Rye D’Orazio      rdorazio@rayandbarney.com

I recently had the pleasure of attending an Innovation Summit put on by Tech Columbus (www.TechColumbus.com).   During this Summit, we were exposed to many of the successful Innovative ideas businesses are currently using.  Innovation can help a company develop product and service offerings and gain competitive advantage all while increasing efficiencies and reducing costs.  We discussed a myriad of Innovative ideas, including:

• Yahoo Hack Days
• Call Center guidelines for help desk workers to ‘just solve the customer’s problem’, with no time limits, no number of calls tracked
• We heard about an electronics retailer offering total flex time for retail workers

All of these Innovations resulted in increased performance and profits, new offerings or superior customer service.

This got me to thinking, what are things we can do as sales professionals to stir a culture of innovation, out of the ordinary thinking?  Would, perhaps, a day a month to explore innovative ideas help us to increase sales performance and generate revenue?    Maybe as Sales Professionals we can use Innovation to get more meaningful meetings, to get in front of our target prospects, to keep clients and consumers.  We need to consider how we, as sales professionals, can discover Innovation, particularly in relation to marketing, product development or service delivery teams.   We need to ask ourselves, have we looked at Non-traditional ways to foster innovation and creative thinking?

Professor Neeli Bendapudi quoted Albert Einstein, “Not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts.”  We often are so numbers and metrics driven that we may miss the valuable things outside of what we count that really count.   Part of the TechColumbus Innovation conference was a talk by bestselling author Daniel Pink, who discussed the science of behavior and the mismatch between how businesses work and how they incent.   The power of incentives for innovation worked on simple problems, but not where creative, perceptual or cognitive thinking was required. The more complex issues were solved quicker by the non-incented group. Daniel Pink calls it intrinsic motivation.  Here is a video with more info from Daniel Pink:

As Sales Professionals, we need to look at how we incent and if it is broadening or limiting creativity.

Are you willing to maybe have a paradigm shift in our thinking and in how we incent and motivate?  In what other Sales areas might a jolt of innovation help improve the success of our work?