Cascade River Run: A Sales Enablement Case Study

The Challenge

Sales teams are usually handed a feature list and left to turn it into a story a buyer will sit through. I wanted to design a sales enablement program that teaches reps to run a whole deal the way a guide runs a river: reading the water, choosing a line, adjusting when it gets rough. To build it without touching real product or competitive intel, I invented a fictitious data observability platform, Cascade, and designed a full curriculum around it, from value proposition to close.

The Design

The course uses a river-run metaphor as its spine. Six modules map to six stretches of increasing difficulty:

• The Headwaters (Class I) – The one-breath explanation of what Cascade does and why it matters
• Reading the Banks (Class II) – The three buyer personas in the room and what each one is judged on
• Running the Line (Class III) – Demoing a narrative instead of a feature tour
• The Rapids (Class IV) – Turning technical objections into buying signals
• Other Boats on the River (Class III) – Framing the competitive category around Cascade’s strengths
• The Finish (Class II) – Pricing the value and closing with a mutual action plan

Each stretch pairs core concepts with a “lock it in” takeaways section reps can carry into a live call.

The AI Coach

Rather than static text and video, I built an in-course AI guide, Nova, who narrates each stretch and answers open-ended questions in real time, woven into the river metaphor rather than bolted on as a generic chatbot.

Working With Claude

I designed the full experience collaboratively with Claude: the fictitious product, the persona and objection-handling content, the demo structure, and the interactive build itself, including navigation, progress tracking, and the AI coach.

Why It Matters

This project shows the range of what I do as a learning designer: translating a technical product into a story a seller can use, structuring content around how people actually learn a skill, and pushing what sales enablement can look like when it’s built by an instructional designer instead of handed off from marketing.

Click the image below to open the project.