Sales people are often described as Hunters or Farmers.  Hunters have been characterized as chasing after new customers and new opportunities.  Farmers focus on nurturing established accounts, keeping loyal customers, growing the business primarily through servicing the customer and growing the relationship.

I’m not sure that model has ever been appropriate, but in today’s world of value creation, the model falls far short of what our customers need and what our own organizations need.

Everybody Hunts!  It’s the responsibility of each sales person to constantly develop their territories–whether it’s an industry segment, a geographic region, or a named account, everyone hunts.  We have to constantly be assessing our territories, looking for opportunities to grow.  We have to be constantly exploring–developing new relationships, finding new ways to contribute to our customers.

Our customers deserve far more than nurturing and great service.  Those are table stakes for any sales territory, but they don’t help our customers grow and improve.  They don’t help our customers get better.  Our customers need us to be hunting–helping them to discover new opportunities, new ideas, ways to grow and improve.  Our customers and prospects need us to challenge them, to get them to think about new opportunities for their businesses, to improve their own success.

Hunting demands curiosity and creativity.  Hunters have to search, they have to discover, they have to push.  Hunters are constantly exploring–finding untapped potential in their territory, a new customer, a new opportunity, something different for current customers.  Hunters know, they must create new ideas and visions for their customers and prospects.  They know they must nurture and develop those ideas over time.  Hunters know they must be patient, working with the customer, developing them until the time is right, until they are prepared to buy.

Your customers want hunters not farmers, they want us to help them build their business.  Are you hunting within your territory, are you living up to your customers’ expectations?

The other day, my friend Jill Konrath wrote a compelling post, Silence Is Complicity.  Please make sure you read it.  The post resulted in an email discussion between Jill and me on the topic of Intolerance.

In the national media, we are pummeled by pundits spewing messages of intolerance.  Whether they wrap themselves in their country’s flag, claiming patriotism, or in the “rightness” of their issue, or claiming a religious position, or are just plain mean; we’re surrounded by intolerance.  Their messages are nothing but poison.

These people refuse to recognize other points of view, other ideas, and positions.  Through arrogance, conceit, ignorance or fear, rather than engaging in a healthy exchange of ideas, or in listening and understanding, they seek to destroy, to tear things down.  This behavior is shameful.  To see so called leaders or influencers spewing this venom sets a terrible example and makes all of us littler, stop all progress, and keep us from growing.

One doesn’t have to look far back in history to see the damage done by intolerance.  Millions of deaths, decades of repression, cultures and economies destroyed.

Intolerance is the enemy of progress, of innovation, of growth and creativity.  Intolerance does not create success, but instead drives failure.  It impacts all of us because it stops the exchange of ideas.  It stops us from seeking to understand and to be understood.  It stifles our growth as individuals, communities, organizations, and nations.

At a time when so many are searching for answers, whether to achieve our personal goals, to find ways for our companies to grow, to provide solutions for our communities, or to be better world citizens; intolerance stops all of that.

It’s differences that make us great.  Differing backgrounds, differing experiences, differing beliefs, different ideas, different points of view.  No single person or group can have the answers.  But the healthy exchange of views and ideas enable us to consider new things.  Rather than trying to shut down or shout down those who hold a different point of view, we need to encourage them to speak up, we need to listen, we need to respect them—though we may still not agree with them.

Ideas, conversations, differences in views are the stuff that create growth, and isn’t that what each of us is trying to do?

Intolerance is around us every day.  It’s just not the garbage we hear in the news.  We see it in very subtle ways every day.  It’s the bullying, it’s people who don’t listen, it’s people who stop learning.  It happens in little ways, but accumulates, and worsens.

The only way we fight intolerance is to refuse to succumb.  We must continue to question, we must continue to explore, we must continue to learn.  We cannot stand by and say nothing, because if we do, Silence Is Complicity, and silence destroys each of us.

Many pundits, including me, believe predictive analytics and big data are becoming the “killer apps” for sales and marketing.  Developing deep understanding of our customers, being able to intercept them when they have a higher propensity to buy will become a key tool for sales and marketing.  Presenting value in terms of hard, compelling analysis is a critical element of most complex B2B deals.

Developing sales and marketing capabilities in being data driven, both in better targeting market and customers and in helping quantify value in working with customers is a critical skill.  I’ve written often abou how important this is, along with the importance of increasing the business acumen of sales and marketing professionals.

