Salespeople as Innovators?

Can your salespeople contribute to developing wallet-opening “great products”?

The short answer is “Yes, they can.” The more important question is “How?” Selling is “outward looking.” It’s getting products and services out of a company and into a marketplace to increase the top line. New product development is ultimately “inward looking,” actually happening inside a company with greater or lesser support from marketing.

We’ll answer the “how” question by explaining the three key points at which the right sales skills and process can move things along from idea to marketplace-and even keep the best ideas alive long enough to get a fair hearing.

Successful companies know that product and service innovation are forever linked to a strong sales process, especially to the effectiveness of consultative selling skills-the “discovery” skills-of their sales representatives. In addition, an effective, discovery-based sales process can propel innovation throughout an organization because, ultimately, its result is to persuade. Innovators must persuade from the time they get an idea to the time that idea goes to market. These skills can be learned but without training are difficult to put to work in the field.

If you think about it, doesn’t it just make sense that sales forces should be great resources for innovation?

Key Point #1: On the Outside Discovering.  Productive salespeople have regular, frequent, and in-depth contact with prospects and customers, just the people for whom a company wants to innovate. And when they do they look for needs their companies can fill and problems they can solve.

The really good salespeople, the top producers, go further. They not only identify typical needs their target markets have. They also uncover  unmet  needs for which the company currently has no solution at all or one that is non-competitive. Sometimes prospects and customers don’t even realize they have those needs.

Using consultative selling discovery skills to uncover unmet needs in the marketplace is the first point at which skilled salespeople using a customized sales process can contribute to innovation.

Key Point #2: On the Inside Communicating.  The second spot is inside the company, where they must know how to communicate the promise of new ideas from the field to new product development, marketing, and management. We teach salespeople how to filter such ideas and communicate them effectively. When salespeople can’t filter and communicate, the costs to corporate growth, not to mention sales commissions, are high.

For example, at least a few of the missteps Xerox suffered involved a failure to communicate internally the value of innovations later recognized as transformational–namely, the computer mouse, the graphical user interface, and the computer network. (Yes, it’s true. Xerox had these early on.) They never made it to market, reports Terry Jones in his new book,  On Innovation , essentially because product development could not communicate their value to management. Those dropped ideas eventually bounced back, practically to outer space, as other companies took them to market with incredible success.

Jones, now chairman of Kayak.com and a personal friend since junior high school, had a front-row seat–at times, the driver’s seat–to the catalytic innovation in software and technology as chief information officer of Sabre, American Airlines electronic reservations system. Jones went on to found Travelocity, a pioneer in Web-based disintermediation that allowed consumers to book reservations with airlines directly without the assistance of travel agents. The practice is commonplace now, but when introduced in 1996, it was catalytic.

When Jones was CIO at Sabre his lab came up with the mobile phone boarding pass, showing bookable hotels on a map, and a computer-driven way to track lost luggage.

“These were all great ideas,” Jones writes in his book. “The value and potential [were] there all the time; our lab team simply lacked the sales skills necessary to persuade decision makers to say yes.”

Key Point #3: On the Outside Again, Persuading.  And of course salespeople can contribute to enabling successful innovation right where you would expect them to: selling an innovation-turned-product in the marketplace. But the sales force has to be capable of persuading by communicating value.

And this is also where the top producers stand out. Most salespeople simply educate the market about an innovation (or any product, for that matter) but are not trained to communicate value and persuade prospects of what that value means for them and their companies specifically. The top producers, however, can. They are the 20 percent of salespeople who bring in 80 percent of new business. Arguably, they are as important to a company as any innovation.

So, a strong sales process and consultative selling skills can contribute significantly to the accelerated birth, growth, and successful launch of innovative new products or services. Your people, not only front-line sales reps but also new product development folks and marketers, however, must be well-trained and managed for the process and the skills to work.

No matter where or how you’re attempting to innovate , we’d like to speak with you about how we can help. Our sales training, business-to-business lead generation, and marketing services can support your innovation in myriad ways.

Phil Krone   is president of Productive Strategies, Inc., a marketing and management consulting firm specializing in consultative sales training, lead generation and appointment setting, and marketing and marketing communications. Phil can be reached at 847-446-0008 and pkrone@productivestrategies.com.

The post Salespeople as Innovators? appeared first on Productive Strategies, Inc..