Three ways and three steps: using customer knowledge, fresh thinking and new ideas to sell more.
Sales innovation can create customer value and business success. By tapping into salespeople’s customer insights and experiences, businesses can conjure up innovative ideas for improving sales processes and sales messages, and creating fresh sales tactics and approaches.
Think different
Salespeople know about customers; about their attitudes, likes, dislikes, wants and needs. So why not use this knowledge to inspire fresh thinking and innovative new ideas? Sales innovation could inspire improvements in three key areas:
Sales processes. Improve sales processes for the benefit of both business efficiency and the customer. Could you make things easier for salespeople? For example, by providing mobile access to customer data, product information or stock levels. Or could you simplify customer processes in ways that improve customer value? For example, by simplifying customer interactions, pricing options or order processes.
Sales messages. Salespeople have unique customer insights and experiences which could help to create or improve sales and marketing messages and adapt them for different customer types or groups. Good communication and collaboration between sales and marketing – to brainstorm and implement innovative ideas – could lead to more practical and relevant sales messages and a stronger sales voice.
Sales approaches. Could you conjure up creative, clever, engaging and witty ways to get your foot in the door and win the hearts and minds of individual prospects or customer groups? Ingenuity grabs attention, so novel approaches could get customers or even the media talking about your business. By learning more about potential customers’ wants and needs, and by understanding how they think, you could formulate unique, exciting and personalised sales tactics and approaches.
Three steps to sales innovation
Customer knowledge. Get inside the minds of existing and potential customers; understand their attitudes, instincts, perceptions, wants and needs. Get together and share insights with marketing, salespeople and other customer-facing employees. Also analyse customer data for insights. Let this knowledge inspire and feed the ideas generation process.
Creative ideas generation. Brainstorm ideas – individually or in groups – on how to improve sales processes, messages, tactics and approaches – and how to solve sales challenges or problems. When brainstorming: don’t evaluate ideas immediately as this may dissuade people from contributing; think realistic and practical, but also open up to more imaginative or unorthodox ideas.
Innovation. Assess and develop good and viable ideas. Prioritise safe quick-wins, but don’t overlook those good-but-risky ideas; valuable innovations sometimes result from taking risks. Seek management and employee buy-in for your ideas so that they have the support they need to become successful innovations. For less surefire ideas experiment with test programmes before wider roll-out.
So why not take time out to think differently and innovate? Get to know your customers and key prospects, review your sales processes, messages and approaches, and brainstorm new ideas.