Elevating The Sales Experience

Problem

In the early 2020s Cisco faced a change in the market: Customers were transitioning away from buying physical hardware and towards SaaS subscriptions. In response, the company set a goal of cloud software exceeding 50% of total sales revenue by 2024. Sales' primary tool was Salesforce — in fact, there were dozens of Salesforce instances running across the company in regions and subsidiaries.

To do this, Cisco needed to change the culture, and the tools, of sales, which were both oriented towards selling physical, not virtual, goods. Sales relied on dozens of fragmented Salesforce instances across regions and subsidiaries, creating operational inefficiency.

The Workforce Experience Design team (later IT Design) hired me to extend and grow a team of designers and researchers working on this modernization. The team of ten struggled with stakeholder management and lacked credibility with product leadership, who perceived them as lacking domain expertise around how Cisco did sales.

Approach

Team Development Phase

• Established a culture of critique, with weekly design critique sessions to build presentation and defense skills
• Implemented "pair design" assignments — assigning two designers to each project instead of the usual one — to encourage designers to work together, sharpen each other's skills, and enable domain knowledge and cross-functional understanding
• Coached designers on stakeholder communication, focusing on tight presentation, clear messaging, audience awareness, and pushing on stakeholder assumptions
• Maintained regular 1:1s and stakeholder check-ins to build organizational alignment

Research & Insights Phase

• Partnered with the user research team as a lever to build trust and rapport with the product organization
• Conducted user interviews and quantitative analysis to generate "aha" moments
• Created a persona map documenting user goals, jobs-to-be-done, pain points, and research evidence — something the product organization needed to understand the siloed nature of the sales process

"I'm utterly amazed at the level of clarity and depth you delivered — and why have we never had this before now??" — Cisco VP of Sales

Solution

Salesforce One Initiative:

This momentum shifted conversations from tactical requests to strategic partnership. The team hired a specialized architect and supported their vision for unifying Cisco's fragmented Salesforce instances into a single ecosystem accommodating future acquisitions.

Outcomes

• Team: Managed 15 over two years, with only one regrettable departure
• Stakeholder Satisfaction: UMUX scores increased 15 points year-over-year, with product leadership expressing high confidence in the design team's capabilities
• Team Engagement: Job satisfaction metrics improved quarter-on-quarter, with team members reporting they "felt included" and "their work was meaningful"
• Business Impact: Cisco achieved its 50% subscriptions sales goal ahead of schedule
• Senior Leadership Recognition: One Sales VP praised the design blueprint as "a significant leap" toward cohesive acquisition integration