To begin the innovation process in your company, consider these common barriers to innovation:

1. Lock-in. “Lock-in” describes an organization’s dogged commitment to business models, products, behaviors, processes and perceived benefits. Lock-in is beneficial because its standard operating procedures create efficiency within a company and drives growth as long as the success formula is working. However, when the market changes, rigid adherence to lock-in will stifle innovation and sink a company.
2. Defend and extend management. This is a practice of defending core values, procedures, services, products and customers, and seeking incremental opportunities to grow by extending those cores.  Practitioners of defend and extend management view innovations as threats and are often late to adapt to market changes.

Successful innovation requires that your company promote and adapt to those things the marketplace rewards. Here’s a four-step strategy to drive innovation within your company and industry:

1. Stop defend and extend strategies. Instead of focusing on core products, core services, core markets, core business practices and core technologies, which seems the natural thing to do, focus on future scenarios. Scenario planning can identify innovations and their future value.
2. Attack competitors’ lock-in. Focusing on competitors’ lock-in shows how to put them at risk, and it also surfaces your own lock-in situation and how to manage it. You can find new innovations and the incentive to develop them by attacking your competitors’ lock-in.  Nothing helps to motivate your team like attacking an arch-nemesis with a new plan.
3. Create Disruptions. When launching an innovation, it’s critical to create internal disruptions which overturn old lock-ins. Disruptions are not problems caused by market changes. Disruptions are internally generated decisions to attack lock-in and reassess the status quo.
4. Create and maintain “white space.” Innovators must have their own place/space and mandate to develop new success formulas, aligned with new market requirements.  They must have permission to operate outside of and even violate corporate lock-ins.  And they need sufficient resources of manpower and money, even if this means taking some of the budget from the traditional business.

All companies can adapt to today’s changing markets.  Although in tough times the gut reaction may be to “protect the core,” it is innovation which leads to long-term sales growth and higher profits.  Those who move quickly to adopt innovation, becoming part of the market shift, will come out stronger and more successful.

The recession is technically over; however, sales teams are still facing more competitors going after the same projects, price pressures, or the new competitor—prospects doing nothing.

 The recession is also testing sales managers to see if they can provide sales environments that keep their sales teams’ heads up and hearts engaged. Here are six tips for leading your sales team in this post-recession economy.   

#1 – Seek out good news. Assign each salesperson with finding good news and sharing it with the rest of the team.  

#2 – Step up your coaching efforts. Conducted role plays with your sales team to see if they know how to quantify the cost of the problem or the gain of an opportunity? This selling skill is KEY in a buying environment where cost justification is king. 

#3 – Decrease desperation. In desperation, salespeople don’t take the time to build trust, make deposits in the relationship account, and practice the law of reciprocity. Remember: processes are efficient, while relationships are not.    

#4 – Balance something old and something new. Social media is the new mode of prospecting. Teach your sales team to integrate new social media with old principles of influence and selling skills. Social medial marketing tools create the opportunity, but selling skills close the opportunity.

#5 – Revisit negotiation skills and strategies. Discuss with your sales team the mindset they need to possess during tough economic times. If your sales team is not convinced on the value they  can bring, why would the prospect invest with your company? Work with the sales team on strategy and tactics. Many salespeople drop price without any concession from the prospect which is a win-lose strategy, and leads to a transactional sale versus a value sale. Caving in too quickly on price also creates distrust. The prospect is thinking, “If you lowered your price that quickly, why wasn’t it lower in the first place?”

#6 – Inspire and motivate. As a sales manager and share “tough times” stories with happy endings. Never underestimate the power of motivation. Leaders are made famous by their inspirational rhetoric. There is a time to train and coach. There is also a time to inspire and motivate.

Put your leadership hat on. Help your sales team keep their heads up and hearts engaged. Good sales leaders are needed now more than ever.  Now, that’s good news.  

Source: Vistage International