Name: Win deals in 2026: Three sales workflows to get aligned
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T19:49:02.973Z
Duration: 31 min 49 s
Description: Win deals in 2026: Three sales workflows to get aligned

Transcript for "Win deals in 2026: Three sales workflows to get aligned": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar where we will be discussing common sales challenges that most teams face and how human centered design problem solving might be able to help. I'm one of the sales leaders at MURAL. I lead our team of Luma experts, and MURAL, if you didn't know, is MURAL's human centered design practice. As a sales leader, my career has mostly been focused on scaling human centered design skills and mindsets with large enterprise clients to support their transformation goals, which these days really sound like AI and digital transformation. And now let me turn it over to my partner in this webinar, Lisa, to introduce herself. Hi. So I'm in large deal enablement at IBM, which means I help client teams refine their sales motions and progress their deals to closure. So specifically, my focus is on the largest and most complex opportunities with our team's level clip level being at $10,000,000 at minimum and often reaching into the greater than 50 range. I currently use MURAL as a collaboration tool, but I'm so excited to learn about some new Luma exercises that I can apply in my day to day. So thanks for having me. Amazing. And some people watching the webinar might recognize Lisa from previous MURAL events. She was part of a panel at our New York City mural symposium event in October. We had a ton of fun with Lisa there and a bunch of our other close customers. And Lisa, we need another event to bring us together in the same In the meantime, I'm happy for this webinar. And that event in this is a bit of a continuation on it. That event was focused on the importance of team alignment and the role of human centered innovation in the age of AI. And we know these are important concepts, alignment and human centered design that sales leaders at MURAL and Luma, and also ones that we're working with like Lisa are thinking about. And when we say human centered design, what we're talking about is the skills and mindsets that really allow us to deeply understand our customer and then design solutions that really drive adoption, loyalty, measurable business outcomes. So Lisa, how is human centered design woven into ways of working for account teams at IBM right now? So I would say generally, IBM prioritizes formalized design thinking education across the company. Like, I remember it being a key part of my own onboarding training. But I feel like the general idea is to just instill that focus on outcomes based and iterative thinking practices. But it's as opposed to like the formulaic exercise of design thinking. It's more of like a mentality, if that makes sense. So everybody's got this mentality when they first joined. This is a way we're going to be thinking. This is a way we're going to be problem solving to help ground people and align people in solutions that are going to be really meeting customer needs. For sure. Yeah, and for the sales teams and leaders that we work with, that can have a huge impact. We've seen that across companies that have already developed and brought in the mindset for human centered design and ways of thinking in that vein. It allows account teams and clients to really align on those solutions that are grounded in needs versus assumptions. So what we've seen, and I'm wondering if you've seen this as well, that means there's lower risk of missing the mark with the clients, you've got like higher close rate, you've got faster alignment with the clients, this means like faster deal cycle. Also, are ones that customers will actually use. So, the repeat buyer rate goes up, and revenue goes up through expansion and retention. So a lot of benefits for having this mindset be kind of what teams are anchored in. For sure. And so, like we know aligning account teams and clients using human centered design works to also solve, not also not give us just those great benefits, but also help solve some common challenges that we still see in 2026. Those challenges span the complete complex sales cycle. They're found in key moments like discovery, like deal strategy, and like customer meetings. Those are the three that we'll focus on today and talk about. And Lisa, what challenges have you seen within these moments in the deal cycle? Specifically from the discovery perspective, it's tough when you get larger teams because everyone has their own day to day, they're meeting with the client. They have a very subjective view of what the problem could be in their heads. And so I find that it's tough and really necessary to get everyone's thoughts out of their heads onto something that can be read and reacted to by the entire team. Then from there, have an action plan going forward. Yeah, discovery, get aligned and be in the same reality, the same place. What about the deal strategy? What do you see there? In terms of deal strategy, I would say that my focus is specifically on stakeholder mapping and power dynamics. So, obviously, it's really critical to know who influences the deal, who's making the decision, who's involved in each step of the deal closure process. And so, in terms of deal strategy, I would say that that's where the focus lies for me personally. And then for the third challenge, we'll explore the customer meetings. What's a little taste of some of the challenges that you might find? I would say in the same vein of that close plan, there needs to be a communications plan that who's speaking with who, who has what action and who's going to own it. And so a large complex deal cycle in a large complex deal cycle, everyone can be orchestrated and move the deal forward in a synergistic way. Yeah, I think across all three of those challenges, these are like alignment moments, whether that's with the team or with clients. So let's dig into those more, each of them. So we're going to dive into all three of them, and then we're going to hear about actual scenarios