Design & Sales: The partnership you’re probably ignoring (but shouldn’t)
The challenges of creating enterprise solutions and connecting to customers
Last year, David Hoang gave a talk at the Hatch Conference. He discussed the often-overlooked relationship between design and other disciplines, particularly marketing, which is David’s area of expertise (this was meant to be a secret, but I guess it’s out now!). I found it fascinating to see how the two fields are interconnected, and when this synergy is leveraged, it opens up a new level of insights, work, and success.
The talk resonated with me and prompted reflection on my challenges in designing for enterprises. Those challenges have pushed me in a similar direction to what David talks about: collaborating more with other departments.
Product design for enterprises
Let’s explore what it means to design in the B2B world, especially when developing new and disruptive products because designing for B2B enterprise software isn’t glamorous. You’re not crafting sleek consumer apps with millions of users or building the next viral social platform. Instead, you’re solving complex problems for massive, risk-averse organisations—retail giants, supply chain behemoths, and finance titans.
And that means:
Fewer customers to talk to
Longer feedback loops
Heavier gatekeeping between you and the people using your product
In B2B, it’s not like you can simply run a quick usability test with a handful of users you have found on Reddit. You’re often designing for niche personas with particular needs. Personas you rarely get direct access to. And even when you do, the feedback can be filtered through layers of account managers, customer success teams, and legal restrictions.
Many of us face this struggle when designing for enterprises. But I don’t want to moan or just talk about the challenges. I want to touch upon activities and experiments that have significantly impacted me and my team.
Let me start with a question: when did you last sit on a sales call as a designer?
Yes, sales calls. Because while your direct access to customers might be limited, your company's sales team speaks to them daily.
It’s probably a team with whom you do not interact a lot, but sales teams are constantly in touch with customers and potential customers. They strive to understand what they are struggling with to evaluate how best to address our product as a solution to their problems.
I understand designers care (and should!) about craft and elegant experiences, not close deals. Sales feel so far from our discipline with pipeline talk and quotas. But it’s also a direct line to the people you’re trying to reach. And in the often murky world of enterprise software, where customer access is limited, and product feedback is gold dust, this partnership is not just helpful—it’s essential.
You can now see the connection between design and sales, and I am confident to say that if you’re not working with sales from the start, you aren’t using the most straightforward resource you have within your organisation to gather insights.
Sales calls can help hear offhand comments such as:
“Yeah, but can it integrate with our legacy systems?”
“It looks nice, but what happens when we have 3,000 concurrent users?”
“We already have a tool for this—why would we switch?”
These are the honest conversations and the fundamental questions customers want answers to, beyond the simple feature you might be working on. Working with sales doesn’t mean ditching user research. Sales is an additional source of research that keeps you grounded in customers and allows you to understand what makes or breaks a deal, what customers get excited about, and what features might never see the light of day.
What design & sales collaboration look like
Design and sales are not as far as you might think, especially in the enterprise world. We create a product that the sales team sells. If that doesn’t sell, there’s a problem that we, as designers, need to figure out. So, working together isn’t such a far-fetched idea. My team and I have started small activities to connect the dots and create flawless synergies.
1. Working on the sales decks
The sales world revolves around decks. Your sales representative will use many types of decks at different stages of the conversation with a potential customer, and they are pivotal to keeping the sales ticking along.
In those decks, you will find a lot about your product, the problems it solves, and how it helps customers reach their goals. This is likely supported by product images and interactions that explain how it works.
The story that the team is selling to the customer should be the same one that drives your product and design decisions. When there’s a tight connection, the story unfolds naturally and really connects with the customers.
That’s why working on sales decks allows designers to connect the dots and get a close perspective of what works, what doesn’t, and why.
2. Crafting demos that demo
There’s a big difference between designing a product and a demo. A product solves a problem, but a demo tells a story about solving the problem. This approach focuses more on the customer's issues and outlines how to solve them in detail.
Sales need the latter. So, we collaborate to create tailored demo environments—focusing on the most relevant workflows for specific customers and ensuring everything looks flawless. We design with context:
What are the pain points this prospect cares about?
What “aha” moments do we need to hit?
How do we visually simplify complexity?
3. Feedback sessions that don’t suck
Sales teams constantly talk to customers, attend conferences, and scroll their LinkedIn feeds for the latest leads. Designers are busy designing.
That’s why regular feedback sessions with the sales team can be incredibly useful for collecting insights from the ground and combining them with other forms of research that teams are doing.
You learn why certain features kill deals and which ones seal them.
You hear where clients get confused or sceptical.
You discover which product parts excite them enough to push it through procurement hell.
These insights shape the product roadmap far more effectively than a dozen internal debates.
4. Sitting on sales calls
If you’ve never joined a live sales call, do it next week. Seriously!
Listening in real time is a crash course in customer reality. You’ll hear objections you hadn’t considered. You’ll catch the unspoken frustrations. You’ll feel the pulse of the market.
Even better, designers on sales calls signal to clients that you actually care about their experience. You’re not hiding behind your screens—you’re in the trenches, ready to learn.
5. Collaborating with clients
The best way to validate initial ideas, product vision, and strategy is by collaborating with clients to understand their current situation, what they invest in, and whether your strategy aligns with their objectives. Sometimes, a product idea can be excellent and solve the client's problems, but they may not be ready to invest in it, so teams must grasp this.
I have participated in internal events that we run with clients. About 2,000 clients come to see products and participate in talks and workshops, allowing me to do what I enjoy the most: run workshops.
These aren’t focus groups or pitch sessions but collaborative problem-solving moments. We run co-creation workshops where clients sketch, ideate, and vent. It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s where the magic happens.
You see how they think.
You learn their mental models.
You hear the language they use to describe their pains (and you mirror it in your design decisions).
Designing with your clients, instead of just for them, builds stronger partnerships and better products.
Design can’t win alone
David Hoang said it perfectly in his Hatch talk:
“The best products aren’t designed in a vacuum—they’re designed in motion.”
That implies collaboration across teams: design, sales, marketing, and beyond. When designing for enterprises, you don’t have the luxury of creating a consumer app for millions of direct users. You must seek customer insights wherever possible. Of course, this doesn’t dismiss traditional research methods, which remain crucial and are the best way to gather information about your product. However, it provides alternative ways to collect feedback, particularly in the enterprise, where connecting with the right target personas can be more challenging to pin down.