Salesforce Ignite on Research that Delivers High-Level Business Value
Giving stakeholders what they want means developing great value props and meeting expectations. Here's how Salesforce used dscout to do just that.
Salesforce’s Ignite team plays a unique role at the organization.
Rather than primarily working in-house on Salesforce’s own priorities, they focus on using human-centered design, research and strategy for external partners to help them reimagine their businesses around their customers.
Chris Weber, Ignite’s Innovation Director, addresses the needs of higher-level stakeholders in the C-Suite who ask bigger, more strategic questions. To answer these macro issues, his team uses micro methods such as fieldwork to get things done.
The problem:
One of Salesforce’s partners, a toy company, came to Chris and his team with a problem: they had invested tens of millions of dollars into developing a new technology for their customers—but it wasn’t delivering the results they needed.
They needed to figure out why this was the case, and see how they could improve upon it.
The issue: they still didn’t know what their consumer’s needs were. It also didn’t help that the partner had been doing granular research on features rather than value propositions.
Chris and his team knew they needed to find the value proposition behind the product. They also needed to finish on a tighter timeline to meet the expectations of their stakeholders.
That’s when they turned to dscout.
The solution:
To get the high level of business value their partner needed, they needed to work quickly. Luckily, dscout allowed Salesforce Ignite to shorten timelines dramatically in order to deliver on the technology’s high-level business value.
“It’s really hard to justify that kind of time investment when your stakeholder may not be asking for those ground-level consumer insights—but we need them no matter what. So being able to do it more quickly [with dscout] has been a tremendous value add.”
They also leveraged dscout’s screener tool to use it “as a survey” to better tailor and hone their fieldwork. This helped lend credibility to their process and get stakeholders to buy in.
"If I can say to a client, ‘We surveyed 900 people,’ that checks a couple of boxes and gives us credibility in the room."
Salesforce Ignite Innovation Director
With dscout they were also able to conduct interviews, use concept comparisons, and attain diary work all in the same sprint.
The impact:
In the end, Chris and his team were able to identify the underlying value proposition and opportunities where this product could delight their customers.
“We had this observation that the technology was fairly complex and could only be totally understood by kids in the nine-to-ten-year age range,” he explains. “But that was also exactly when kids moved away from toys they played when they were younger. So we got to this conclusion in a week or two about what we called the ‘abandonment chasm,’ which was exactly when you want to be selling them something.”
Using data attained by their partner, they were able to back up their findings. “And they had that represented in their data as well from thousands of survey responses and things they spent a lot of money and time getting to—but they didn’t have the insight of what to do about it,” he says. “And we did. We got to do something that was quantifiable and backed up by their own research, but we had greater insight on it.”
