By Mark Faust @ Echelon Management

We have seen sales and profits literally double in less than three months at companies where 10% annual growth was the standard for generations. How can sales increase so much so fast? Sales innovation is the process of identifying and implementing new ideas into your sales process every month.

We will share insights we’ve learned from the best and fastest growing sales organizations. The objective is to help you reach what is one of the top two goals for the vast majority of readers; optimizing growth of sales and profits.

Not long after starting our sales improvement firm 17 years ago, we realized that teaching techniques is not the root key to continuous growth. Rather working to instill a culture and habit of continuous sales innovation is the key to fostering a team toward a more aggressive growth of their business to its fuller potential. One process you can implement with your team right now is to start an I-Power program with all those whom have any influence on sales. Require every person to come up with one sales improving idea every week or month or for perhaps every sales meeting or some other regular function. Commit to implementing one new idea every month or more if possible.

We have seen a focus on fostering new ideas around sales growth to be one of the most profitable habits for a company to implement. As many research efforts have proven, a genuine effort to foster innovation is one of the most profitable management interventions period.

The dean of management theory, Peter Drucker was the direct inspiration for the transformation of Martin Edelston’s company Bottom Line Publishing and the resulting book I-Power, which is a business classic about how to implement an innovation program at any company and how there will be a resulting increase in profits, sales, team work and even esprit de corps. We have implemented such programs at many companies only to see the results be nothing less than phenomenal.

We highly recommend the I-Power book and the process of formally gathering ideas on a regular basis and committing to implementation and feedback on every idea gathered.

A few principles for making an innovation process effective are the following:

• Require participation. Everyone must submit a minimum of so many ideas per a period of time
• Create an Innovation Team that will review each idea and respond to every one with either a request for more information, how and when you will implement it, and/or a personal acknowledgment and thank you for the idea. This thank you is most effective coming from the top leader of the team. A handwritten note of just four words works like high octane fuel being poured into the untapped creative dragster mind engines on your team
• Reward ALL ideas. Edelston suggested a $1 bill for every idea and a $10 for every idea implemented. We’ve seen these same amounts (and cash is a must! No $1 checks please) work wonders to underline the appreciation and encouragement of more participation. Sometimes there may be bigger awards or even percentages of money saved or made from an idea, but a minimum gift with the thank you is key to showing the value leadership puts around this process

Peter Drucker wrote of how the two major functions of a business were marketing and innovation. They go hand in hand, and we promise you that you will reap a tremendous ROI if you implement an I-Power process on your team.