around those challenges. And then we'll look at human centered design methods that will help navigate these complex moments, help bring the team and client more alignment. And our human centered design approach for solving real world problems like those is called the LUMA system. So we'll look at the LUMA system, which is made up of methods for applying human centered design to really specific outcomes. So we'll start with discovery. And Lisa shared an example of discovery, as you were talking about it, there's misalignment sometimes around discovery, people have their own points of view. Often, too, we're seeing just surface level discovery being done and account teams really struggling to align on value drivers. So what's an example that you've seen in your work? So I would say that like issues run the gamut, in terms of, I like people being on different pages. And so I feel like I really try to focus on framing the problem statement from the client's perspective. And so that's a key part of what I currently use Mural for in terms of running deal qualification sessions as part of the intake process to like the large deal engine. And so I feel like that's maybe a simplistic way to try and tackle it. I wonder if you have other methods that you could show me that I can apply. Yeah, I think it's you know, it's one thing to ask the client, like, what is the challenge that you're focused on? I think there's a way to go a little deeper and learn a little bit more about why that's a challenge and the things that surround it. And that also, we see just asking the question doesn't always go deep down to a client need as well, and we might bake in some of our assumptions when we're thinking about what we're solving for. So we have a method that really helps us go deeper, helps us align with the client and have an artifact for our teams to look at as well, which is called what's on your radar. And let me go there. So let me screen share. You're gonna see that I'm a tab hoarder, but I feel like we all are. Okay. So are you seeing a MURAL with a radar on it? Yes. The demo that we're going to look at is a method for doing discovery in a way that goes deeper and also helps with team alignment. And this is a LUMA method of what's on your radar. And I bring it into MURAL because we wanna run this visually. We also wanna have it be like a co creation with clients. So we invite them into here and our full team. And then we also want this artifact to reference when we take it back to our executives to look at what's happening with the account, or when we use it to maybe co create a proposal with our client, we've got this to work from. So, we'd invite them into here. And basically, we'd select a topic like, for example, what's on your radar as your organization plans for the next twelve months? I like this topic because it's a pretty lightweight way for your sales team to help clients really make sense of what's competing for their attention before we even talk about solutions and sales. So, what's on your radar as your organization plans for the next twelve months? So, we have the client come into the mural, they each pick a section here to work in. This might be my section, this might be your section, we've got our client joining. And then we put some time on the clock and have them just start to think about individually, start to write in things that they might be thinking about, which might be on their radar. For example, like leadership change, or maybe they've got like, budgeting, budget season coming up. They'll just start to fill these out as they're thinking about the question posed to them. And then what we ask them to do is take these items that are on their radar and start to map them in their section based on how urgent is this, how big of a priority is this, how much mindshare is this taking for me? So maybe leadership change, that could derail our whole plans for what we're actually driving towards. Budget season can play up, that might impact we're able to work with vendors like yourselves or think about other resources we might want to bring in. But we get them to map, and then we'll have a conversation. We'll go around the call and kind of have a discussion around what people put in their sections. Maybe as they're talking, might, you know, I'm actually I think this might change for me and I might be more concerned about budget season coming up because leadership change might not have impact on what we're trying to do until later in the year. Now we're basically mapping out what's the client thinking about? What are the other parts of their strategic vision that we're not aware of. And it really helps us kind of like run this method specifically helps us run a much sharper discovery that uncovers real problems and then the urgency and value drivers that'll help us in our proposal moment in the sales cycle. And it's super visual. So, on the client side, often find clients kind of like, we're being a conduit as well in this moment for people to align on the client side and say, Oh, I wasn't realizing that was actually a big concern. I'm glad we surfaced it here. But now we're kind of all getting the same story and being on the same side in terms of what's going to be important. And again, you can change this topic to whatever is relevant or present for the deal. For example, your team might have it, if you're really trying to frame the right problem, you might put it here and then get reactions to it. And you might surface that you're actually playing around with the wrong problem and now you can redesign it. Yeah, I like that you can start really broad and then still have a focused discussion because I find that that's sometimes an issue as well when the problem statement is too broad. Yeah, Yeah, I agree. I think starting broad, safe space, especially like if you're just introducing this like moment of co creation with your client for the first time, and then being able to like tighten it up and go deeper as you maybe even like picking something from the middle of the radar and saying like, we'll go deep on this next. Yeah, yeah. And the stakes are super low. So it's like, the quiet folks on