Surprising Lessons from Sales with Maulie Dass #69

What lessons can you learn from the strange and unfamiliar world of the sales team? Maulie Dass (Global Lead @ Cisco Innovation Labs) has experienced both worlds and joins to share what she’s learned! We cover questions to help you get to the root issues of your customer, design thinking strategies to generate customer empathy in your teams, how to balance product vision vs. feature requests from sales & more!

ABOUT MAULIE DASS

Maulie Dass (@mauliedass) is the Global Lead for Cisco's Innovation Labs, which works closely with local industries to create new technology solutions that solve common pain points and positively impact business, society, and the planet. She has been in the industry for over 20 years in a variety of tech, strategic, and customer-facing leadership roles. Maulie is passionate about her customers, innovation, technology, inclusivity, and cheese pizza.

"Even if a customer is very clear on a solution that they want... "I need an AI ML solution that does X, Y, Z." The question that I use often is "Tell me more about that? Like, what is instigating this need?" Think of the next question that'll kind of get you closer and closer to the source, or the root of the issue."

- Maulie Dass   

SHOW NOTES:

• Maulie shares the “expensive lessons” she learned while designing her first microchip (2:00)
• How learning and curiosity guided Maulie’s career across engineering, sales, and innovation (6:19)
• What engineering leaders can learn from sales (11:07)
• “Seek to understand first” & questions Maulie uses to empathize (17:30)
• When should leaders stop asking questions? (21:57)
• How to use the design thinking tool “A Day in the Life” to cultivate customer empathy and communicate between engineering and product (23:05)
• How to navigate your product vision versus feature requests from sales (28:45)
• How to manage and sustain your personal energy long-term (32:40)
• The impact of changing your communication style & having cultural awareness (36:03)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (39:17)
• Takeaways (42:19)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Get-Woke on Github - A tool to detect non-inclusive language in your source-code
• Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Amazon) - Maulie’s book of choice for avoiding accidental exclusion in the world around us

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