When I, Agustin, joined Facebook in 2017 as Head of Learning and Development for Latin America, I came from 20 years in L&D consulting and was accustomed to serving large corporations to elevate their teams’ skill levels. I was used to delivering transformative learning programs to change business practices for targeted teams inside large organizations, but I had not yet managed system-level change. By becoming an insider in a large corporation like Facebook - as opposed to an outside consultant - I had more leverage to influence multiple teams at once through an extended period. As I was to discover, it would grant me the opportunity to drive systemic transformation, especially in an organization that had peculiar characteristics that, I can tell in hindsight, were key ingredients to drive innovation.

The first thing that struck me when joining Facebook was the elevated skill level and talent of the people who worked there. It was not uncommon for people to leave director-level positions in large banks, telecoms, or consulting firms to be senior account managers at Facebook. Renowned leaders in top advertising agencies would join the Creative Shop team, mathematical geniuses would leave academia to join the Marketing Science hub. Over a few years, this led to a highly talented pool of driven people who wanted to perform the best work of their careers. This was great, but not necessarily conducive to innovation on its own. The fact that we had very talented individuals did not mean they would together undertake productive work and build the required relationships. It is a well-known fact that a team composed of stars does not necessarily win the championship.

Facebook had a strong culture based on collaboration, experimentation, and focus on impact. There was a tacit expectation that individuals and teams should fail from time to time because, “if you’re not failing, you’re not growing.”

This is where culture kicks in. Facebook had a strong culture based on collaboration, experimentation, and focus on impact. There was a tacit expectation that individuals and teams should fail from time to time because, “if you’re not failing, you’re not growing,” and an expectation that you should also produce breakthrough achievements from time to time.

When you have talented, driven individuals embedded in a culture like that, you get an organization that can collaborate and drive a lot of change. Hackathons, in which teams would get together to solve a specific challenge, were a common practice. Although teams were used to collaborating and producing amazing results, Hackathons were mostly technically oriented, focused on improving results on Facebook’s advertising platform. When involving clients, collaboration projects would revolve around improving the execution of their digital marketing campaigns, optimizing ads, systems integration, or the creative aspect of digital ads, and generating results specifically for the marketing team responsible for digital campaigns within clients. They were not innovating in Facebook’s go-to-market approach, its commercial practices, or the way they related to clients.

The cross-functional nature of the program is a markedly different way of working for Facebook’s customers. In fact, for some of them, it was their first time working across the aisles.

To learn the business, I would sporadically shadow sales professionals for client calls. Every time I did it, I was impressed with the high level of trust they had earned from their clients, the world’s largest brands. Through diligent work over a few years of serving the same book of business, the commercial teams had positioned themselves as trusted advisors: clients would listen to them attentively and, very often, follow their recommendations. Facebook was a small size operation in Latin America when compared to its clients, yet it had significant influence over their decision-making regarding digital marketing and advertising.

Despite their high level of influence over clients, at the end of 2017, the commercial team was facing a critical challenge: they had committed to another year of intense growth, but there was no clear path to accomplish it. For the past three years, the Latin American Facebook team has been driving hyper-growth, moving from being the slowest to the fastest-growing market globally. This led them to take most of the digital advertising budget available in the market, and they started to plateau. There was no clear way to generate new or additional revenue streams to sustain the committed growth. We had hit saturation.

That was the moment the Vice President of Facebook LatAm and the Head of Sales of LatAm came to me asking for some type of learning intervention that could make the teams more strategic in their approach to the market. The idea was to make teams go beyond their traditional way of doing business and start tending to broader client needs. If we were to keep growing at high rates, we needed to start addressing client challenges that would involve new, more elaborate, and larger advertising solutions. In other words, we needed to innovate.

During the pilots, it became quickly apparent that identifying the “right” customers with the “right” problems at the “right” time is critical to ensuring the best use of the required social capital.

As Head of Learning, I knew that offering one more traditional training would not cut it. The solution needed to transform our way of working, leveraging the trust clients had in Facebook’s culture of open experimentation. We needed an innovative, hands-on approach to get Facebook to market as a strategic enterprise team. To create such an approach I needed help, and that’s when I reached out to The Design Gym, a consultancy specialized in that field.

The Innovation Hacking Program

Painting the Vision

When designing a strategic engagement approach for Facebook’s most important clients, it helps to imagine what these clients would say after a successful experience. Ideally, they would say things like “The Facebook team is our chosen partner to lead innovation in the way we advertise.” Or “Facebook helps us move things forward.”, “They have a definite seat at our strategy meetings.”

With this ambitious vision in mind, the Design Gym team embarked on a robust discovery process. To better understand the needs of Facebook teams and their clients, they interviewed 30 internal and external stakeholders and reviewed past client surveys.

