In this episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Ashley Welch, co-Founder at Somersault Innovation, where she leverages design thinking in sales coaching. Join us for an engaging conversation about the 3-step process to help sales reps unlock their empathy, curiosity, and insightfulness.
If you missed episode #194, check it out here: No More Quotas, No More Commission: Sales Without SDRs with Nelson Gilliat
What You’ll Learn
- The importance of focusing on your customer’s customer
- True sales are about empathy
- Harnessing challenge into curiosity
- Ashley’s discovery-insight-acceleration framework
Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast
Show Agenda and Timestamps
- About Ashley Welch & Somersault Innovation [2:05]
- Bringing concepts of design thinking to sales [5:24]
- Step one: discovery [7:29]
- Step two: insight [14:03]
- Step three: acceleration [17:41]
- Paying it forward [25:16]
- Sam’s Corner [27:31]
About Ashley Welch & Somersault Innovation [2:05]
Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs. Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Today on the show we’ve got Ashley Welch, talking to us about why it’s so important to focus on your customer’s customer.
Before we get there, we’ve got three sponsors:
Pavilion is the key to getting more out of your career. Our private membership connects you with a network of thousands of like-minded peers and resources where you can tap into leadership opportunities, professional development, mentorship, and services made just for high-growth leaders like you.
We’re also brought to you by Outreach, the first and only engagement and intelligence platform built by revenue innovators for revenue innovators. Commit to accurate sales forecasting, replace manual processes with real-time guidance, and unlock actionable customer intelligence that guides you and your team to win. Find out why Outreach is the right solution.
Finally, Flockjay. With sales becoming increasingly knowledge-driven and digital-first, elite sales leaders are looking for ways to invest in the most important part of their tech stack, their people. Flockjay helps sales teams do their best work by automatically capturing, tagging, and sharing best practices. Find out how to elevate your sales team at flockjay.com/saleshacker.
Ashley is the co-founder of Somersault Innovation, providing a unique approach to sales development. Somersault offers go-to-market tools and techniques from the world of design thinking to drive customer centricity and revenue growth.
Prior, she spent 20 years as a leading sales professional managing a multi-million dollar portfolio of global clients for a consulting firm. She founded TEDxYouth@Wayland in her hometown to enable students to tell their stories. Ashley, welcome to the show.
We like to start by giving you an opportunity to tell us more about your company. What’s the value that you add to the world?
Ashley Welch: We’re a sales enablement firm, first and foremost. We’ve pioneered this niche of taking the best tools from the world of design thinking and giving them to various customer-facing professionals to enable them to be more customer-centric, do better discovery, co-create with their customers, in a way that grows revenue.
We started the company seven years ago. Before that, I was a sales professional at a consulting firm. I loved what they did, I loved the people. I knocked on their door and I got a job as an assistant. I wanted to be a consultant, but they kept saying, “no, no, you want to be in sales”.
I found I had a knack for it. It was old-school sales back then. It was good training, and it spoke to my entrepreneurial energy.
Bringing concepts of design thinking to sales
Sam Jacobs: You mentioned bringing concepts of design thinking to sales. Let’s dive into that. What are the basic tenets of design thinking that we can incorporate into our sales process?
Ashley Welch: What is design thinking? I think of it as a methodology that sits in the same realm as Six Sigma, used to tackle problems or create new innovations. Design thinking is a five-stage process. Each stage has a set of tools.
You always start with this ruthless curiosity about the end-user or customer. Asking all sorts of questions and really understanding the how, why, when, so that you’re creating from the insights that you have about your end customer.
The underpinnings of design thinking are curiosity, empathy, agility, customer-centricity. We said “wait a second — this is used for innovation, but a lot of these things that designers do, salespeople do as well. They’re super curious. They do great discovery. They want to co-create with their customers. They’re insight hunters.” We’ve been taking the best tools from the world of design and giving them to sellers.
Step one: discovery [7:29]
Sam Jacobs: The first part is, essentially sales, which is empathy and curiosity about the end-user, and trying to understand where they are, what they’re doing? What are the next steps? Walk us through the full process.
Ashley Welch: We translated the 5-step design thinking process into three stages that map more closely to the sales process. It’s discovery, insight, and acceleration.
In discovery, it’s exactly what you said. How do I stay open to understand not only what my customer cares about, but what their customer cares about? That’s where value is created.
In the insight phase, we’re saying, “what’s something insightful and newsworthy that would be interesting to bring to your customer that would enable them to engage with you and say, ‘wow, you understand me. Let’s talk further.'”
Sam Jacobs: Is this a distillation of the discovery process? Or the collective synthesis of your conversations with customers so that you can bring them that insight?
