Jon McNeill, the former President of Tesla’s global sales, picked up a technique from Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, that changed how he thought about getting close to the customer. Cook calls it “follow me home”: you skip the reports and the focus groups and go and watch real customers use your product. You stand behind them. You see where they get confused, where they give up, where they improvise workarounds. You use, as McNeill puts it, “the greatest analytical instrument in the world — your two eyes.”
McNeill applied it at Tesla. When dealerships in certain regions weren’t converting, he skipped the data and the sales scripts and went to the stores. He test drove cars at eight stores, using a different email address at each, and watched what happened when a customer walked in. The salespeople were technically sharp but couldn’t answer the one question every prospect had: “What does it cost to own this thing?” He also found 9,000 people who had test driven a Tesla and never been called back. The product was fine. The price was fine too. The gap was between the experience Tesla had designed and the experience customers were actually having.
You can’t see that from a spreadsheet.
The same principle, applied to CRM
When Softwired started the ANZ CRM Reset project with Metagenics, we sent our Senior Business Analyst Sandeep Pareek out on a ride-along with the Metagenics sales team on his second day.
Day two of the engagement — before discovery workshops even began.
Before we designed anything, we needed to understand what a Metagenics sales rep’s day actually looked like. Past the job description and the old requirements document, that meant on the road, in a pharmacy, with a pharmacist across the counter and a dozen other priorities competing for that rep’s attention.
Sandeep spent that morning with a Metagenics Territory Manager, Tracie Connor, visiting pharmacies. He watched her work through the in-call process: what information she needed at her fingertips, what she had to work around, where the friction was. He heard what pharmacists actually asked about, and got the rhythm of a field sales call. The time pressure, the relationship dynamics, the gap between what the CRM was supposed to do and what it was actually used for.
By the end of the morning, he had context that would have taken weeks of stakeholder interviews to approximate.
Why the ride-along matters
Most technology projects are designed at a remove. Product owners write requirements. Business analysts document processes. Developers build to spec. The work happens in meeting rooms and Jira boards, translated through layers of abstraction from the actual problem.
By the time a system ships, it’s often solving the problem as documented, several layers away from the problem as it happens.
The ride-along short-circuits that. It’s the fastest, cheapest form of requirements gathering available. Workshops capture how people think their job should look; ride-alongs capture how it actually runs.
What Sandeep saw that day directly shaped the feature prioritisation for the CRM Reset. The in-call workflow we designed wasn’t based on what Metagenics assumed reps needed, or what IT assumed they should have. It was based on what reps actually did, observed firsthand on day two.
Getting close to the problem is a discipline
It’s one of the principles I’ve built into how Softwired works: get as close to the problem as possible, as early as possible.
That means sending analysts into the field before design starts, giving them access to the people who actually do the job, and treating the first week of an engagement as intelligence-gathering before any planning starts. It means being willing to have everything you thought you knew about the problem challenged by what you see.
Cook’s “follow me home” was about respecting the gap between the map and the territory. You walk the territory yourself before you design anything for it. McNeill took that principle from Intuit to Tesla. Softwired applies it on day two.
The best consultants get out of the meeting room.
Pictured: Softwired Senior Business Analyst Sandeep Pareek with Metagenics sales representative Tracie Connor, on a pharmacy ride-along during the ANZ CRM Reset project.
