Every couple of weeks I get calls from clients asking questions such as, “How do other companies in my industry implement cross-selling?” Or, “How do companies in my industry motivate their teams on multi-year selling?” But they don’t really want to know how other companies in their industry do it. What they want to know is, “What should I do,” because right before they called me, they were grasping for solutions and replicating the status quo.
The Innovative Sale Process is a left-brained thinking process that helps to generate right brain innovation. Sales organizations need the structure of such a method to address the range of variables that define sales challenges and the constraints of time, product, price, and organizational capabilities among others. They also benefit from the defined steps in the process that ensure the team moves beyond the known approaches – the solutions they’ve developed in the past – and pushes through to a phase of discovering new ideas. Sales organizations can use this process to develop external solutions – in customer situations where the need to differentiate determines whether a deal is won or lost. The process can also be used internally for the development of other sales programs, such as a new channel partner plan, a new incentive design process, or a new value proposition for a customer segment that fits within the overall sales effectiveness strategy.
As illustrated above, the Innovative Sale Process consists of four phases: Conditions, Known Approaches, Discovery, and Application; and eight steps within those phases: Define the Challenge and Constraints; Gather Insight; Create the Initial Approaches; Destroy False Assumptions; Combine Parallels; Explore Horizontally; Develop Vertically; and Implement and Communicate. The Innovative Sale Principles are at the center of the Innovative Sale Process.
Last week I discussed principles of innovation. Contact me at mark.donnolo@salesglobe.com with any questions.
We Rethink Sales…
SalesGlobe is a data-driven, creative problem-solving firm for sales that solves the most challenging problems.