After spending a decade working in the industry, our CEO and founder, Marc Benioff, was ready for a break. He took a sabbatical, rented a beach hut in Hawaii, connected with the local people and customs, and discovered the concept of Ohana. In Hawaiian culture, Ohana represents the idea that families—blood-related, adopted, or intentional—are bound together, and that family members are responsible for one another.

Today, the Salesforce Ohana is a deep-seated support system we nurture inside our company. It extends from our employees to our partners, customers, and members of our communities. As an enablement leader for Salesforce Canada, I wanted to do my part to align to this inspirational message. But how?

The first challenge was how to keep training fresh, engaging, hands-on, and collaborative with a 50 person sales team—all who have different personalities, sales experience, and reside in three different offices across Canada. The other was how to find a way to measure the impact training makes, not only for the sales team through feedback but ideally by creating value for our customers in new ways.

Here's an example we tried that you may be able to replicate with your organization. We attempted to make learning fun and impact revenue through a business case competition. This involved co-writing a business case with the CEO of a marquee customer and evolved into a partnership where we are now co-building a vision into reality.

For those of you unfamiliar with business case competitions, the typical format involves writing a narrative about the challenges a company faces along with metrics to describe the current situation. The main purpose is to leave the story untold so the case competitors have the freedom to come up with their own ideas on how to solve the challenges. Along with the business case, the competitors get a scoring rubric the judges use to measure their success. The outcomes we were looking to develop from a learning standpoint were improved discovery, quantifying solution ROI, and executive presentation skills.

A case study on its own is fine but we wanted to take it further. What if we could find a customer to co-write a LIVE business case with us and then judge the winner? The benefits would be two-fold:

• Account Executives would take it more seriously as they’d present in front of an actual customer.
• We would develop a closer partnership with our customer and ideally find a new way to provide value for their organization.

With this in mind, we went to our customers with the message and found the perfect CEO leading a $70M business and looking for creative ways to transform for the future. From his perspective it was a no brainer: In less than a day, he'd get 50 educated minds generating ideas and plans he could review and implement with his team.

We had one more hurdle: The customer had only one Account Executive. How would we get another 49 Account Executives excited to participate? Participating would pull them away from their regular responsibilities, so we did two key things:

• We spread the work between groups of 3 or 4 and provided the case study ahead of time with recommended milestones to hit leading up to competition day.
• We offered an attractive Grand Prize of $10,000 to the winning team.

The competition involved four pools of four teams each competing for finalist spots presenting directly to the CEO. The winning presentation was incredible and our CEO customer was blown away: “I will make this review a priority given the impact this could have on our future." The winners presented a franchise business model the CEO had considered, but didn't pursue because there was no mechanism to prevent franchisees going out on their own. With the addition of technology as the enabler, the CEO saw how he could provide not only a business opportunity for entrepreneurs, but also the technology to run their franchise. The next step is to align the organization with this transformational change.

Another big takeaway was hearing from our sales team. It was great to hear the Account Executives share their feedback: “Very valuable. Loved the opportunity to present to a CEO, and loved the opportunity to work with experienced reps,” and from a new employee, “Being new, watching everyone present sheds great light on how things are done so well here at Salesforce.” The Salesforce Ohana is alive and well!

What once looked unreasonable—to have a live customer participate in our business case competition—once solved, yielded fantastic learning and results. What's unreasonable for your company?