the team that have really good ideas, they're not overshadowed or they don't feel too shy about speaking up and putting their ideas down. That's great. Yeah, I'm so sure I could use that. I think this is a great what's on your radar, great way to visualize discovery, great way to go deeper. And now you've got this artifact that you can keep coming back to and sharing with account teams. So, very helpful. Let's go to the second challenge that we know is still pretty prevalent, which is thinking about deal strategy. So, what happens when teams aren't aligned on how to win and how to move forward with next steps on complex deals? We see this a lot. Strategy and approvals really break down without clear ownership and influence on both sides. Do you have an example of what this could look like within your work? Yeah, I feel like we see this pretty often, especially in deals where we're trying to expand into a white space area or we don't have current consulting work with a client. And it's like, we didn't know, so and so was actually part of the decision making committee. And so we didn't cover for what they care about. And we were way too expensive because we didn't, we weren't able to have the right relationship connections to the person who has the budget. And so yeah, all of these blind spots, I feel like really contribute to losses. And it's like, I would arguably, it's the number one thing that wins or loses the deal for you just in terms of decision makers and stakeholders. Yeah, I feel like we talked about this briefly after your panel in New York. And like, yeah, it's like everybody wants us all to go into the white space, go find opportunities. But if we're not aligned on the folks that are in that white space, we're gonna maybe have a blind spot to a really important part of the dealer, important decision maker. We do have another LUMA method that uses human centered design to really help map buying committees and influence paths so that teams can really target the right people, divide and conquer, use exec sponsors really intelligently, and de risk those moments when you are trying to make those big bets into white space. So, this method is called stakeholder mapping. I'll share my screen again. And again, we're using this LUMA method within MURAL. And like the other one, like this gives us a really visual place to work, it gives us an artifact. And what is exciting about the stakeholder mapping is there's certain MURAL functionality that we can use that really helps us power this method even more. Some of the methods we won't look at today also use some of the mural AI functionality that really helps us go fast and get deep on the human centered design problem solving tool we're using. But for this one, I'll show us in a second. But yeah, this is called stakeholder mapping, which is nice and easy to remember. And this is a place, an opportunity to really come together on like, I think we hear a lot, we say it a lot, like who's who in the zoo? And for this, we might build this with our account team. It's also really fun to bring the client in to build this, or you build it first, and you ask, is this right? Especially those champions you have really close to you. But for this one, you're really going in and just starting to do some interesting mapping. So, if we use MURAL for this, as we're learning about who's who and coming up with names and people, we want to start bringing them into the board. And so, you could just go into LinkedIn, I've got you and I here. Go into LinkedIn, just copy and paste the URL into the section of the map, and it'll bring in these nice, neat name cards that will have our name, it'll have our current titles, how long we've been there and where we are in the world, which is super helpful. Love that. So, first part is just dumping them in. Get a bunch in. As you're hearing names, just start to put them in here. And then we start to want to group them. That's the next thing. We might group based on geography. I know sometimes you're in Canada, so we could group each other together because we're both Canadian. And then sometimes it might be by function or maybe by influence, but you want to start grouping them together in a way that makes sense. And then next, might start like drawing lines to each other to try to like indicate further connection, you and I meet weekly, and like we're often deciding certain things, or we're not necessarily in the same functional group, but we're part of an innovation team. We want to start to draw lines and then write things about how they're connected, like part of the same innovation team. To start Hey, like Blue Jays fans. Exactly. Blue Jays fans, don't talk to them. They need a few months after October this year. Give them a second. Yeah, start to bring them together like that. Then what we also do, which is really great and where I like to start having clients help me fill this out, we'd start to put air bubbles here on what's their mindset? What do they care about? You might put here, know, cares about scaling new ways of working, like as part of like career pathing, or maybe on yours, what would I put for your mindset? Carousel, closing big deals. Yeah. Yeah, and we can start to build this out. I've even seen on somebody's like, be aware, this person's really keen to try to drive to leading this new team. And so, we might want to be aware of that and how we could help them with that. Or this person loves to be at the front of the room, but it's also about their strategic initiatives that they're driving and how we might leverage them in our work together. So, starting to fill this out. I love bringing the client in for these parts and saying and like putting something in there and just asking them like, is this right? Like, is that capturing actually your spirit? But we'll share this with the team. Everybody keeps like adding stuff in, moving them around, and a great way to really start to lay the map and understand, yeah, who's in the zoo. So, helps us surface hidden decision makers, really understand the influence paths, align teams around who matters for what you're trying to do. Yeah, I'm curious, do you have something