Sales Innovation Habits- Mark Donnolo, Author of The Innovative Sale

I was thinking about when you were saying how people have this rote process that they go through. So they might be at a company where this is what they've always done. So it would be more of a top down approach to it to get the process changed.

Well, I think that's a really good question about how you actually make a change like this. And one comment we hear back from people is, well, I'm not in an innovative organization, therefore we aren't really innovators. And it can happen within teams, it can happen from the bottom up. So it can happen with an individual or a small group or a sales team that starts working together a little bit differently. Certainly you can start to create a culture change in a company by doing that as well and by creating a message about how we're going to think differently. But you need to help people learn how, what they do differently in order to get there. But I think this is the kind of thing we see being done in companies where it's not necessarily mandated or promoted as a corporate program, but it's just a different way of thinking as a team or as an individual.

Okay. In the book, if I recall correctly, you talk about some creative habits that people have. So I was wondering if you can share with us some examples of successful business people and some of their creative habits.

That's a great question. I think we tend to think of some of the really high profile examples right off. So you think of people like Richard Branson and he's certainly a great example where he's been a serial innovator or creative thinker. In fact, we've got a great story about him in chapter one of the book and how with Virgin Atlantic he had to do some creative work around how to configure the planes to target a different audience. But I think it's the people that are doing it in real life that are doing it within companies that make a difference. And I think about people, if I just go off the top of my head, a few people that I think about as sales innovators, guy like Boland Jones. Boland is the CEO of a company called pgi, which is a conferencing company, a rapid innovator, a lot of idea abundance. Jeff Connor, who's chief revenue officer at Aramark in Philadelphia, same type of thing. They integrate it into their sales process. Mark Hahn, who had sales for Ernst and Young, same type of thing. If you look at some of the commonalities of what these people are doing, the first thing they're doing is they're not jumping to an answer, they're not jumping to a solution. They're stepping back and they're pausing to think. And that, I think is one of the important things is that what we tend to do immediately is say, oh, this is the way we did at IBM, or this is the way we did it in another place and we kind of acquiesce to the alpha dog in the room, or we just grab something that has worked before because we're under pressure, we've got a quota to hit, so we need to move quickly. So stepping back is one important characteristic. Taking a look at the problem and redefining the problem is another thing that I see being done as a good habit. And what that means is as the customer describes to you or the client describes to you what they're looking for, that's not always the thing that you should be solving for. They're describing to you one level or one dimension of that. And if you just take that client problem and take it at face value, you're going to be solving the same problem as all of your competitors. Right? So you're starting from a non differentiated starting point. If you can redefine that problem by looking at its different characteristics around what's happening with their product or their applications, what's happening financially, what's happening with their market, in terms of the users, of what they're providing, what's happening in terms of resources. There are different dimensions or questions you can ask to redefine the problem. Then you're starting with a differentiated starting point and you're solving a different problem with your competitors. So that's a big characteristic. I think the idea abundance, divergent thinking and combining ideas is another characteristic that we see. So instead of saying, well, I've got a couple ideas, usually innovators will have a range of ideas. They may have five or six or seven or more ideas, and then they have to cull those down into what we think of as vertical development into the ones that work. And probably the other characteristic is the right team. So we don't do this alone. In many cases, the idea of having people to work with or collaborate with, whether it's a formal team or an informal team, is very powerful. So you want to have a mix of people that are not necessarily the same people that you always work with. So a mix of familiarity. So having some people with different ideas is not a bad thing to do. That can help you push your thinking.