Excerpt from a SalesGlobe Sage YouTube interview (April 17, 2014) with Mark Donnolo describing six principles of the "innovative sale": pattern, variety, unity, contrast, movement, and harmony. He explains each principle in practical sales terms (comfort with ambiguity/pattern, idea abundance/variety, team-role unity with productive divergence, openness to contrast/criticism, patient movement through process, and harmony/integration into existing processes). He also notes these principles can be used to measure individuals' "functional creativity" and guide team composition for sales innovation.
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Now, you had just mentioned some principles of the innovative sale and how that works. Can you tell us a little bit about those?
Sure. So that was one of the questions we asked is what are the characteristics of innovation or creativity? And also what are the characteristics of people that are innovative or creative? And we boiled that down to six different principles that describe those characteristics. And there are a number of different, what we call imperatives within those principles. And. And these principles are really characteristics that are good reminders and guideposts, but they're also characteristics of a person. So we actually used some artistic terms, but they have very practical sales meanings. So the principle of pattern, which is basically having a creative context or an ability to think in a creative way. So characteristics there would be that you would feel comfortable in an undefined situation. We talk about the idea of being comfortable being lost in any creative endeavor. If you're going on and you're doing something new, there's a period of time where you might feel a little unsure, a little lost. And that's usually when people pull back and they go back to what they're comfortable with versus pushing through and seeing what's on the other side. So creative context around pattern variety or idea abundance. So one characteristic of creativity is I'm not coming up with one idea. And rarely do creative people come up with one idea. And that's the answer. It's having a range of ideas and an abundance of ideas and divergence of ideas and unity, or how you work on the team. So the dynamic of people working together, as I mentioned before, you're better off having a little divergence within the team itself versus people that all think alike. So we want to make sure we have that right combination of people and they're playing the right roles. And these are not formal organization roles. In fact, when we have a good sales innovation team, you may have the VP of sales and several salespeople and somebody in sales operations on the sales team, but they have to drop their formal roles. They take on roles of innovation within that team. Contrast is another principle. So you're pushing boundaries, you're getting comfortable with criticism of your ideas. And very often when you come up with a new idea or creative idea, you'll hear comments from people like, well, what are you trying to do there? Does that really make sense? And you have to get comfortable with that, with pushing through that. So contrast in terms of pushing those boundaries, movement in terms of the patience to work through the process, as I mentioned before. So you don't necessarily need to jump to an answer, but you've got to let that answer flow through. And then finally, harmony, which is integration. Harmony is really the idea of coming up with an innovative approach and then fitting that within the existing world so most innovations don't get dropped in cold. Most innovations integrate in with another process or something else that's happening. So being sensitive to how your new idea is going to work. So we can also take those six principles of pattern, variety, unity, contrast, movement, and harmony. And we can measure people's functional creativity there as well, so we can look at their characteristics and comfort level around those different areas and know how they can strengthen or where they may play well on a sales innovation team.
