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Discovering and designing pre-sales AX for desirability validation
Problem
Pre-sales teams spent 300+ hours processing technical proposals, with response times up to 4-8 weeks per complex tender. Up to 80% of the pre-sales cycle devolved into a labyrinth of manual, soul-crushing paperwork and disconnected workflows. Sales engineers struggled to comprehend 40-50% of their product offerings, with proposal generation relying 90% on manual spreadsheets and fragmented information systems. This broken process transformed potential strategic sales activities into a time-consuming, error-prone bureaucratic nightmare
My scope
- Defining desirability validation strategy
- Preparing and facilitating discovery workshops
- Product Design, process Ownership
- Preparing the offer and scope for my own services, negotiations with the client
Solutions
- Customizable desirability validation strategy, including concrete techniques
- Product discovery and experimentation framework – ready to use by the client in the future, even without my help
- Structured workshops to uncover and prioritize JTBD, and to define the value proposition for the MVP intended for desirability validation
- Comprehensive offer, Customer Interviews template
- Refined high-fidelity Figma prototype of an AX web app addressing key user JTBD, simple design system based on adapted Figma Community libraries
Results
- Structured client knowledge that he got after expert interviews, the entire pre-sales process mapped (each with own JTBD)
- Prioritized JTBD to visualize key areas unlocking the MVP. Discerned jobs potentially enriching the product post-launch
- Respectfully of the time and budget, these desirability validation techniques were used: a quick "find the watering hole" and a high-fidelity Figma prototype
- Build great rapport with the client due to time-cost transparency and the pre-sales preparation empowering him despite the limited budget. He now has a comprehensive set of techniques to easily experiment with without my involvement, along with data types to be drawn from each of those techniques. I'm still in touch with the client for future tweaks after he completes expert interviews
- The client was positively surprised about the outcomes and wrote me a LI review 😉
