In this blog, I’ll discuss what is design thinking, is it still relevant, and how to apply it in a practical way to a real growth problem. We’ll use channel partnerships as our example today.

Why design thinking?

Consider these statistics:

• Only 9.1% of sales think that leads generated by marketing are high quality
• 85% of all channel partnerships fail to generate any ROI
• 70% of sales leaders feel that account growth is opportunistic, not planned
• 88% of lost opportunities can be tracked to lack of tangible next steps being generated

What to do about these dire statistics?

Applying brute force by playing the volume game is one answer. Is there any other approach?

Indeed there is.

In this short article, I’ll outline how we can and should use design thinking to elevate our go-to-market and partner monetization efforts.

In fact, many of you may already be applying the principles without calling it as such.

What is Design Thinking?

First, do NOT conflate the word “design” with creativity, visual design. or UX. That’s where significant confusion and claims of design thinking being outdated come from.

When IDEO made the term “design thinking” popular ~20 years ago, they intended to apply in a different context the best practices that designers widely used to create their designs, i.e. thinking broadly, researching users, and generating multiple ideas to test.

IDEO were then a design firm often making concepts for physical things. All of us are familiar with their popular videos of how they came up with concepts, tested them out, and arrived at their final recommendation. A popular one is their shopping cart design.

So while the methodology and the concepts of Design Thinking come from product design, they are intended to really put the customer or user at the center.

That meant understanding them thoroughly, brainstorming not just the immediate problem but the broader context, analyzing the utility, and then coming up with ideas to pilot and test.

That thought process is what is at the core of design thinking method. Sure, UX and aesthetics go together with it most of the times, but they are only one of the important pillars of the process.

The Stages of Design Thinking

Of course, like any thing else that is important, it needs to have multiple steps.

The 5 stages of design thinking are / were:

1. Empathize – research your customers and users, immerse yourself, feel the pain and the desires
2. Define – their needs and goals as best as you can, think of end to end experiences
3. Ideate – generate ideas, challenge assumptions. and constraints
4. Prototype – shortlist and create a solution to test
5. Test – and get feedback and then refine as needed, discard if needed, make another

These sound like practical, common sense things to do, right?

You can think of “Design Thinking” as an “input and guide” to your execution, whether its your partner strategy, solution GTM, or growing an account.

Expanding the canvas of thinking and reflecting from the outside-in is also very customer centric. I’ve outlined this in both my books too as a way to achieve a human centered strategy.

Thus, adopting Design Thinking is a great way to generate conviction in your approach and then following through. The results generally follow.

Consider this: If I ask you for $5000 and promise that you may, potentially, if you play your cards rights, hopefully, will get back $250,000 in about 6-12 months. you’ll think twice about making the deal.

Instead, if I clearly show you a plan for how you will make $250,000 in the next 6 months along with raising your brand awareness, you are much more likely to invest.

That’s how design thinking complements your strategic intent.

Let’s take an example.

Applying Design Thinking in Practice: Partnerships

Let’s use the method to design a single partnership.

Say there is a ServiceCo wishing to partner with a ProductCo. The product is picking up in the market, and ServiceCo also wants a slice of the pie – generate more revenues for themselves by partnering with ProductCo.

Ideally this should be a win-win for both of them. ProductCo gets more adoption, and ServiceCo gets more services and/or resell revenue.

So why do 85% of these relationships fail to get off the ground?

Because both parties will invest on returns, and the initial returns never materialize without starting. So the partnership stays in a limbo.

As ServiceCo, here’s how you can use design thinking to justify and jumpstart the partnership:

1. You analyze the potential customer demand – their pain, their unmet needs, why they buy, and who buys, and where this solution fits in their overall plan. You look at your current customer base and prospect base for fit. You also analyze the challenges faced by the sales team of your ProductCo partner – maybe they can’t easily differentiate, show value quickly, cross-sell once they open an account, and so on.
2. You define the needs clearly so you can back them up in tangible form. Most likely this will be based on talking to a few customers and people in the industry
3. You then ideate a couple of solution options that would be appealing to customers and to the productCo sales people. You also generate options on what would be needed to get the word out and reach your audience.
4. Then you start small and prototype – perhaps just create a slide deck and some screens
5. Then you run it by clients who are in your prospect list or you do a webinar on it. See how the solution sticks.

