Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Ashley Welch, Author, Naked Sales – How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue
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Ashley Welch is the Co-founder of Somersault Innovation. Somersault Innovation is a sales transformation firm. They pioneered the tools of Design Thinking to the Go to Market Community to help people stay customer-obsessed in the sales process and grow revenue. The tools are practical, and help sellers speak to their customer’s business outcomes in a differentiated way and co-create. The results have been significant in terms of pipeline growth, deal velocity and new revenue. Their clients include Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, VMware, Salesloft and many others.

- Naked Sales marries the idea of Design Thinking to Sales. At its core, this tries to address the business needs of the customer’s customer. In other words, it asks, “what is my customer trying to solve for their customer”. Only when the seller organization understands the problem that her customer is trying to solve– that is, addressing their customer, can the sales organization become effective in taking a consultative role, helping the proximal customer, and consequently becoming a valuable partner to the buyer organization.
- In this quest, the author suggests a model that takes into account factors that affect the customer’s buying decision, such as desirability, feasibility and viability, and means that design thinking happens in three stages, user research, insight generation, and solution experimentation. The seller should map out the process, and this is more like an art project, rather than ‘science’.
- Selling by design corresponds to the sales cycle and consists of the discovery, insight and acceleration stages in the sales cycle. The author delineates what it takes to go through each step sincerely and successfully, instead of checking the boxes.
Run time – 37.56 mins.