As the fastest-growing Enterprise IT company in history — having grown from $0 to $10 billion in 10 years and still growing at an annual rate of 64 percent year over year — Amazon Web Services was continuing to accelerate the pace of its innovation. After starting out with a single storage service, AWS had grown to offer more than 70 services including compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, and enterprise applications. The organization announced 722 significant new features and services in 2015, 40 percent more than what was introduced in 2014.
The Challenge
Amazon Web Services' growth happened organically, with a strong emphasis on innovating — rather than dictating — a company culture that contributes to its customer-obsessed nature.
Known for its "Amazonian" style of doing things, Amazon Web Services has a rigorous dedication to their culture, best exemplified in their 14 Leadership Principles. A few of those principles set the stage for the training challenge ahead:
- Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.
- Ownership: Leaders think long term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company.
- Invent and Simplify: Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify.
- Hire and Develop the Best: Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They take seriously their role in coaching others.
- Insist on the Highest Standards: Leaders have relentlessly high standards. They ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and problems stay fixed.
- Learn and Be Curious: Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves.
When the company needed a way to standardize its primary leadership principle — customer obsession — they took a thorough approach to learning that was both broad and deep.
The Opportunity
Amazon's primary leadership principle of customer obsession is the major driving force in the company.
"One of the things that Jeff Bezos has set out to be as a company is the most customer-obsessed company on earth. That's his goal. It's written on our walls. It is embedded in our leadership principles and it is lived every day at every level of the organization."
Mike Clayville, Vice President of Global Sales, Amazon Web ServicesIn line with this overarching principle, the Amazon Web Services approach to selling starts by identifying the customer's desired outcomes — and only then recommending solutions that will deliver on those most critical desires. It strives to define success through customers' eyes, based on their unique priorities and target outcomes.
As the company grew faster and faster, leaders knew they needed a way to unify on a common methodology and language to further extend the customer-obsessed mindset across its global sales force. Through deep discovery and design, a global program called Outcome Based Account Management (OBAM) was developed and deployed for sellers across Amazon Web Services.
The Approach
It was critical that the learning solution match the Amazon Web Services culture. Baker Communications worked with Amazon Web Services to create a highly customized version of its Customer Outcome Selling course aligned with the methodology and language of Amazon. This Amazonian selling approach — Outcome-Based Account Management (OBAM) — is the process, tools, competencies, and dialogue architecture for initiating and solidifying customer-obsessed relationships.
"We're not trying to sell you parts and pieces or technology. What we're trying to help you do is get the business outcomes. Our job is to sit down and help. We talk about it as the four E's: explore, engage, empathize, and enable."
Mike Clayville, Vice President of Global Sales, Amazon Web ServicesThose four E's are ingrained in the behaviors of teams that support problem-solving, identifying business outcomes, creating a path for those business outcomes to be achieved, and then helping the customer achieve them.
The Results
The program was delivered globally to around 1,000 people in all geographies, including the European Union, the Asia-Pacific region, and North and South America. In every location, the program was met with great success, achieving a global average score of 4.2 or higher out of 5 from participants.
Amazon Web Services' deep commitment to a culture of continuous learning and skill development helped its sales force not just keep up with the pace of its innovation, but provide ever-greater levels of service to customers.