Ashley Welch: Both. Unfortunately, there’s not a recipe. A lot of times in sales we’re looking for the steps to revenue. It’s not quite as clear-cut. The work that we do is more about the art of sales versus science.
Sam Jacobs: You tell people, “curiosity and empathy are the coin of the realm, you have to have those, you have to be interested in your prospect.” They go into the customer conversation and start asking a bunch of questions. They get lost in the woods. They’re not sure how to get back. They can’t understand how to relate the questions that they’re asking, they don’t understand how to tie that back to a business conversation. From the prospect’s perspective, you’re just in this unending interrogation without any purpose to it. How do you coach reps so they don’t get stuck?
Ashley Welch: I don’t have a formula. The idea is being normal, being human. Be natural. Reflect it back. Make the translation. What are they trying to do strategically so that you can make the link?
It’s about your natural instinct around how to synthesize what you’ve learned into a conversation about the future.
Step two: insight [14:03]
Sam Jacobs: Insight is the second step in your process. Is the emphasis on the customer’s customer? Are there additional questions that you introduce that make it closer to design thinking?
Ashley Welch: The emphasis on the customer’s customer is what’s unique. We talk about doing your discovery in a way that links to the macro priorities of your customer.
What we’re pulling from design thinking is how to be curious. Some people aren’t naturally good at that or they just need a little more direction.
We tell people to pay attention to four things: where you hear value, where you hear someone cares about something. Ask for more information. Where does someone see value? Where are there inconsistencies? If you hear an inconsistency, that tells you something. That would be a place to dig in.
Hacks or workarounds. If someone’s doing something that helps them get around a system, that’s interesting, “tell me why you created that? What unmet need is underneath that?”
Lastly, something that surprises you. If we’re having a conversation and you say something surprising to me, it’s a place to dig in and say, “can you tell me more about that?” We’re giving people prompts to accelerate their curiosity.
Step three: acceleration [17:41]
Ashley Welch: In acceleration, we’re helping the seller move into this co-creative stance. We know that the more that you are involved in a process of creation, the more ownership you have.
We’re trying to get the seller to a place of co-creation with their customers. How do you do that? You ask for feedback, invite them in to tailor what you’re creating, use whiteboards to visualize something, and get their fingerprints on it.
We talk about using a mutual success plan that is truly mutual, done on Google Docs or something so that both the seller and the buyer can add to it so we are mutually owning the process of creating value through this transaction.
There are many different tools around co-creation, but it’s all about accelerating the deal by co-creating with your customer.
Sam Jacobs: What do you think keeps companies and sellers from being customer-centric, from co-creating, sharing insights together, and focusing on the customer’s customer? I think the main thing is a lack of curiosity and empathy, and there’s cultural self-centeredness that keeps coming into play. Sometimes it’s just how people behave.
Companies that are not customer-centric don’t care about their customers. You’re not solving a specific problem on behalf of somebody else, you’re just making something that you think is cool.
Ashley Welch: The promise of pay and the pressure of sales are two big inhibitors to customer-centricity. If you’re paying me a lot of money to close, I’m maniacal in my focus on closing the deal, which keeps us from being our curious empathic selves.
The pressure of sales is real. I’ll sell you anything. I’ll promise anything. There’s a lot about sales that keeps us from doing great discovery. There’s a lack of ability to slow things down a bit for the payoff of a great partnership and a much bigger deal.
Marketing and sales need to be aligned in service of the customer. Marketing is pushing a product that’s just come out, and sales is trying to listen to their customer and not necessarily push. That lack of alignment decreases customer-centricity. If they reported to the same person, we would be serving the customer better and those two functions would get along better.
Paying it forward [25:16]
Sam Jacobs: What are your influences? People, investors, books you’ve read that are important. Ideas or humans that we should know about because they’ve had a big impact on you?
Ashley Welch: David Straus, who wrote How to Make Meetings Work, and the founder of Interaction Associates, was profound in my thinking, in terms of how do you help people collaborate more effectively? That skill is so valuable regardless of what industry or role you sit in.
The most influential book I’ve ever read is the book I wrote, Naked Sales: How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue.
Find me on LinkedIn, and my email address is ashley@somersaultinnovation.com. I’d love to talk to anyone who wants to connect.
Sam’s Corner [27:31]
Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody, Sam’s Corner. Loved that conversation with Ashley. If there’s one thing that you want to take away, it’s a simple, but powerful insight, which is focus on your customer’s customer. Focus on their priorities, their needs.
True sales is about curiosity, empathy, being interested in other people and trying to understand what makes them tick. Why do they do what they do? How do they make that decision?
Ashley’s approach through design thinking is about genuine curiosity and focusing on the needs of the person you’re talking to, what they’re trying to do, not what you’re trying to do. She has this concept of being open and that’s really important.
A big thanks to our three sponsors:
