KION GROUP
How did Kion make the sales and financing process easier by delivering value to users?
How might we simplify the interaction between the sales team and its financing and sales tool while increasing efficiency and effectiveness?
The Kion Group
The Kion Group is a German multinational manufacturer of material handling equipment based in Germany. Its main products include intralogistics, warehouse solutions, and industrial trucks (forklifts).
Among the various companies that Kion serves are Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Casas Bahia, DHL, Lojas Americanas, TAM, Ford, and Mercedes. In Brazil, Kion Group manages R$100 million in financing.
The Challenge
Kion Group faced a challenge in its financial area: to improve the interaction between its sales team and its financing and sales tool.
The idea behind this tool was to empower the sales department, as all the necessary information to close a sale would be at their fingertips. However, the problem was that the complex financial formulas were often not easy for the salespeople to interpret, which made the process longer.
How might we simplify the interaction between the sales team and its financing and sales tool while increasing efficiency and effectiveness?
The Design Process
As an initial part of a design project, we started by visiting and interviewing customers, salespeople, and resellers to hear the stories (positive and negative) that each person had experienced about the tool.
From the salesperson’s point of view, we heard stories about the difficulty of explaining a financial product to their clients. Although they were experts in the products they sold, they had little knowledge about credit lines and financing and wished they had more time to delve into this subject.
We synthesized this information and began to define the challenges that salespeople faced and how we could transform the tool into something that would bring agility and ease to their daily routines.
The Service Design Process
- Workshop
- Business Canvases: Business Goals, OKRs, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition
- User research up-front
- Definition
- Ideation
- Early Prototyping
- Journey Map
- Value Proposition
- Service Blueprint
- Ecosystem Map
- Service Prototyping
- Service Testing
- Roll Out the Service
- Measure the Service
Outcome
After generating several ideas together, we prioritized one to prototype and test, which is now called Kion Finance Service+: an application used by the sales department that simulates and presents the end-to-end sales process to the customer, without additional layers and with all information clearly available.
Today, 40% of total sales happen through this application. With its development, Kion was able to reduce the average time of a commercial proposal from 20 days to just a few minutes, as well as gain agility and ease when offering Kion Finance Service 🙂
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