Transform Your Sales Approach with 10x Mindset and Design Thinking
As a salesperson, your job is to deliver outsize value to your customers. So much so that they consider you a valuable business partner. Not a vendor, not a rep — a partner.
In a fiercely competitive market where customers have increasingly high expectations — how do you distinguish yourself to create a value-based partnership? One answer lies in adopting the 10x mindset and using Design Thinking in your sales process. This method enables you to deploy a customer-centered approach, think big on your customer’s behalf, and help them creatively solve problems and embrace opportunities.
I recently led a workshop with a B2B sales team that focused on incorporating the 10x mindset and Design Thinking into their work. Like many sales teams, this one has audacious revenue goals. To achieve their goals, they must unlock new customer relationships and untapped budgets — a great use case for trying on the 10x mindset and applying Design Thinking. The team walked away with a shift in perspective and a new framework for centering their sales process on their customers.
A kaleidoscope of possibilities
The 10x mindset looks at the world through a kaleidoscope of possibilities. As a kaleidoscope takes a collection of colorful objects and creates an infinite number of unique patterns, the 10x mindset takes an idea or opportunity and envisions multiple outcomes, maybe some beyond our wildest dreams. The 10x mindset encourages us to look past our notions of what’s technically possible. In doing so, we must reinvent our approach and align our actions to enable us to reach our enormous goals. When traveling this path, we may uncover unique opportunities, solve new problems, and create wins we never imagined.
Terence Mauri, author of The Leader’s Mindset: How To Win In The Age of Disruption, says, “10x mindset stops you from thinking small.” Sales teams that adopt the 10x mindset live in a world of abundance and growth. They see beyond their role of hitting their quota and use creative courage, innovative thinking, and measured risk-taking to deliver enormous value for their customers, team, company, and industry. From this stance, they are well-positioned to accelerate revenue growth.
Applying Design Thinking – it starts with your customer
With curiosity and empathy at its core, Design Thinking is a customer-centered approach to solving problems and building solutions. It’s a non-linear process that involves empathizing to deeply understand your customer, using these insights to define the problem, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing.
One of our activities in the workshop involved reframing a typical challenge faced by sales teams: How to tap into new budgets and increase revenue. With our 10x hats on, we played with the first three phases of Design Thinking. The guidance included:
Phase 1/Empathize: Look at the world through your customer’s eyes.
Ask questions that seek to understand their values, what excites them, and what challenges them.
Use their products, and know what their customers experience.
Learn what macro issues are at play for their business and their role in the broader industry.
Phase 2/Define: Use Phase 1 insights to define the problem or opportunity.
Frame the statement from your customer's business perspective, not your own.
Examine what they’re prioritizing and their most pressing challenges.
Identify patterns and themes.
Phase 3/ Ideate: Generate multiple possible solutions.
Brainstorm without judgment.
Encourage outlandish ideas, and build on others’ ideas.
Stay on topic, keeping the customer at the center.
Through this exercise, the team gained insight that will be useful for other sales leaders and teams. And that is — there’s a rich opportunity to continuously shift to frame things from the customer’s perspective. For example, instead of framing the problem as “How do we get Customer X to adopt more of our solutions [in order to hit our revenue goals]?” — we ask, “How do we help Customer X increase their market share?” At this altitude, we can ideate possible solutions that we’re uniquely positioned to co-create with our customers.
Leading with a customer-centered mindset, strategy, and communication is a road-tested way to create long-term value for customers and drive your business growth. If you’re looking for a place to start, at the very least, when approaching your sales process, ask questions like “What if…?” “Why not…?”, and “How might we…?” These prompts will open up a world of possibilities for you and your customers.