Unleashing Productivity: A Framework for Success

In the constantly changing world of modern businesses, innovation and transformation is the key to staying ahead. I recently did a transformational project that brought about a staggering 3X boost in productivity. In this article, I will try to share my learnings from this project. While the article draws from a project we did on improving sales productivity, the insights and learnings are equally true for any other aspects of a business.

Customer Centricity is More Than Just a Buzzword

Being a staunch advocate of customer centricity in business, I've often found that many business leaders preach its importance but fall short in practice. However, it is my experience that introducing customer-centricity in processes invariably leads to sustainable business gains. Win-win scenarios unfold when customers become the focus of all interactions.

In our project, the first step was to shift from the typical B2C edtech pushy sales approach to a customer centric consultative sales process. We introduced a call solely focused on understanding the student's learning needs and the parents' aspirations. No products were discussed during this initial conversation. We did another call with parents where we carefully matched products from our portfolio to the identified needs of the customers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, signalling the power of genuine customer engagement.

Why weren’t they signing up?

Despite the initial success, a puzzling trend emerged. When we introduced a product that perfectly met their needs, and asked the potential customers to sign up, they hesitated. ?They promised to come back after a family discussion, yet they never did. This was unusual from my previous experiences. It also pushed us to delve deeper into what we were doing and think about running a few experiments.

We debated amongst ourselves and ran a series of experiments:

1. Communication Patterns: We introduced a pattern for calls and WhatsApp communication without resorting to spamming. No lead was discarded until agreed communication patterns were completed.
2. Script and Messaging Iterations: We continuously refined the script of our calls and experimented with the messages on WhatsApp.
3. Pitch Overhaul: We changed our product pitch multiple times, exploring different approaches to see what resonated best with our customers.
4. Lead Volume Change: We experimented with the number of leads picked up by each salesperson, ranging from 5 to 30 leads per day. (This was a B2C Ed tech sales process, in case B2B folks are wondering who picks 30 leads to call in a day)

In this journey of transformation, we faced numerous setbacks and I was proved wrong countless times. This made me humble and open to learning new things through experimentation and iteration. At the end of three months, we were able to see a jaw dropping 3X improvement in the sales productivity. I will not go into the details of how the final sales process looked like as that is not important. Different businesses will come up with different processes, activities, pitches, tools, etc based on their business context. The real breakthrough came from our commitment to experimentation and learning from it.

The key to our success lay in our willingness to run experiments and change our processes based on the results of these experiments. Every week, we introduced new elements in our processes, tested them rigorously, and analyzed the outcomes. What worked stayed, and what didn’t, was discarded, irrespective of our initial beliefs and hypotheses.

Our team relentlessly scrutinized every aspect of our interactions in what we called ‘defect analysis’ meetings, a process improvement technique I learned from Vivek Sunder . Calls were dissected threadbare-a 15-minute customer call was discussed and analysed for hours to identify areas for improvement. These insights fuelled our next set of experiments. However, we also missed a few opportunities for improvement. One of them was not practising enough of what we had learnt. Had our team practised and perfected proven techniques and made them their default approach, the improvement might well have been a staggering 5X or even 10X.

A Framework for Success:

In conclusion, when you are on a transformation journey, success is not just about innovation; it is about adopting a systematic approach to change. ?Here are the key steps that can guide your path to success:?

1. Embrace Customer Centricity: Make customer centricity more than a buzzword- it should be infused into your processes. Focus your strategies around genuine customer engagement.
2. Initiate Thoughtful Experiments: Embrace experimentation wholeheartedly. Introduce new ideas regularly, test them, and analyze the results rigorously. Be open to being proven wrong, as it often paves the way for groundbreaking insights. It will not be easy to create space for experimentation as all of us busy with our daily routine work. But this is the most crucial step for success.
3. Continuous Analysis and Feedback Loop: Establish practices and routines for analysis and reflection. Dedicate time to dissect what happened in the experiment, scrutinize all activities and data, and extract valuable insights. Create a feedback loop that informs your next set of experiments, ensuring a continuous cycle of improvement
4. Iterate Relentlessly: The magic lies in iteration. Continuously refine processes, steps, activities. Don't be afraid to discard what doesn't work. This ensures that you are continuously improving your approach.
5. Institutionalise and Practice Successful Elements: Once you've identified successful elements, make them a habit. Make routines to practice them. Consistency in applying successful strategies is the key to sustained improvement. We discovered that institutionalizing successful elements was a missed opportunity for even greater improvement in our project.
6. Cultivate a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Success isn't a destination; it's a journey. Build a culture in your organization that values continuous improvement. Encourage your team to learn from failures, celebrate successes, and always find ways to improve your ways of working.

I hope the above framework helps you start your journey towards a successful transformation. Feel free to share your insights, experiences, and thoughts in the comments.