But big data and compelling facts are insufficient for our success–both in leading our own organizations and in working with our customers.  Big data and analytics are always best positioned in a context.

Others argue the power of stories.  Rich narratives that provide people a vision.  Stories painting a picture of a desired future, stories illustrating problems, challenges, and possibilities for overcoming those challenges.  Stories are very powerful, the provide a context, something the customer can grasp and understand, something they can use to bridge their own experience and feelings, to better understand the potential of a solution.  But often, stories have a weakness–they can be perceived as not having enough substance, not having solid foundations, as being nothing more than just rich pictures.

So there are these opposing camps — big data and powerful analytics or powerful stories.

Actually, these are best leveraged together—big data and powerful analytics have deep meaning when positioned in the context of powerful stories.  Stories give people a context in which to position the analysis provided by the data.  They provide meaning and help create insight.

Several years ago, I was COO of a start up company.  We provided high end data analytic solutions.  Our technology was overwhelming.  We were able to solve problems people had never been able to address.  We were able to provide insights that were previously unthinkable.  The problems we solve were BIG problems—with one customer, in just one part of the business, we provided insight that enabled them to save a $100M annual contract with a customer.    Other problems produced business value on a grand scale.  But we had problems in closing deals.  Our prospects would see the analysis, they could see the output of our analysis and see data presented in a compelling manner—yet we struggled with closing deals.

Suddenly, one of our sales people discovered the secret — it was stories.  With stories, all of a sudden the data had a context, it had meaning, people could create mental pictures of what we were presenting.  They could become emotionally engaged with what had previously been very abstract.

Data and analytics are powerful, stories are powerful.  Multiply the power of each by combining them — leverage data and stories together to create a rich picture that people can understand, own, and become invested in.  Together, they enable people–whether our own organizations or our customers to connect the dots, creating meaning and insight.

• Do you have powerful stories about what how you can support your customers in achieving new things, realize goals they had not thought possible, grow in new ways?
• Do you have data and analysis that supports this, can you quantify and model the impact of what you can do, of the results the customer might achieve?
• Can you leverage both together?

We organize our companies by function–sales, marketing, customer service, finance, manufacturing, development, an so on.  I suppose the management science guru’s thought it the most efficient way to organize and run a company.  Each function has their goals and performance measures, each naturally optimizes what they do to achieve those goals.  The senior executive team seeks to make sure the sum of each function’s performance enables the organization to achieve it’s goals.  It’s a model that works pretty well.

But then there’s the customer.  The customer may first become aware of our companies through our marketing outreach.  It may be an ad, commercial, something they heard from another customer, an email, or a search result from Google.  They first start to get to know us through our marketing messages.  Marketing executes their strategies–engaging the customer based on their plans and programs, all designed to optimize marketing’s attainment of their objectives.

They get more interested, they reach out, “We’re interested in your products and services…”  Sales jumps in.  They engage the customer and work with them through their buying process.  At the end of that process they like what the sales person has done, they say, “We want to do business, we want to buy…..”  Sales has worked with the customer, achieving their goals.  The sales process, the overall model is optimized by the sales function–achieving it’s goals, hitting the numbers, maximizing productivity.

Order entry gets involved, perhaps our legal department, if there are contract, other functions get involved.  The order is eventually placed, the customer may deal with our shipping departments, or possibly our implementation and delivery teams.  We have our order management, contracting and other processes—all well tuned efficient in their operations and workflow.

Then finance sends them the bill, the customer starts dealing with a receivables person in paying the bill.  Finance is very efficient–after all they are really numbers driven.  The billing, collection and all other functions are well tuned organizations.

Our customers buy the product, pay for it, now they are using it.  They have a problem or question.  They call customer service.  Customer service is responsive.  They work with the customer to solve the problem.  The customer may have waited on hold for a while, the customer may have had to call back a couple of times, perhaps dealing with different people, but their problem is solved.  Customer service has met their problem resolution metrics, their turn around time.

Our organizations are working as we designed them.  Each function is efficient, effective, meeting it’s performance goals and objectives.

Then the customer needs to buy more.  They start their cycle again—we send them back go “Go,” they don’t get to collect $200 and they go through the same experience again, it may be a little faster, slightly different because they know us and we know them.  But they walk through our functions and silos.

Things are changing, customers aren’t feeling comfortable with their experience with us, they think, something has to be different, they start considering alternatives, or suggesting we change our approaches.

