Innovations and the challenge of sales management
How to create a good growth platform and culture for the birth of innovations in sales?
Alf Rehn, in the previous post we discussed why sellers and sales managers should be interested in innovations and innovative thinking. What kind of leadership culture supports creative thinking and what kind of growth platform is the most favourable for the birth of innovations?
A leadership culture that supports creative thinking is one that is inclusive, empowering, and supportive. It values diversity of thought, encourages experimentation, and tolerates failure. Inclusive leadership actively seeks out and values different perspectives and ideas, creating a diverse team with members from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets. Empowering the team involves giving them the autonomy and responsibility to make decisions and take ownership of their work, trusting them to do their job well, and providing them with all the support and the necessary resources they need to succeed. A supportive atmosphere is one where employees feel safe to express their ideas, take risks, and learn from their mistakes — a psychologically safe environment where employees are not afraid to speak up, share their ideas, or challenge the status quo. Tolerance for failure is also crucial as failure is an inevitable part of the innovation process. Leaders should foster a culture where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity rather than a setback, celebrating successes but also analysing failures to understand what went wrong and how to improve in the future.
To this comes the issue how a leader can ensure that the organization keeps to a productive, creative mindset, as well as staying focused on how to serve both existing and potential clients and customers. This is always a balancing-act, as a leader needs to be able to both create a feeling of calm and space in the organizations, whilst at the same time keeping people focused and forward-looking. Some leaders seem to think that innovation is all about demanding more from employees, adding innovation to a long list of previous demands. While it is important to set an agenda and keep people thinking about ways to improve their work, the organization's processes, and the business in general, this needs to be tempered by giving people the space where they can actually develop a growth mindset. For instance, in sales it isn't enough to simply demand that people improve their figures "with innovation" or "by innovating", you need to be able to give your sales team the resources, including time and freedom to test things, to actually explore innovative approaches — without chastising them if this doesn't immediately lead to improvements.
What leaders need to develop most when it comes to innovation is patience, and I have previously talked about "radical patience" in innovation. Innovation takes time, and a creative culture takes time to form. Patience can feel scary, as you wait for your team to get to where they need to be innovation-wise, but real leaders have the courage to let innovation take the time it needs.
How should sales organizations get started when they want to increase creative thinking and promote the emergence of sales innovations?
For sales organizations looking to boost creative thinking and foster the emergence of sales innovations, it is crucial to start by working on the culture. The culture is the foundation of any organization and influences everything we do. Creating an inclusive and supportive environment is the first step. This means creating a setting where employees feel safe to share their ideas, take risks, and learn from their mistakes. As stated above a psychologically safe environment is key.
Encouraging and learning from experimentation is also essential. This involves urging employees to try new ideas and approaches, whether it is experimenting with new sales techniques, exploring new markets, or developing new products and services. This also includes documenting and analysing the experiments, however! Too often companies think experiments are just about doing a fun test and then moving on. A proper culture of experimentation takes a more scientific approach and has an emphasis on learning from experiments.
To this comes the dimension of diversity. This is an often-misunderstood element of innovation, but study of study has shown that diversity is the dimension that characterizes innovative teams and organizations. This does not refer only to the usual categories of diversity, such as gender and ethnicity, even though these are critically important, but to the full gamut of organizational heterogeneity. With this we refer to things such as socio-economic background, age and experience, education, and functional speciality, and many more. Without enough diversity in your teams, you will not have enough perspectives and a narrowness of outlooks — and this is no way to ensure sales!
It is important to remember that no matter how much managers want change to occur at speed, cultures of creative thinking and innovation do not emerge overnight. Developing such a culture is a long-term effort that requires commitment, effort, and resources. However, with the right approach and culture, sales organizations transform themselves into powerhouses of creativity and productivity — because in a healthy culture, these do not exclude each other.
Who do we go with? Today, the seller cannot do it alone, and customers are often served by teams of experts. How important is cooperation with other departments, customers and stakeholders and finding a common agenda (a common cause for innovation)?
In today's sales environment, a salesperson cannot succeed alone, and customers are often served by teams of experts. Collaboration with other departments, customers, and stakeholders, as well as finding a common agenda (a shared reason for innovation), is of utmost importance.
Collaboration between different departments is necessary to leverage the entire organization's knowledge and resources. For example, the sales team may need to collaborate with the product development team to customize a solution for a particular customer. Similarly, collaborating closely with customers and stakeholders helps in understanding their needs and preferences better, which is crucial for developing new products, services, and solutions.
Finding a common agenda for innovation is also essential. as the term can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. Talking through what is meant by "innovation" in developing sales ensures that everyone is aligned towards the same goal and works together to achieve it. A shared reason for innovation fosters a sense of purpose and commitment among the team members, which is crucial for the success of any innovation initiative. It is too easy to just start initiatives, seminar, and workshops, thus creating innovation fatigue in the organization.
In other words, there is no one right way to do innovation, and no one right group to start doing innovation with. Instead, we should be continuously mixing and matching, finding new collaborations, trying out new combinations. Sometimes you need to collaborate with your in-house accountants, sometimes your existing customers, sometimes with a gang of students. Heck, throw in a clown and an academic (sometimes available as a handy combo) in there. Anything to stay nimble and curious.
Is it possible to somehow measure innovativeness and innovations in order to monitor development?
The notion of measuring innovation is a little like trying to quantify the ethereal or bottling a ghost. While there are numerous metrics and indices that claim to measure innovation — such as the number of patents filed, R&D expenditure, or new products launched — these only capture a fraction of the picture. Innovation is not merely a function of outputs; it encompasses a wide range of factors, including culture, mindset, and the ability to adapt and evolve. Moreover, not all innovations are created equal. A minor tweak to an existing product may technically count as an innovation, but its impact is hardly comparable to a groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting invention. Additionally, some of the most significant innovations may not yield immediate results but have a profound impact in the long run. Hence, while certain aspects of innovation can be measured, doing so provides an incomplete and potentially misleading picture. The true essence of innovation defies easy quantification. So, do not freak out over numbers, and just make sure you stay on a positive path.
Alf Rehn is an Executive Board Member of Fife Sales Agency. He is a Professor of Innovation, Design, and Management at the University of Southern Denmark, sits on numerous boards of directors, and is in addition a bestselling author and a strategic advisor for everything from hot new startups to Fortune 500-companies.