like this? Or could you see this taking it a little further, being helpful for your teams to understand a little bit more about who's in the white space? For sure. And I particularly like this for account planning, because each, each large deal, there could be different stakeholders, could be similar stakeholders. And so just having one sort of white space to visualize everything and get the team's reactions and, oh, like this person actually influences this super important decision maker that one person knew about, but now the entire team can look at and react to. Yeah, for sure. And I love I think this is new, the functionality of the LinkedIn URL just automatically populates. Like, in my day, I have created a box, dragged in, copy paste the LinkedIn headshot, done all of that manually. So that's awesome. Yeah, I remember when I first joined MURAL, we were doing a screenshot of your face and then putting the line of text for title and names. These cards are so much easier. I also think it helps. There's something a little bit it's hard to approach a brand new stakeholder map sometimes, like they just feel like so big and like, how am I going to organize this? A lot of the other tools are a bit restrictive in terms of being more of like a mind map function. I think this allows you to just start to put names in that you're hearing, start to something approachable, and then you can group it in whatever way makes sense for how you're working with the client versus just like a traditional org chart, because you drop those in. But I think this helps us get a little clearer on what kind of conversations we want to have with people. Yeah, the flexibility for sure. Yeah. Okay, so we've covered discovery, we've covered deal strategy and the importance of stakeholder mapping. I think the third challenge that we want to cover is what happens with customer meetings. So, what we see and talk to a lot of leaders about our deals really losing momentum after really key meetings happen with prospects buying committees. So we'll have these like great meetings. We feel like we're like, there's momentum, there's excitement, and then things drop off and we start to see like close dates being pushed out or falling right off the map. So do you have an example or what does that look like in your world when deals start losing momentum after customer meetings? I would say that we've sort of formalized it into two things. One's called the close plan. So, like milestones, action items that are open with owners, and then the other is a communications plan, which is a little bit more specific. It's like a matrix of who, like who is facing off with who we say. And it's just super important that everyone's on the same page in terms of the action plan and how we're going to actually close this deal. Like, are you going to go and talk to CIO about this concern that they have and de risk that mitigate that risk? Are you going to talk to the budget owner to see how much money they actually have for this opportunity? And so that so we can come back and be like, Okay, how can we solution this to match that? So, very relevant, I would say. What do you have for me? Yeah, so I even love thinking about stakeholder map as a way to know who does what based on what you're just talking about and who to have go action. And then I think another tool that could help as a pre step before your close plan, before your comms plan, I think there is sometimes hesitancy or not sure where to start or do our next steps, are they necessarily like the same thing the client thinks are important next steps? So, I think a step before you get to your close plan and action and comms plan could be our next we're actually going to do a twofer. We're going look at two different methods that I love putting together for how you could, yeah, help to move things forward after a really good meeting. So we're looking at me share my screen again. We're going to look at a LUMA method. Again, we're pulling it into MURAL so that we can work on it together, invite the client in here, invite our teammates in here, and then have an artifact that we can keep going to. So, this one's called the important difficulty matrix. And for those that maybe like these are like first time they're being exposed to these methods, we always have like a great how to guide at the bottom, which I even looked at today to like brush up bunks. I've kind of made my own like weird version of it at this point, because I've done it enough with clients to be like, yeah, this is my of hacky way of doing it now. But another one that you bring the client into, and we're asking them to brainstorm with us all of the things we might want to do to help the deal move forward. So, this is another one, like the first one, where you could have a very broad kind of call to action here, or very broad, like this is what we're asking. It could be, you know, like for this one, I want to ask the client, what do we need to think about or do to move the deal forward? How do we get it to keep progressing? I've also seen things like, again, could ask a strategy question, like what's important to you this year to get done? What's on your mind? What are you thinking about? Or like even bringing it down to like a career level, if you're like doing a one to one with someone on your team, you might ask like, what are you thinking about for your sales career and where do want to go? And they might map it out on this. But it's all about getting people to like prioritize think about how difficult and how much effort needs to go into something. So, we'd ask them, what do we need to do to move the deal forward? They'd start to populate some ideas here. And then we'd ask them to come into the matrix and start to layout on layout on this line based on like how important something is. So, that's along this X axis. And then how difficult something is going to be to do, which is on the Y axis. So, something's based on my question of what are the things that we need to do next to close the deal or progress the deal, define success metrics. We know that's really important. And that might be, as they're laying it out on this