IBM changes its staff meeting

It's a sunny autumn day and the trees on parking lots at IBM's corporate campus in Hawthorne, N.Y., are turning bright red. But leaves aren't the only things experiencing change here. The area is the first client briefing center where meetings, technology demonstrations and sales pitches for potential clients of Big Blue's consulting services, have been newly structured. And that process has been supervised by no less than a veteran IBM product designer, Lee Green.

25 years ago, as a vice-president of brand values and experiences, Green helped design IBM's first consumer PC. Now, he has applied what business school professors and engineers like to call "design thinking" to rethink how sales teams bring in new business.

Design thinking is based on observing what customers want and then creating, testing, and improving prototypes of products and services to address those wishes.

At IBM's briefing center, staff members now have detailed guidelines of what to show and tell at a given time. Before, the company had no typical model of how to pitch clients. Instead, sales staff had to rely on their own intuition, with different degrees of success.

In fact, Green likes to tell a story of a sales meeting gone wrong to explain why he came up with the new strategy to redesign the client preparation.

Avoiding Bad signs

"One set of clients was picked up by an outside driver, who was hired to bring them from the airport to an IBM briefing center in the rain. But the driver couldn't find IBM," he recalls.

Details like a poorly planned ride can suggest a lack of organization, a bad sign for some companies being encouraged to spend thousands or millions on IBM's technologies. Green won't say if that particular client signed up for IBM's consulting services, but the experience did act as a medium for creating a new protocol and a confidential internal document to guide sales staff.

“They should offer clients sample equipment after delivering sales information, not before. The goal isn't to produce generic, scripted meetings, but to "map what we want to accomplish, how to stimulate a dialogue that might not occur," says Green.