The problem with customer experience today, is we’ve designed customer experience around the efficient operation of each function in our company’s  organization.  We’ve designed the experience to focus on each silo achieving their goals, operating efficiently and effectively.

The problem is, this customer experience design isn’t very customer focused.  It’s internally focused on our own structures, functions, and operations.

Customers are questioning this design, they are questioning their experience.  They are wondering why the experience is optimized for us and not them.  They are challenging us, “Shouldn’t you be optimizing my experience?”  They are voting with their pocketbooks, working  with suppliers who create great customer experiences.

We’re all struggling.  We recognize  customer experience has to  be designed for the customer, not for us.  We’re struggling with understanding what great customer experience means and how to organize ourselves to deliver it.  We struggle with what it means to our own operations–what’s the impact on our effectiveness and efficiency?  What’s it mean to our growth and profitability?

Creating great customer experience—based on the experiences customers want is not in conflict with the efficient, effective and profitable operations of our own companies.  We can create and deliver great customer experience while meeting our goals–after all, that’s also in the customer interest.

The only issue is the design point.  Great customer experience design starts with the customer, not with our internal operations.  If we start our design from an outside-in perspective, we can simultaneously created differentiated customer experience and have lean, efficient and effective operations.

It’s only a matter of where you start.

A trait I don’t hear much about, but one that I think is critical for sales people is curiosity.  When you are recruiting–do you look for curiosity?

Think about it.  We have to be students of our customers’ businesses–their customers, their markets, their competitors.  We have to understand their business strategies, dreams, and goals.  We have to look at our customers’ businesses, discovering new opportunities for improvement, looking at different ways to do things.

We have to be curious about our customers as individuals–what drives them, what are they interested in, what are they trying to achieve, how do they relate to others in their organization?

We have to be curious about our own products and solutions–how they help our customers solve problems, where they best fit.  Likewise about our companies–what is the company trying to achieve and how do we contribute to that attainment.

Great sales people are curious about the profession of selling.  They are curious about their own performance and how to improve.  They are constantly learning, adapting, changing.  They never believe they have learned everything–they are interested in seeing what other successful sales people do–in their companies–in other organizations.   They constantly push themselves, trying new things, experimenting, always improving.

Hiring sales people who are curious makes life much easier for managers.  It’s impossible to train sales people on everything they need to know.  Curious sales people will realize they have gaps in their knowledge and will figure it out.  Curious sales people will constantly re-examine their strategies trying to improve them.

Curious sales people, by their nature are challengers.  They will challenge their customers on why they do things a certain way and whether they’ve considered something else.  They’ll challenge within their own companies–helping managers and others look at things differently, considering new methods.

Curious sales people never accept the status quo–they are always questioning and pushing.

Aren’t these the type of people you are looking for?

Do you look for curiosity when you are recruiting?  It needs to be one of the top characteristics on your list.

There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull.  I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels.  It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process.  Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided.  Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a need.

There are a lot of important changes that enable us to engage customers in different and more impactful ways.  However, with all that said, I remain an unabashed proponent of the sales person’s obligation to Push!  I don’t believe sales can afford to be Pulled–in fact it’s irresponsible to be Pull only.

The problem is sales people (and businesses) have always gotten the notion of Pushing wrong.  It’s always been focused on the wrong thing:  What’s our elevator pitch?  Let’s go pitch our product!  I need to get this order now!  It’s been almost exclusively focused on the sales person, the sales person’s goals and the sales person’s company.  It should be clear why customers react so poorly to this, it’s not about them.

Push is important, it’s the obligation of sales people–but it must be correctly focused.  It has to be about the customer.  It has to be focused on them and what they can achieve.  It’s the obligation of the sales person to help their customers think differently about their businesses, to discover new opportunities, to discover opportunities to improve–operations, customer satisfaction, quality. profitability, reduce risk, or whatever.  Customers are sometimes buried in the day to day, losing perspective about opportunities to grow their businesses.  Often, as prisoners of their own experiences, they don’t realize that they might try something new, there might be a different or better way that improves their results.

Whether it’s called “Challenging,” “Provocative,” “Solutions Oriented,” or “Customer Focused,”  top sales people bring new ideas and opportunities to their customer.  They create a vision and engage their customers in owning the vision.

