales and then the promise of pay. It does not bring out the best in us, right?

And so it's that context that we're trying to resist with these tools that I think actually have become quite helpful because once you start to use these tools and they're very concrete and they do give you a recipe for how to engage, you can resist that, resist the pressure and the promise of pay in a way that actually gets you more because the opportunities grow versus limiting yourself.

[00:14:05] John Kundtz: In your book, and as a former sales manager, you had a quote that really resonated with me, and it was, Stop playing the forecast game. I'm in a world where, yeah, we literally get up on Monday, we look at what we do, we forecast for the week, we roll it up by Wednesday to various levels of management, and then on Friday, we evaluate whether or not what we said was going to happen on Monday actually happened.

Do it all over again. We play that game for 13 weeks, and then the world ends, and then all of a sudden, it's now the next most important quarter. I always like to say it's the most important quarter in the history of the company, until the third day of the next month of the first quarter.

Let's dig into that a little bit. 

[00:14:49] Ashley Welch: So much of this is about the art of sales versus the science of sales. There's a little bit of intuition that you have to believe in this. So, what I know about sales forecasting is a little bit of the bane of these managers' and corporations' existence.

It's like no one ever gets it right. You take the top of the company, the board's always asking for, like, well, what can you predict? What can we rely on? And managers are always scrambling to get it right, which they push down to their sellers. Like, tell me, Ashley, what are you bringing in? And I don't care how you're bringing it in.

You told me you were going to get 50,000 by the end of the week. You need to get it. That's all going on. And yet. I think consistently, it tends to be inaccurate, and people are always looking for a better forecasting process around accuracy. So, I don't know, I feel like we're working in the same system, and it doesn't actually work very well.

And I do think that the pressure and attention on the forecast in some way. It moves us off of what really matters, which is the customer. And so if we stop just this mad incessant focus on the numbers and started just a mad incessant focus on the customer, I actually think things would dramatically shift the whole system because we're talking about the system now and start to put our intention on just making our customers wildly successful.

We become successful, and the money follows. 

[00:16:14] Jan Almasy: Yeah, we actually just implemented something here at Apex that I got the idea from one of our clients actually, and we're using rather than like top salesmen or like achievement base awards For staff, we're using values based. What does that mean?

We have our core values, right? We have the courage to innovate and the resiliency to solve any problem. What we decided to do is give out awards, not based on performance, but on embodying courage, embodying resiliency, and taking those saying, Hey, this person embodied the core values of the business.

Here's why. There you go. And because inside of my head when you, whenever you give somebody like you said, I don't care how you bring it in. You told me you're going to bring 50,000 in, get it done. Anytime you do something like that, it forms animosity relationships with your clients. And I would rather have a business that's foundationally based on what we are going to do what is best for our clients, regardless of what our top line number might be.

Because in the end, that long, firm relationship with the client is going to be what actually keeps us alive. It's like climbing up a mountain, and if you have. A whole bunch of people that start out cheering you on as you're climbing up the mountain because you've got this fancy new piece of equipment, and you're going at it, and you're pushing yourself, but along the way, you're taking rocks and chucking it down at the crowd.

And they're going to stop cheering for you. And then, if you slip and fall, there's no one there to catch you. But if you maintain, this is what I'm doing. And you get up to a plateau halfway up the mountain, you're like, Hey guys, like, this is where I'm at. This is what I can see on the horizon.

This is what we should do. This is what can help you. Then they're all still down at the bottom, cheering you on. And if you slip. There's a group of people there waiting to catch you and throw you back up on the mountain again to keep 

[00:18:19] Ashley Welch: climbing. Yeah, I totally agree. And I do want to say I know we've you're talking about envisioning and cheering us on, and I talked about pixie ducks and magic and unicorns.

This is not just like magical thinking. Like, you do have to some of our clients will say, like, well, I've got a run rate, I've got to keep. Right. So we're not saying, like, don't do tons of activity and keep your transactional business alive, and well, yeah, you've got to do all that.

And you do it to pay attention to the numbers. We're not saying forget about them, and it's all going to be wonderful. Still, there is also something about this mindset shift around customer centricity first versus forecast first that is real and will translate into more dollars. 

[00:19:06] John Kundtz: I read an article or a book or something that said when the buyer's process and the seller's process align, you are actually both working towards the same goal.

But the problem with forecasting is that most of the time, the buyer's process is out of line with the seller's process. They don't understand the client or the customer. 

