Who knows where the next good idea may come from?
Last week I wrote about the rare and valuable intrapreneurial sales professional. One of the defining features of ISPs is their ability to generate insights and capture new value. Just like entrepreneurs, the first quality that most people think of when they describe them is their ability to generate good ideas, maybe because they see things that others don’t.
In the next article of this series, we will see that the ability to think of good ideas may be the least important factor in intrapreneurial success, but you do have to start somewhere; you can’t grow a tree without a seed.
So, how does the would-be intrapreneur find ideas?
Salespeople are in a great strategic position to know what’s going on outside and inside their own companies. On the outside, they spot ideas by being creatively dissatisfied with the status quo, or productively paranoid, if you will; by listening closely to customers without relying entirely on what they say they want and need; by constantly asking questions such as these:
- What else can we do for the customer?
- How can we improve the results they get from doing business with us?
- How can we improve their experience of doing business with us?
- What could cause us to lose this critical account?
- Why are we not doing business with customer X?
- If we lost this customer today, what would we have to change to get them back?
- Why do we do things this way?
- Why don‘t we do things that way?
- If I got a job with our biggest competitor, how would I steal this account?
But of course customers are not the only source of valuable ideas, which is why successful intrapreneurs also stick their noses into areas within their own company where they don’t belong. They find out what’s going on in R&D and Marketing and anywhere else there might be good ideas. They’re the ones who seem to know everyone else in the company and they seem to be the first to know the latest gossip and major news before it’s officially announced.
Finally, since one of the best ways to generate new thinking is to connect ideas from unrelated fields, intrapreneurs are curious about everything else outside their own and customer’s circles. They read widely, talk to a lot of different people, and pay attention to the world around them, to the economy, and to their own industry.
In short, sales intrapreneurs are curious, imaginative, and paranoid. But that’s just a start, as we’ll see in the next article in this series.
In the golden age of the industrial era, the key resource was the means of production, best symbolized by Ford, which emerged and thrived because of its mastery of mass production techniques that allowed it to capitalize on vast economies of scale. Companies gained competitive advantage by making and selling more and better stuff. In other words, they dominated the upstream activities.
Today, as explained by Niraj Dawar in his book, Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers
To succeed in the new tilted landscape, CEOs and marketers (and may I add, salespeople) need to be asking themselves new questions.
- Why do customers buy from us?
- Why do potential customers not buy from us?
- What else does the customer need?
- How else can we slash the customer’s costs and risks?
- Are we criterion takers, or criterion makers?
- My own addition: how else can we help them grow revenues or serve their customers better?
How does a company compete for downstream competitive advantage? Although the book considers both B2B and B2C companies, I’ll focus here on the former. In Part 2 of the book, Dawar explains how a company can use its “perch”, or higher and wider perspective of the market, to bring innovations and fresh insights to customers. Because they deal with large number and wide range of different customers, they can see the whole forest, and use their knowledge to relay and connect ideas, provide benchmarking information, and make predictions that add value.
The second section of the book dives deep into the scarce resource that we should all be competing for: the customer’s attention and cognitive effort. Dawar poses an interesting thought experiment. If Coca-Cola somehow lost all its physical assets, would they be able to raise funds to restart their business? The answer is clearly yes. But if somehow the entire world got partial amnesia and forgot about the Coca-Cola brand, would anyone invest billions of dollars in the business? Clearly not. The point is that a brand, or a customer’s perception of your company, is a critical asset because it lowers the customer’s costs and risks of making a decision to buy. They don’t have to expend much attention or think very deeply about their decision. That’s why downstream competitive advantage can be not just sustainable but accumulative. Through network effects, habit, and confirmation bias, the rich brands tend to get richer by gaining more and more mind share.
One interesting insight the book provides is that what is important is not being first to market, but first to mind. Anyone remember the Erwise browser or Chux disposable diapers? The incumbents have managed to define and dominate the customers’ purchase criteria, and the only ways for a challenger to overturn this dominance is to either provide an offering that is clearly superior in the important criteria, or change the criteria of purchase. You can either be a criterion taker, or a criterion maker.
There’s so much more I could write about this excellent book, but I’ll let you take it from here. Let me just say that if you aim to be an intrapreneurial sales professional, you need to read this book soon, and you need to sit down and seriously reflect on the six questions above.
P.S. If you don’t have time to read the whole book, read Dawar’s summary article in this month’s Harvard Business Review. If you don’t have time to read that, you have my sympathy.
Got any new ideas for sale?
I’ve had the privilege of working with many outstanding sales professionals in my years of training, but the ones who stand out are the sales intrapreneurs, those who go above and beyond consultative selling to create and deliver superior value to their customers and their own companies.
We admire the consultative salesperson. Regardless of whether you call it consultative selling or challenger selling or something similar, it’s seen as the pinnacle of sales professionalism and skill: the valuable elite who create value for their customers by going beyond what they want or think they need; who solve problems the customers don’t yet know they have; who bring new ideas and insights to improve their business.
But, as important as consultative selling is, it still carries an important limitation. It implies a one-way flow of information: the seller has superior insight and knowledge and imparts that to the buyer.
But the extensive sales literature seems to overlook the fact that customers may just possibly be as smart as we are, or might have a bit more insight into the problems than we give them credit for. They may actually know about needs that we’re not aware of.
Or sometimes during the creative exchange of ideas between buyer and seller a need emerges that the seller is not prepared to fill. Maybe they don’t offer the right solution, or maybe because it’s a newly discovered need the solution does not even exist.
What happens in that case? Does the salesperson wish the customer good luck with their problem and just walk away? That would be the prudent thing to do; why spend time chasing something that doesn’t exist?
But while it may be prudent in the short term, there are two problems with walking away. First, once a need is known somebody will eventually figure out how to fill it and steal your customer. Second, there is a lot of value that is being left on the table.
Enter the intrepreneurial salesperson, the rare individual who refuses to accept the risk and cost of walking away from the customer’s needs. The intrapreneurial salesperson turns his or her consultative skills internally, brings fresh and challenging insights to management, acquaints them with undiscovered problems or opportunities, develops internal champions, and agitates for change. The intrapreneurial salesperson thinks and creates.
They work just like an entrepreneur, the person who sees a need and finds a way to fill it by creating the right solution. Intrapreneurs do the same thing, but do it within their own company. Entrepreneurs work for themselves, but intrapreneurs work for their employers. They work internally to develop new products, services, processes, offerings, and capabilities, which remain the property of the company they work for.
Keep in mind that a sales intrapreneur is not just resourceful. There are salespeople who know how to get things done internally for their customers, such as pushing up delivery dates or securing sale engineering resources. That’s a great talent to have, but it does not make one an intrapreneur. Intrepreneurs create something new.
When they succeed, they may simply win a difficult deal, which is a good thing. Or, as in several cases I’ve seen, they may even create a whole new product category or market, which is a great thing.
Every intrepreneur, regardless of their function within a company, is a salesperson—they have to be, to get their idea accepted—but remarkably few salespeople are intrapreneurs. We’ll look at why that is in the next article in this series.