Push doesn’t stop there, it continues through the buying process, helping the customer engage the right people, structure their process, and make a decision.  Great sales people help the customer keep focused on the goals they are trying to achieve.  As the buying decision stretches out–as it often does, the great sales person pushes the customer–helping them realize the lost opportunities and opportunity costs of delaying the decision and implementation.  The objective is not the order, but helping the customer achieve their goals on as aggressive a schedule as possible.

Push is critical, push is important–but only if it is focused on the customer and pushing them to achieve their goals.

But Pull plays an important role in supporting Push.  Pull is a measure of customer ownership  and engagement in the opportunity, and the business result.  If the sales person has done the right job in Pushing, all of a sudden the customer starts to Pull.  They embrace the initiative, they get actively engaged in the opportunity and in owning the results.

Great sales people look for their customer to Pull as a result of their appropriate Pushing.  By itself, Pushing can be slow, but if the sales person can get the customer engaged in Pulling as well, the entire process gets accelerated.

A Pull only strategy is the kiss of death for sales people.  However powerful our customer nurturing and development programs, if we wait for the customer to Pull, we are in a seriously disadvantaged position.  The customer has already done their research and arrived at some decisions.  They have evaluated alternatives (correctly or incorrectly) and narrowed alternatives to a short list.  At this point the value the sales person can create is seriously constrained–primarily to responding to the customer need.  At this point, too often, the difference between alternatives is very small–often leaving the key differentiator to be price.

Pull is bad for the customer, as well.  It puts too much responsibility on them.  They probably can never be a knowledgeable in solutions as the people who build those solutions.  While there is a wealth of information in the web, the customer in their research may emerge informed, but not well informed.  They may emerge mis-informed.  Pull is even worse from another perpective–it puts the onus of recognizing opportunities on them–they may miss opportunities, or be late in recognizing them.  Customers get great value from others making them aware, challenging them, Pushing them.

Push and Pull, artfully combined is the winning formula for the customer and for sales.  They work well with each other, but to my mind, it all starts with a little Push.

What do you think?

Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas.  They are driven for improvement and innovation.  But too often, our efforts are stymied.  It’s hard to improve or innovate.  Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places.

When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?”  Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!”  Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.”

When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel:  “Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.”  There are dozens of examples of this–the start up that has a completely different take on things, the game changer that was never on anyone’w radar.  The Amazon’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s and others.  It’s a dismal but too accurate observation–but we can do something about this.

Benchmarking our competition, looking within our industries is an important element of our business, sales and marketing strategies.  We have to have competitive practices, we have to understnad the critical issues in our markets.  But at the same time, it limits us.  We restrict ourselves to the familiar, to the known, to our experience base.  We become prisoners of our own experience, blind to what is happening outside our worlds.

The good news, our competitors and our customers do the same things!  They are also blinded and limited.  This creates a tremendous opportunity — both to outcompete and outperform our competitors, and to bring ideas and innovation and value to our customers.

If we just started looking in non-traditional places–the web and social media may be one of those new places for us to hang out.  Different industries, different regions, different cultures, different business models all give us new ideas.  The ideas we may be looking at could be old and stale in their own industries or regions—but they could represent great innovation in our own.

Innovation doesn’t need to be tough, it just means looking in different places, exposing yourself to new ideas.  If you live in a B2B world–look at retail and B2C.  If you live in a box/product solution world, look at services, subscriptions, knowledge based industries.  If you live in high tech, look at high fashion.  If you are a Boomer meet some X, Y, Z’s (and vice versa).  Expose yourself to different things–different art, different music, different people, different ideas.

You could learn a lot.  You might find ideas that twisted, tweaked, artfully adapted could have great applicability for you and your customers.  They could set you apart from everyone else.  You might also get a chance to see your new competitors–perhaps before they become competitors.  That opens a whole new realm of possiblities.

Are you looking for innovation innovation and ideas in the right places?

As sales professionals, we learn a lot about problem solving.  We focus on understanding our customers’ problems, determining their needs and presenting compelling solutions.  We learn to identify and quantify the customer’s pain and seek to eliminate it.  We go from customer to customer trying to find those that have problems we can solve.

This is a valuable activity for sales people.  It’s easy to catch our customer’s attention–they are probably already aware of the problem, hopefully, they have recognized the pain, and are pursuing solutions.  But I wonder if we miss an opportunity to better serve our customers, while simultaneously setting ourselves apart from our competitors.

What if we expanded our view of sales to also become “opportunity solvers?”