[00:19:26] Jan Almasy: That's why I love John, that I'm a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk, but that's why we really take this whole day trading and attention approach.

It changes daily, but you have to pay attention to where people are paying attention, how they're paying attention, and what they're paying attention to. If you try to forecast that out too far, now you're trying to predict, and you have to, right, in order to make prudent business decisions, you have to predict, you have to do those types of things, but if in your brain, You're not mentally flexible enough to handle a complete curve ball, like a global pandemic, then you need to make sure that you're inside of your head.

They are able to make those adjustments because the buying process has completely flipped on its head and accelerated even further. Now that we've experienced this COVID. 

[00:20:16] Ashley Welch: That's right. And I think when I'm the customer if I come in already having done my research, I know. I've done 60 percent of this quote-unquote buying process.

I'm coming to you as a partner. I'm like, help me figure this out. Let's figure this out together. I'm not coming to you because I don't understand it, And that's again what's pushing us to this more co-creative stance that I think we need to move into.  

[00:21:54] Jan Almasy: I have a question for both of you guys. Why? Do you think it's difficult for people who have been inside of the sales world for a while to accept the fact that vulnerability is a positive thing, and how could they potentially start to get over that when they're interacting with customers? 

[00:22:13] Ashley Welch: It's a great question. We started somersault innovation, and we started working at Salesforce initially.

I remember One of our coaches in the system was like do not talk about vulnerability like that. It is not going to go down well in the sales community. And I think it's gotten more traction lately because of Brene Brown and others talking more about it. Well, I think I think salespeople are also unique in that we face a lot of adversity, right?

The door's getting shut on your face constantly. So there's this interesting dynamic in salespeople. Like, on the one hand, we have to be really resilient and tough and like, well, I'm gonna get up the next day and make another call. And I've got the number on my head, and everybody knows whether I'm making it or not.

So, I have to be pretty strong in that way. But I'm also incredibly vulnerable because I'm constantly putting myself out there. And so, I think in some ways, it's hard to acknowledge that vulnerability sometimes, and easier, like, I just gotta keep showing up, and I gotta keep my shell up, and I'm gonna be tough, and I'm all about the numbers.

And so, I think there's a little bit of resistance in the sense of acknowledging the vulnerability that we actually all have in being a sales, well, being a human being, but Right. in sales. In the past, And last, certainly as we were less educated and self-aware and therapized, vulnerability was not necessarily looked at as a good thing.

It was certainly looked at more as a weakness, whereas we connect when we sense other people's vulnerability, right? We connect when we understand what is driving another person. That's where that's sales, right there, right? And that's what you want. And the more vulnerable you make yourself, the more it allows another person to open up and connect with you and tell you things that They don't tell other people.

And that's why you become the trusted advisor.

[00:24:03] Jan Almasy: I believe it was a book on EQ versus IQ. And it was like, anytime that you're trying to form a relationship with another person, you have to be a mirror. You have to reflect the behaviors that you want that person to reflect back to you. It's like the golden rule.

And so if you expect the customer, you said it perfectly. You want the customer to tell you things that they have not told anybody else. You have to showcase that. You have to be willing to form a relationship with the customer that they've never had with anyone else. That's a very deep, that's an intimate thing.

That's where that trust comes in. And you start to become this person that is saying, Like, this is one of my favorite lines, right? I could sell you this. However, I know that with this specific thing you need, you can get it cheaper, like here. And I will point you in this direction; get that done here.

It'll allow me to do my job better up here. And you can actually save money. And then give me more money to do my job up here, right? And so they, but the way that feels when you're having that conversation. So, hopefully, none of my clients listen to this, right? Because then they're going to know my tricks, but they're not tricks.

That's the cool thing. It's genuinely trying to make sure that you're getting the best bang for your buck. And then, when you form that long-term relationship and now they, they trust that you have their best intention at heart. Yeah. That's a completely different ball game. Totally agree. Nursing and sales, right?

Two completely different ballgames. The amount of times that you need to try to sell something to a patient is absolutely insane. Like, now that I'm thinking about it, the way that you guys are talking about this, whether it's selling a tablet that they need to take. Because it's going to help save their lives or convince them to get up and walk if they just had open heart surgery or something you're selling constantly.

But I think that the entire reason why I understand so much about what you guys are talking about is because, in the nursing field, you have to sell from a place of empathy. Otherwise, it does not work at all. Yeah, it doesn't. And you have to go in and figure out, okay, this person has, Like, a cardiac ICU patient, for example.