From this research, they learned that although advertising clients generally had a positive relationship with Facebook, the nature of that relationship tended to be more tactical and transactional when, in fact, they were looking to Facebook to be more of a strategic and consultative partner. They wanted their conversations to shift from media pitches to advising on business growth and market trends.

However, the sales environment was already challenging due to greater competition, increased quotas, and dwindling “low-hanging” opportunities. Asking Facebook teams to deliver on clients’ growing expectations while also serving as strategic partners required more than shifting how they worked with clients. It required the organization to shift how it evaluated success from short-term quotas to creating long-term value.

It became clear that a solution that any innovative design that addresses these expectations had to help Facebook teams:

1. Understand their customers’ perspectives and needs;

2. Look for challenges that are meaningful to their customers;

3. Consider solutions that feel innovative to the client; and 

4. Create a team mentality around the client challenge.

With these insights and design principles in mind, as well as inspiration from Facebook’s history of technology Hackathons, the team designed a customer engagement program called Innovation Hacking.

Innovation Hacking is an approach for quickly and collaboratively creating marketing plans and initiatives that are consumer-centric, actionable, and mutually beneficial. It consists of three phases:

1. The Challenge Phase - understand the context surrounding the client’s problem and reframe the challenge accordingly.

2. The Ideas Phase - create innovative solutions and prioritize a range of short-, medium-, and long-term ideas to test.

3. The Action Phase - align with the client on the ideas to test and implement.

Learning by Testing

In the spirit of Design Thinking and iterative learning, the program was piloted with two Facebook customers in Brazil. To test the approach in different organizational cultures and industries, two different types were selected for the pilots. One was an e-commerce company that was known for being innovative. The hypothesis was that they would be more open to experimenting with a new approach. The other one was a more traditional company in the beauty industry with whom Facebook had already established trust but wanted to grow the relationship. Here, the hypothesis was that the initiative would help realize a greater potential to generate more business with the client.

The pilots validated both hypotheses, along with several other assumptions, including:

The customer and the Facebook teams are open to new ways of working. The Innovation Hacking framework allows Facebook teams to have a different kind of conversation with their clients. Rather than pitching products or selling specific outcomes, the sales teams listen to their customer’s unique needs and challenges, and help them generate, prioritize, and implement ideas.

Innovation Hacking drives both short- and long-term outcomes. Innovation Hacking helps Facebook teams to have both tactical and strategic conversations with their customers, addressing both short- and long-term goals. This results not only in a robust pipeline of sales opportunities but leads also to real, actionable outcomes. For example, one pilot customer shifted their entire Q4 strategy based on the experience, which opened a whole new line of investment for the sales team that sustained into the future. The team estimated that the experience could unlock an additional $3M in recurring revenue.

There is value in cross-functional collaboration. The Innovation Hacks bring together diverse stakeholders marketing, communications, sales, strategy, finance, product, or sometimes even HR or manufacturing from both the customer and the Facebook organization, as well as the customer’s media agencies. Not only do these various perspectives contribute to a broader range of ideas; but it also increases the likelihood that ideas are implemented due to the buy-in and alignment that is generated across teams and organizations.

By leveraging the current trust in your business network, it is possible to entice different stakeholders to achieve a common goal, as long it is genuinely based on addressing the main stakeholder’s needs.

The cross-functional nature of the program is a markedly different way of working for Facebook’s customers. In fact, for some of them, it was their first time working across the aisles. As a side effect, those engaged in the project elevated their political capital among their colleagues. 

On Facebook’s side, the cross-functional design allows the team to grow their influence and develop new contacts within the client organization, beyond their usual media and marketing collaborators. At the same time, involving Facebook team members beyond media signals their commitment to helping the client with their challenge. It is a win-win solution for everyone involved.

Continuous Improvement

Even after formally launching the program and engaging additional customers, the consulting team continued to iterate on their approach. Following each engagement, they collected feedback from both Facebook and customer participants, which helped fine-tune the experience. This spirit of continuous improvement has kept the project nimble and responsive to key learnings, including those outlined below:

Make the investment worthwhile. Innovation Hacking requires a significant investment of resources from both the customer and Facebook stakeholders. During the pilots, it became quickly apparent that identifying the “right” customers with the “right” problems at the “right” time is critical to ensuring the best use of the required social capital.

The “right” clients are those with whom a sales team is looking to grow their relationships, influence their marketing strategy, and/or help them think beyond short-term outcomes. Engaging a client’s executive leaders or decision-makers in the process was critical to the project’s success, and the most successful Innovation Hacks have executive leaders attend the workshop, as well.

