Ashley Welch on design thinking in sales

Building empathy for the people you serve is a cornerstone of design thinking. We can easily imagine how that might feed into product development or marketing efforts. But how can sales teams benefit from principles and techniques found in design thinking?

Sell by design: Ashley Welch’s approach to sales

Ashley Welch is an expert in both sales and design thinking, and she has blended the two together in her approach called “sell by design”. Alongside co-author Justin Jones, Ashley explores this methodology in her book, Naked Sales. At Somersault Innovation, Ashley consults various sales teams on how to benefit from bringing design thinking methods into their work.

Design thinking can be used throughout the sales process. Ashley explains how she and Justin “translated what is a longer design thinking process – usually has 5 stages and lots of tools – through the lens of a seller.”

Ashley breaks it down into three areas:

Discover

Focus on learning about the customer and their needs. “Do great discovery so you really understand your customer and their customers, and what they care about.”

Insights

“Translate that into insights that are meaningful to your customer, not to you.” Salespeople should make conclusions and get feedback from customers.

Acceleration

“Lastly, how do you start co-creating as early as possible so you get your customers fingerprints on the solution? And build their buy-in and trust as you go.” This part is about winning the deal and closing.

Transform sales with design thinking

For Ashley, design thinking transforms the way people sell, whether it is inside sales or multimillion-dollar deals a whole team works on. She’s seen time to close reduce, and deal size increase, with her approach. Feedback from clients she’s worked with also shows that sales teams become more aligned with each other, streamlining communication and decision-making.

Ashley highlights the importance of visual storytelling in the sales process. 

“Using a whiteboard like Mural is such gold in a sales process. It gets you collaborating with your customer online, and it makes things visual which is very powerful. So what you see here in a template is spaces for you to put what you've learned about the customer, so you can share it back to them in a concise way, and it demonstrates both that you're paying attention, what you're learning. It also enables you to say, hey, did I get this right? What would you change??"

Using visual tools like Mural, sales teams can make their process more interactive and engaging:

• Collaborate in real-time: Share discoveries and insights with customers live to create a collaborative environment.
• Humanize the sales process: Use visuals, like customer profiles and LinkedIn images, to create a personal connection.‍
• Iterate and co-create: Continuously refine and improve proposals with direct input from customers, fostering a sense of ownership.

To dive deeper into Ashley Welch’s design thinking methodology, check out her book, Naked Sales, and visit Somersault Innovation. Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn for further conversation and insights.