line, you usually do importance first. They might say, like, that is really important, but I bet that's challenging. And so, we might then see, like, it's challenging because there's so many stakeholders that we have to have involved here. So, we might have them, you might see them, well, I can't, maybe I'll just take a new one, but you might see the defined success metrics. It's important, but as we have a conversation about it, that's actually gonna be really challenging, so we put it up here. What else we have mapped here? So, validating required integrations, that looks like it's been put up here as important ish, but really challenging because that's, again, a lot of stakeholders coming in. We wanna confirm expansion phases, a little low importance, low difficulty. And so as we start to map this with the client, we can start to agree on things that could feed your action plan or your comms plan in terms of like, what are we going to do together next? So, I like to map this out with them. I like to have a conversation. Again, we actually, an opportunity, again, we are co creating with the client in a high facilitated way to be a conduit between client team members because you might have this discussion on people saying like, I actually don't think track results is actually going to be that hard because we can include so and so. And now we're kind of acting as helpful teammates for their own work. What I like to do next after this is all mapped out like that is visualize the vote. So, this is set up over here, but I would probably just have people come in, put their names in, or maybe we pre populate their names. I'm actually just going to like bring this over here to be easier. They're all going to get three stickies, three stars to vote. And what I'm going have them do, just like set a timer up over a couple minutes, is just start to vote on like, okay, we've mapped this out and we've made conversations about it. Where do we actually, like, do you want to start based on like your appetite for like how difficult it might be or how important it might be and have people put stars, their three stars, on different things that they want to start first. And then we can have a conversation and start to bring some of these things down into an action plan to say, okay, these are where we're going to go next, Who's going to be responsible for that? And now, we leave that call, we've got a really clear prioritized next step based on impact and effort. And we can leave the call with a plan, as you discussed, your team does. And I think this is great for deal progression. We also see this working really well for things like QBRs with clients or demos or renewal conversations, like what's important, how much effort is that going to take? And then based on that, where should we start? So, that was a twofer. I threw a lot at you there. What do you think of I love that because you can quantify what's most important and what's most doable. Yeah, which I feel like there can be a lot of confusion in terms of the priority of next steps and like, what should be, you know, prioritized. No, yeah, so that's, that's great. I feel like I could apply this to a deal that I'm working right now and it'll go over really well. Because I feel like internally, like the internal teams is who I work with the most. But I can see this being so effective, specifically in sales cycles with the clients, with our champions, as you said, or our coaches at the client. Yeah, thank you so much. I can even see it if you're with your internal teams, just a quick exercise to say, are we all agreed on what we're doing next here and what we think we should go do next, especially if it's one of those white space clients where you can do a lot of different things and just aligning together and deciding based on effort and impact where we should start. So, that's another one for you. I think that wraps up our three challenges. So, looked across the complex sales cycle and talked about how human centered design methods can help solve for them. So, doing deeper discovery to really uncover and align on real client needs, having an artifact to continue to go back to, aligning on stakeholders and their impact in a really living place to keep adding people and keep updating changes that happen as people, as an organization, organically moves and changes. And then also how to create next steps with clients to progress conversations and keep momentum going, all in a place where we can have these living artifacts, keep coming back to them with clients by combining Luma methods within a mural space. And these are only four of the 36 methods that Luma has to really help clients use human centered design for some of their gnarliest challenges, whether that's within sales or other parts of the organization. And for the folks that are watching, we're going to share links with you that you can get more details on all four of the methods that we looked at. And if you'd ever want to learn more, including you, Lisa, or anyone on your team, we have mini workshops that we run. There's one coming up in February that you can sign up for and find on our website and LinkedIn. And it's really a sixty minute experience to get more practice and play with different methods that you can actually apply to your own problems within that session. And also just, yeah, people can reach out to us anytime through website or respond to the email send out so that we can chat more about what methods might help. But Lisa, thank you so much for joining and sharing your experiences at IBM, what you see with your team, and kind of being a good sounding board for how these methods might help with some of these challenges that many of us still face. Oh, it's totally my pleasure. This has been awesome to get your coaching and to get true things that I can take away from this session and apply in my day to day. So, thank you so much. Amazing. And I'm sure we'll see you at other future MURAL events or the twenty twenty six baseball season is just around the corner. So, we'll definitely have to stay in touch with Yes, definitely. Thanks to everyone for joining and hope everyone has a great week.