This person has four tubes sticking out of their chest. They just had an 11-inch incision in their sternum. It's wired together. They just freaked out because they had a heart attack five days ago. And I have to get them up and make them walk down a hallway even though it's gonna hurt like a son of a And Trying to sell somebody on that is, is not super easy if you sell it from a place of, hey, I know this is going to be tough.

If we don't do this, here's what could potentially happen. And if we do this, I'm going to be with you every step of the way. It's going to be scary, but I promise, like I've got you if you fall, we're going to catch you and really push them to this growth that now they come back, and they sit down in a chair after that walk, and they're like, Oh my gosh, I feel so much better.

Yeah. 

[00:27:03] John Kundtz: At the end of the day, people still buy from those they trust. Therefore, building a trusting relationship is critical. The unfortunate thing today is we have to do it totally different, right? Even now, especially now with the COVID problem. But even before it's, we have to build relationships digitally.

What's your perspective on the state of digital disruption in our technology industry, or even industry in general? I think everybody's being disrupted. They are the disruptors, and I always said if they're not, they're probably going out of business, or if they don't think they are, I 

[00:27:41] Ashley Welch: should say.

Yeah, well, for sure, it's disrupting sales. There's all this AI technology, as that at the beginning I was actually skeptical, like how is a Computer gonna come up with an email. 'cause it's used a lot in prospecting. That actually connects with me. But if you look at some of the emails that are being generated now, they are wired in empathy in a way that I'm actually like, wow.

[00:28:06] Jan Almasy: That email felt like processing. What'd you say? It said natural language AI processing. Yeah. 

[00:28:13] Ashley Welch: So it's impressive what it's coming up with, but I will say, or, and so I think it's going to start replacing some of the sales processes and disrupting sales in different ways. But I think that there is a.

 There's a myth beginning or has already taken hold that, like data analytics and AI is going to save us, and all of a sudden, it's going to make it easy for us to sell, and we can just get out of the way. I can just read the analytics, and then boom. And I think that's a trap, right?

Because at the end of the day, and it's actually Ginni Rometty, your former CEO at IBM, who said at the end of the day, we're all B2P, not B2C, B2B, B2P, business to people. Like, at the end of the day, it's. Someone who's making a decision, particularly in these complex sales. And so I don't think that the human element is going away.

I actually think it's becoming more important as we move into this digitalized world. So I think that we will be disrupted by all this technology, but what's going to be distinctive is how we continue to humanize sales in whatever portion we become more and more involved in. 

[00:29:26] Jan Almasy: AI. So that's something I'm extremely passionate about, right, is this artificial intelligence and how it can enhance the ability to gather insight because of just the vast reach of data points it's able to bring in?

Not too long ago, I gave a speech about our human-centric media model, right? And it was at the University of Akron here in Ohio. But one of the things that I said was that AI is nothing but a force multiplier. That's all it is. It's not a magic bullet. It's not pixie dust. It's not a unicorn or Yoda or whatever we decide to call John for the day.

 It's a force multiplier, so it still requires a highly trained human pilot in my world; in the world of the creative, what it allows us to do is. Allow creatives to do what they love, which is being creative. We have a photographer and a videographer who like to go out and shoot our commercials for us.

So, instead of spending 10 hours trying to figure out what type of commercial to shoot, what type of music to use, and what other stuff to use, we can find all of that out using AI. Yeah. And then what they do. It is phenomenally executing, and it gets really creative with the shots, with the audio, with the music, with all this other stuff, which is what they actually love doing.

Unlocks creativity that allows that person to bypass this period of time that they would have spent just mindlessly researching or brainstorming, and now they can take this data set, brainstorm for half the time, get an even better result, and really just go out and take some awesome pictures.

So I'm curious, like, if that's the process in the creative world, what would that equivalent be? Do you think in the sales world, what would AI unlock for that human pilot to be able to drive? Well, I think there's an organization called Data Book. They're, I think, a Silicon Valley startup. They've been around for about five years.

[00:31:38] Ashley Welch: They have been really smart in terms of using AI and data analytics to start to understand not only sorts of industry trends. But for, let's say, you're going after sort of an oil company industry trends, but then also looking at, like, what is the board asking for from this executive team?

And what is this person on the executive team really accountable for in terms of goals and metrics? So they can quickly use all these analytics. To synthesize for a seller what's important to John, let's say who the CEO of this oil company is. So, that is very personalized to the industry.