Then you either dig deeper and expand your sales efforts (most likely) or pivot the pitch.

As is natural, most partnerships try to go directly to step #5 to generate sales traction. But without the right hooks and value, they end up not yielding the desired outcomes.

And so the partnership stays in a limbo waiting for the other party to “bring deals to the table”.

What Tools Will You Need to Make this Process Work?

The process above is logical and practical. Even if we were not doing design thinking, you’d probably do the same things to define your strategy.

Here are some things to consider that will make your design thinking (strategy making) process successful.

To execute empathy properly, you need data and diverse perspectives. That means inviting multiple people from different parts of the company to the table. That may include account executives who bring knowledge of their customers, partner teams, marketing, practices or product teams, sales team members, domain experts, and so on.

And then let’s get the right data and structure it properly instead of keeping it all in our head.

It would seem that we’d need data & information on past sales deals, tech footprint and strategic goals of existing clients, key industry trends, our client relationship maps, current technical competencies of our own company, people utilization reports, complementary innovations coming up, our relationships with partners, and so on.

Having this data will allow us to understand our customers and partners much better. We would also be able to recognize our own constraints.

Data allows us to prevent a common and naturally occurring phenomenon called glossing over.

In addition, in these days of excellent remote collaboration, let’s not timebox the process to 1 day or 2 days as was popular when people needed to travel to a central location.  It does help to designate timeslots as the “workshop days” but we can do a significant amount of prep and discussion online to make it effective,

What Tools Do We Need?

Finally, the tools. We must utilize visual tools if we can to make the process more collaborative and less onerous. Nothing kills a session better than monologues and long PDF documents.

Some common tools to use are:

1. SWOT matrix (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) – In the example above it may be our current competencies, client access, existing footprint, partner reach, and so on. This is a great way to get everyone onboard on the same page and dispel any illusions of grandeur.
2. Opportunity modeling – Another 2×2 matrix or a tree like display that quickly shows us all the various opportunity sources. These could be cross-sell, new accounts, resell, implementation support, brand impact, and so on. Size and colors can be used to depict priority and magnitude.
3. Another tool to use is a fishbone analysis tool – this is a simple multi-step root cause identification tool. For example, let’s identify why that deal we pitched before didn’t work – consider people, process, resources etc.
4. Use personas – simple 1 pagers to understand the customer’s ambitions and motivations. We can also create one for our partner sales person – what excites them, what do they care about.
5. Flow chart for business process analysis – no solution is sold in isolation. What do the steps before and after look like. e.g. If there’s an online tool, does it need data input or data extraction.
6. Strategy canvas – this is a very simple and effective way to see what characteristics of our solution differentiate us so we can focus on them better. It helps to deprioritize things too. For example, do we need the user admin feature – is that what clients care about right now or is that a commodity?

And so on. As you do these a couple of times, most of these tools can become reusable and second nature.

Is Design Thinking Dead?

As should be obvious by now, design thinking is very much alive and kicking.

It’s really an expansive way of thinking, and an incremental way of executing and validating, and that’s how you should treat it.

So the next time someone says design thinking is outdated or dead, please give them a wide berth.

And rest easy in the fact that design thinking is how almost all successful innovation comes to market.

In other words, don’t trust the experts, trust the process (pun intended).

Next Steps

Design thinking is not rocket science. It’s just a way to be customer centric, think broadly, and then bring your ideas to market in a way that reduces risk and delights your customers (and partners).

If you want to monetize your partnerships, enhance your brand, or generate more leads consistently, then please contact me for a discussion.

On this page, I have a short partner monetization quiz you can take to identify your top issues.

Happy designing!