What if we helped our customers identify new opportunities to expand or grow their business?  What if we identified new opportunities for them to better serve or attract customers?  What if we identified opportunities to increase the quality of their products and services?  What if we could help them understand new ways of improving their profitability?

What if we could help open our customers eyes–to help them discover something they had never considered before?

Our customers are no different than most of us.  They are busy just surviving day to day.  They’re focused on getting their jobs done.  They have too much to do, with far too few resources, and no time.  When they find a problem, they want to solve it quickly.  They worry about their competition and trying to keep ahead of them.

They get so busy in the day to day, they never have the time to step back and think, “Are we missing something?”  “What if we did things completely differently?”

When they do take some time to do this, too often they are constrained.  They’re often to close to situations to really see what’s happening.  They’re blinded by their experience and the way things have always been done.  They are so busy, they don’t get the chance to see what others are doing.  They focus on their competitors of today, not the opportunities or competitors of tomorrow.  Netflix changed the rules for Blockbuster, Apple changed the rules for Nokia, Motorola, and others.  Amazon changed the rules for Borders.  Southwest did that to American, United, and others.  Social media is changing the rules for the media industry.

To be certain, there is an entrepreneur somewhere that is doing that for your customers’ businesses and industries.

But the opportunities don’t have to be that dramatic, they don’t have to be game changing.  Many years ago, I sold a $20 M computer for just one second.  I had the idea that if the customer, a credit card processing company, could save one second on each transaction, they could dramatically improve customer service, retention, and employee satisfaction and productivity.  The operations VP didn’t have a problem, he just needed to make sure the transactions were processed efficiently and correctly.  He was doing that well, but he was so busy, he never had the time to consider doing something differently.

Another client was so busy competing and trying to grow in their traditional markets, they didn’t realize  there was a whole new set of customers they could address.  With only some new marketing materials and a sales team focused on the new market, they created an entire new revenue stream.

Sales people need to be opportunity solvers.  Sales people need to help their customers see what they can’t see.  Sales people need to change the conversation–to move beyond just talking about problems, but to helping their customers discover new opportunities.

What are you doing to help your customer discover new opportunities?

I can imagine any buyer encountering this post is going to groan.  The last thing customers need is a pushy sales person.  We know the type.  After the friendly, “Howdy,” or “Hello,” as soon as possible, the conversation shifts to “I want to sell you something,” or “I need a sale,” or “When am I getting the order?”

The last thing we need is a sales person trying to sell us something we don’t want or need.  We don’t want to waste our time with sales people who only care about the order or their commission checks.  That kind of pushiness is misdirected and totally inappropriate.

But, we do need to be much more pushy!  We need to help our customers–I think the solution is not backing off, working with the customer at their pace, but I think we need to be aggressive to the point of “appropriate” pushiness.

As sales people, our job is to help our customers achieve their goals.  Whether it’s to solve problems they have, help them address new opportunities, our role is to demonstrate how our solutions can help them to achieve their goals.

Time to solution, time to results, payback are all critical concepts–they should be very important to our customers. It’s our responsibility as sales people to help our customers accelerate their ability to get the results.  We can’t let our customers cheat themselves from a single dollar, euro, yuan, yen of additional revenue, cost savings, or profit.

But our customers struggle with buying.  They have trouble aligning themselves around a problem definition, they struggle in defining requirements, they search for alternatives—all while trying to hold down their day jobs.  They get diverted, the project slows.  Sometimes, they get consumed in the transaction–worried more about the price, focusing on what they are buying, not why they are buying.  They say, “Maybe later.”

Sometimes there’s a window of opportunity.  If they don’t make a decision on a key component, or program, they’ll miss a product launch, they’ll miss a key event.

A few months ago, I was pushing a prospect for a decisions, I was anxious to move ahead.  The customer misunderstood.  The key executive said, “Dave, we need to slow down.  We’re just not sure we should do this.”  I responded:  “I’m really worried about this.  I’m worried that every month we wait, you are missing a minimum of $20M in revenue.  I know revenue and growth is a top concern for everyone in the organization.  I just can’t stand to see you losing that much new revenue every month.”

All of a sudden things changed. The customer had gotten so involved in the task, they lost track of what they were trying to achieve. Realizing what was at stake, realizing that I wasn’t concerned about “the order,” but was focused on helping them achieve their results changed the conversation. Within 24 hours we decided to move forward.