Like, so that's incredible. I still can't walk in there with my analytics and sell you on the fact that now I actually know more than you do about you and your industry without also empathizing with how you, what this must feel like for you, and other things I've experienced about you and your customers.

I also think the reason why this matters is that we are human beings who are wired by emotion, like our reptilian brain, and where we act first is from our emotions, right? Not from the logic, we make bad decisions all day long because we're emotional, right? And so AI and all these data analytics are never going to know that I just had a bad morning, and now I don't care what you tell me, but I'm going to make a different decision because I am emotional or because of my history or whatever it is.

So again, 

[00:33:20] Jan Almasy: I can't read body language. But, like, it's not going to know this person has their ankles crossed, which means that they're still holding back from a part of a conversation.  

[00:33:33] John Kundtz: I think I read a couple of books a while back that in today's world, complex enterprise sales are big and complex. There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 people that get involved in the process of making decisions, And so again, you know their journey. One of the things you shared with me a while back was your version of a journey map. What I loved about what you did was you dummied it down.

Yeah, most of us are pretty ADD, right? We just have trouble focusing for more than about five minutes, and one of the things we struggle with on the design thinking stuff is it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of focus, and now doing it virtually, it's even harder. There are a lot of people involved in these big decisions. Do you have any thoughts there or any advice to salespeople on how to remain competitive and grow that business in that space?

Besides what we've already talked about. 

[00:34:28] Ashley Welch: Yeah. Well, certainly, a lot of our clients are talking about the same thing. Like they're not selling to one person anymore. They're selling to a committee, and that's so much harder, right? You're having to build consensus in a group of people and a group of executives who may see the world very differently, in fact, right?

Sales might see it very differently in the marketing or operations or whoever. So I don't know that I have any magic here, but I do think it, again, comes down to this human element of really understanding what you're different, understanding who the different stakeholders are, what they care about, and then a lot of times we're talking about like your role as a salesperson as a facilitator, right?

Facilitating that dialogue and facilitation is a you. It's a skill. So what are the skills you need as a salesperson now to be also a great facilitator so that you can facilitate this dialogue among the group and among individuals to help you move the decision along?  So, I do think it's a competency that's growing in terms of necessity in the sales organizations at the enterprise level.

[00:35:33] John Kundtz: I wanted to just, before we wrap up, Jan, I wanted to, and I'll let you chime in here in a second, but I don't want to run out of time. I definitely wanted to give Ashley a plug for your Sell by Design offerings. What I noticed was that you seem to be very granular in some small things that could be very pertinent to either small organizations or entrepreneurs or startups and then obviously growing up.

So, I thought you could just take a little bit of a commercial here and talk about some of the things you have to offer on your website. 

[00:36:08] Jan Almasy: Yeah, 

[00:36:08] Ashley Welch: Basically, we work with the whole go-to-market community, so it depends on where you sit within that band. And so we have our flagship program, which you mentioned, Sell by Design.

It's a three-month process where we're giving sellers new tools, and then we're coaching them against target accounts and how to use those tools. And then we're coming back three months later and saying how to go. What happened to the pipeline? What happened to revenue? What happened to your relationships?

That's phenomenal. And we do a lot of that in high tech. We then work a lot on SKOs and sales kickoff events, which people are starting to talk about right now, and customizing solutions. We've been running Microsoft's sales kickoff seven-month process for the last couple of months, actually.

And so that's a custom process, depending on what's needed. Then, we do a lot with either other custom opportunities outside of SKOs or working with problem-solving teams. For example, we're working in a tech company with a team that's trying to rethink partner engagement. And so we're using a whole end-to-end design thinking process to help them figure out that question and come up with a new solution.

So that's the variety of what we do, but we're always trying to figure out what we want; most of all, it is like clients. We want to co-create with us and create something amazing and transformational that adds. I mean, everybody says that, but we're ruthlessly focused also on adding that value because we're in sales, and we know If it's slowing down the deal cycle, it's not adding to revenue.

It's not practical and useful 

[00:37:40] Jan Almasy: I'm going to drop some connection thoughts here to finish out the episode. Sure. So there's a couple of different things that just smacked me, like right there towards the end.  When you guys were discussing the reptilian brain. How did the buyer's journey shift? How in enterprise-level solutions, it's a lot of getting consensus rather than convincing a single person.

So, the reptilian brain, right for those of you who are in the medical world and listening to this, is the limbic system. The limbic system is what she's referring to when she says the reptilian brain, right? So this is the brainstem. This is ancient. This is a very deep primal emotion. Anger, greed, love, lust.