The “right” problems for Innovation Hacking

• Support the client’s broader strategic and business goals,

• Allow for a pipeline of short-term and long-term possibilities,

• Are relevant to Facebook’s expertise, strengths, and resources,

• Don’t require a significant amount of research or specialized expertise outside of the core team, and

• Are issues that the client teams are passionate about.

Innovation Hacking Challenges the various companies faced differed significantly depending on the industry context:

• How might to maximize synergy among individual brands to increase the overall market share? (Consumer Product Goods)

• How to identify occasional guests and increase the frequency of their visits? (Food & Beverage:

• How to increase preference for the brand among the young AB audience? (Beauty)

• How to acquire 50 million new unique buyers by 2020? (E-commerce)

• How to improve brand perception beyond pricing, closeness & assortment? (Retail)

It became evident, that the “right” time to do an Innovation Hack is during moments when they can have the most impact on the client’s business (e.g., before major planning cycles, whenever there is a strategic shift in business priorities, or when a sales team wants to intentionally grow their client relationships). 

Meeting clients where they’re at

One of the differentiating elements of the Innovation Hacks is the Consumer Insights Presentation where the Facebook team shares market trends, consumer research, and/or external inspiration related to the client’s challenge. The presentation is an excellent opportunity for the team to add value through new perspectives, demonstrate care, and position themselves more competitively. While this level of customer-centricity is a new muscle for most sales teams and tends to take the most time to prepare, it is a critical component of the process. By empathizing with the client’s challenges and pain points, rather than pushing media solutions, the Facebook team can open the door to more strategic conversations with their clients.

Maintaining momentum

After the first few Innovation Hacks, it turned out that some clients were better at implementing the Action Phase than others. Some teams struggled to know how to help their clients prioritize the ideas that came out of the Innovation Hack. To respond to this challenge, the consultants designed a Prioritization Meeting at the end of the Innovation Hack workshop to assess each of the ideas based on their desirability, feasibility, and viability. This meeting has proven to be critical to aligning the next steps and moving ideas forward, especially if some of the initiatives require mid or long-term implementation.

Impact and Scale

As the program evolved, so too have the metrics to track success. Initially, success was evaluated based on participants’ feedback on their experience. Would they recommend it to others (net promoter scores)? Did they feel the workshops resulted in innovative ideas? Were they a valuable use of time? etc. These metrics may be favorable indicators of success, but to scale, metrics also need to include business results.

So, in addition to sentiment, they began tracking financial and relationship metrics over time. How much new sales pipeline was generated (tracked through Facebook’s CRM)? What new lines of investment have emerged because of Innovation Hacking? How many new client contacts were created? The combination of both qualitative and quantitative metrics has helped the team make the case to scale the program to more clients across Latin America, delivering a total of 29 Innovation Hacks over a year and a half.

While Facebook’s clients - the world’s largest brands - have had a remarkable experience, it has also resulted in 84 in material success for Facebook’s business, generating a 20x ROI measured in the sales pipeline generated by the initiative. 

Enabling Innovation and Change

The experience that involved multiple organizations in multiple countries showed that collaborative approaches like the one described here are useful interventions that help teams increase revenue with clients or partners, broaden relationships and deepen trust, or drive innovation to solve common challenges.

By leveraging the current trust in your business network, it is possible to entice different stakeholders to achieve a common goal, as long it is genuinely based on addressing the main stakeholder’s needs, in this case, Facebook’s clients. It is what inspires and agglutinates the efforts.

Once the intention to serve the main stakeholder needs is clear, a well-designed program can guide multiple teams into building, sharing, and creating together. Inspired by design-thinking methodologies, the Challenge Phase, the Ideas Phase, and the Action Phase guided increasingly larger groups to accomplish specific tasks throughout the weeks, leading to the day in which all the stakeholders got together to create a common understanding of their business challenge and craft innovative solutions.

It was inspiring to see that, through these practices, Facebook professionals changed their mindsets, and consequently changed their attitudes. They realized first-hand that they could leverage the trust they had built and positioned themselves differently, challenging the clients to act in new, more productive ways. They also discovered that by joining forces they could act as an enterprise team that added tremendous value as opposed to separate teams solving specific technical issues. Collaboratively pursuing this higher goal of solving the clients’ strategic challenges was a change enabler that allowed many of them to experience doing the best work of their careers.

It is possible to break silos and drive innovation with the intelligence already available within existing teams. It is possible to foster autonomy and empower people to step up to a higher game. It is possible to bring together a diverse set of stakeholders that would not normally collaborate and enable them to find innovative solutions to common challenges.

Maybe what is required is just to innovate innovation.