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": instead of reading reports or sitting in focus groups, you 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, his instinct wasn't to analyse the data or revise the sales scripts — he went to the stores. He test drove cars under a fake name, at eight stores, using different email addresses, and watched what actually 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 leads sitting in the CRM who had test driven a Tesla and never been called back. The product was fine. So was the price. 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.
The goal was simple: before we designed anything, we needed to understand what a Metagenics sales rep's day actually looked like — past the job description, past the old requirements document — 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 navigate 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 this 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 a well-documented version of the problem rather than the actual one.
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
This is one of the principles we'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 actually see.
Cook's "follow me home" was about respecting the gap between the map and the territory — refusing to design solutions until you've walked the territory yourself. 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.