 These are very deep human emotions. So, every person, the beautiful thing about your strategy with design thinking Is everybody, regardless of background, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of language, regardless of whatever, can relate to two things: music and storytelling, okay? And so you have this buyer's journey, right?

And we create this hero's journey that people are able to look at themselves in. And if you go back and you listen to somebody like Joseph Campbell, who gives a lot of these lectures on the art of the story, right? You start with an origin, and there's always a call to adventure. It starts when they hear something in the distance when it's, if it's Elsa, she hears in Frozen 2, she hears the call of the wild that was written as a classic in literature, but there's always this call to adventure, and that's your responsibility as the salesperson is to take this hero that is your client and give them a call to adventure.

This is this new land that we can go and explore. The interesting piece is when you start to get into that. There's always a threshold guardian. That's what Joseph Campbell would call it. There's this guardian that stands in the gate, who is your guide. And you see these in Disney all the time.

There's conflict. Parents die. There are no family members around. Hercules is left alone and adopted on Earth. But then he finds this guardian that Takes him through this path and guides him through all of these treacherous areas to where he can reach this place of triumph now. You also said that sales is a mixture of an art and a science, right?

So, the art piece is that relationship formation? The science piece is when you paint that journey when you talk about the story, empathize, and allow that person to see themselves as a hero in their own archetypal story. On the science side, it actually releases oxytocin in the limbic system and chemically forms a bond with you.

And when you tell the story, it causes this emotional response, and oxytocin is one of the most powerful. That's, that is the drug that allows women to completely forget. Portions of the pain of yesterday: go back and have multiple kids, right? Because, like any sane human would be like, I'm not doing that again.

Oxytocin floods the brain and forms this inseparable bond. Yeah. And at this point, it's so powerful that it. Allows them to want to go back and have a second or third child and inside of this sales journey. If you can get that oxytocin to release on the science side because you are so artful with your selling.  It forms a bond, not just intellectually, not just emotionally, but chemically.

Neurochemically, it forms a bond. So your process is not just pixie dust. This is a legitimate, science-based action. Thank 

[00:41:41] Ashley Welch: you, Jan. I'm going to take you with me, exactly. 

[00:41:45] John Kundtz: Yeah. Aren't you glad you got on a podcast with an ICU nurse, and now you've got a little bit of a science lesson at the same time?

[00:41:53] Jan Almasy: That's why I put my hands on my head because I was like, holy crap. 

[00:41:57] Ashley Welch: That's exactly, we say that all the time. I always say that at the end of the day, people just want to be loved and listened to. And that's everything that then chemically happens, and it's true. We one of my favorite quotes from a seller we were working with said, Wait a second, you're not teaching us how to sell. You're teaching us how to fall in love with our customers.

And I was like, yeah, when you fall in love, they love you back. 

[00:42:22] John Kundtz: We are running out of time. And so the last thing I did want to just plug, of course, is your book, which of course we showed on the video, but it's in paperback.

Again, it's Naked Sales, How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue. It's available in paperback. It's also available in Kyndryl. And so those of you who are Kindle Unlimited users, you could actually download it and read it for free. Yeah. And so it's very accessible. So, I don't know, Jan, was there anything else you wanted to say or ask Ashley before, Ashley, anything you wanted to say before we No, 

[00:43:37] Ashley Welch: I just appreciate both of you and love this type of conversation.

I don't get to have it often enough, so thank you for inviting me 

[00:43:44] Jan Almasy: to it. I'd have to say that the only thing that I would ask is that this not be our last conversation. That would be my only request. I'll be back. I will take you up on it. If you ever want to, if you ever want me to share the stage with you, I will take you up on that offer.

We can rock some, we can rock some minds together. The final piece, before we actually sign off, what are your socials? Do you have socials? Are there any places that people can follow you to figure that stuff out? And then I already put up the website for SomersaultInnovation.com

[00:44:12] Ashley Welch: LinkedIn is where we tend to play most of the time. And we've been making a habit of every week posting a tipper tool in video form every week. So it's two to five minutes long. It's Justin and I. Justin's my co-founder. And we're offering a Tipper tool, and we banter back and forth a little bit. So, 

[00:44:28] Jan Almasy: find us there. All right, everybody. Until next time, this has been an absolute pleasure, and I look forward to having another amazing disruptor, whatever one John is able to pull out of his Mary Poppins bag of tricks on the next episode of The Disruptor.

All right, yeah.