Is it possible for a well established corporation to sell radical, disruptive innovation from within?
Yes, it is, I guess,… that’s my story
This corporation has a huge amount of history, very well established in the markets they serve, respected for what they do,… very well known for what they do, before they started to innovate in a radical, disruptive, architectural way, creating new business models to sell new solutions to existing and new customers….
Many challenges need to get faced, focused on and addressed, and today I would like to talk about one of those seemingly impossible ones to solve from within, without bringing in new blood,… that is SELL the new radical, disruptive solutions, products, services.
When you are a company so well known, and your sales teams are so used to sell your core proposition and small variations of it, is it possible to convert them into selling the new? The short answer is that in general,… no,… or not so far.
I would like to share the way we made it happen, my experience, as the person in charge of creating commercial value out of innovation activity, and I would surely think that this is just food for thought, reality in my case, and replicating it elsewhere is,… perhaps not a science! I trust someone leaves a comment or volunteer your own story on the comments section later on!
So who are those strange people who, from within, made the radical and disruptive innovative solutions appeal to paying customers? who make this happen?
Our reality was that the successful “sales person”, some worked in Sales Departments, some actually did not, the majority, shared few interesting traits:
1. They all had and have a very healthy, strong relationship with their customers
2. They all had a sufficiently in depth knowledge of the markets their customers operated in, their customers’ challenges, pains and potential gains
3. They all gained a good understanding of what my innovation team did, and why we did it.
4. They all shared a passion for being part of creating the future of our company, first of its kind offerings to our markets, they were not shy to ask customers to buy into that future!
My innovation team and I had the pleasure to discover such common traits among these people when they spent time with us, coming from 7 different countries and cultures, while never coinciding together with my team at any given point in time,… they all came, and go, and they all achieved the same,… selling radical and disruptive solutions to customers.
Who are these great people?… they shared some traits, and they shared some key experiences too,… let’s see:
- They all spent time, face to face, with my innovation team, from a minimum of 2 weeks for some up to 2 years for others.
- They all experienced what it takes to creat a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or the Minimum Viable Value (MVV) for customers, so they could differentiate between MVPs and Products.
- They spent time understanding the Value Proposition, what problem the MVP was designed to solved for what customer, so what value would the customer get when buying the innovative solution / MVP.
- They all accepted that the value the MVP would deliver to their customers would be “small”, and yet valuable, for helping customers differentiate / save money / be the ones to thrive first in their markets,… they became comfortable with the fact that selling “the small” was not only worth it but desirable.
The combination of personal traits with the experience gained when merging with creative, passionate, determined to succeed people in disrupting models and offerings did make these “sales people” be successful from within, and build trust to last between innovation teams and them.
In this is another key learning for me,… as we worked together, and created the way to be successful together, without realising we innovated a new way of working as a team,…. A Network,… a level plane field where there are no organisational lines, where we all belong, working in an agile way, sharing data, trusting each other, more so now that they are all back to their countries of origin and are not sharing face to face time with my innovation team located at UK. Magic! Fun! Rewarding!
In conclusion
For us, selling the radical and disruptive new from within came down to these 4 things:
- Build trust by belonging, with common purpose
- Work like a Network, agile, digital, no middle layers
- Strong customer intimacy, shared
- Passionate to be the first to give differentiated valuable value to customers
A handful of the right people,… curiously enough 80 % of them did not even worked in sales!… that is all we needed to start being successful.
My innovation team and I love them
They love what we do
… some of them may love us… !?
Magical fun!