That example may be a little dramatic, but as sales people we see this every day. Customers need to produce results. They need help, they sometimes lose their way. They need leadership. It’s our responsibility as sales people to help accelerate their attainment of their goals. We need to be appropriately aggressive and pushy.

A couple of days ago, I was coaching a client on a stalled opportunity.  Their customer was dragging their feet on a decision.  The customer had a critical product launch coming up.  My customer and their competition had a 3-4 month lead time in supplying their components of the product.  We were reaching the critical deadline for my client to meet their customer’s goals.  If the customer didn’t make a decision, their launch date would have been impacted.  Every month they deferred the launch meant lost opportunity in a highly competitive market.  Additionally, their customer had already bought “shelf space”  in the retailers for the product.  Missing the deadlines would have meant empty shelves and lost money.  I advised my client to get pushy with their customer–not for the order, but for the customer to realize their goals and to not waste what might have been millions of pesos.

We have to first earn the right to be pushy.  We have to focus on the customer’s problems and goals.  Our solutions need to produce distinctive business value.  The customer has to understand and buy into that business value.  Then our focus has to be on how we help our customer get that value, how we can accelerate it, how we can reduce the risk.  We can only be pushy when the customer knows our motivation is for their success–not our personal deadlines and goals.

Our impatience must be focused on helping them achieve their results, not on getting our order.  After all, our goals–both our customers’s success and getting the order are aligned.  If the customer achieves their goals, then we will achieve ours.

It’s important to be impatient with our customers.  It’s important to be pushy.  We want our customers to be successful.  We want them to start seeing the benefits to their business as soon as possible.  As long as our focus is on the customer and helping them get the results they need to achieve, pushiness is never wrong.

Innovation In Sales—sounds a little like an oxymoron, something like sales intelligence.  I was intrigued by the question my friend Lauren Harper posed on Focus.

Innovation is critical.  The pace at which customers are changing the way they buy, demands rapid change and innovation.  Without it, we  will be left behind.  We will become uncompetitive, our products and services will be commoditized, we will be left to fulfilling orders at the lowest possible price.

Yet innovation is tough–or we make it tougher than it need be.  I think the problem is that we have a tendency to associate innovation with “The Big Idea.”  Coming up with the big idea is tough.  It takes a huge amount of time, very smart insightful people, lots of research and debate.  Implementing the big idea is tougher.  It probably means aligning lots of disparate interests, many moving parts, great change management efforts, and huge risks.  It may take months or years to know if there is a payback.

I tend to like to think of innovation in sales as dozens to hundreds of little ideas or experiments.  Innovation starts with each sales person looking at what they do every day.  Trying something new–perhaps a new way to do a prospecting call, perhaps a different way of engaging the customer in a conversation about what they are trying to achieve, perhaps a different way of presenting a solution.  It’s looking at each deal and asking, “What if I tried something a little different?”  Perhaps it’s exploring personal performance, asking “What can I do to shorten my sales cycle?” ”How do I improve my ability to win?”  It may be asking the customer, “How can I be more effective in working with you?”  Perhaps it’s getting rid of some bad habits.  The biggest enemies of innovation at a personal level is being on autopilot, sticking rigidly to the script, not paying attention, going through the motions.

At an organizational and managerial level, the same principles apply.  It’s encouraging your people to try some different things.  It may be seeing one high impact thing a sales person is doing and sharing that “best practice” with everyone else — letting them experiment and adapt it to their own territories.

Ideas can come from learning from other organizations in other industries (that’s one reason networking events can be really powerful).  It maybe seeing someone or organization doing something clever; then adapting it, tweaking it, and trying it in your own situation or organization.  Reading, attending conferences, constantly learning, also provide great ideas.  It may not come from a conference speaker focusing on the big idea, but from that conversation you had with someone during a break.

Not every idea will succeed, but since you are working on dozens to hundreds of little ideas, the risks of failure are probably very small or even inconsequential.  Plus, even for those ideas that fail–there is something to be learned, perhaps even a new idea or innovation.

Set a goal for yourself and your team to come up with 5 new ideas that can be implemented tomorrow at no cost.  Try them out, throw away those that don’t work, adapt those that do.  When you’ve exhausted those 5, come up with another 5, repeat the same cycle.  Dozens of ideas and innovations, executed rapidly can have a higher and faster payoff then the one “Big Idea.”