Innovate Your Way to Profitable Sales Growth

If you want to help your company remain alive and competitive, to improve its business performance, and be leaner and more productive, then why not practice innovation. The more successful companies do, and there is no shortage of tools to help you with it. (For some examples, see: 27 Creativity and Innovation Tools – list by Marc Heleven; or All Creativity Tools at CreatingMinds.org)

Innovation is not just about the radical, disruptive or breakthrough technologies. The concept of innovation is broader and includes the less dramatic, everyday improvements that often stem from individuals closest to the work, the frontline workers in the day-to-day operations of businesses, bringing in new or fresh ideas, novel methods or processes, or the never-before-tried solutions that emerge from the work to be done. Let’s celebrate, support, encourage and richly reward them for this. (You can find lots of help online, using keyword searches. Try: how to encourage innovation. This will bring up these two near the top of the list: “18 Ways to Actively Encourage Company Innovation,” or, “6 Ways to Encourage Innovation at Your Company.“)

Among the more ‘innovative’ businesses that celebrate, support and encourage their employees, perhaps most well-known in recent times is Google. Some of the Google innovation pillars may be ones you can use within your own organization. Another one is Procter and Gamble (P&G). You can read what is said about P&G’s support of innovation here: “Innovation.” And, check out their Connect + Develop program. Some of P&G’s early ‘innovations’ other than products occurred in ideas such as profit-sharing, selling directly to retailers, reaching customers through their radio soap operas, and the creation of their Consumer Relations department. Yet another company of note is Xerox. See their Innovation pages. And, let’s not overlook 3M. See their YouTube video. “The Innovative Culture of 3M,” and see the Harvard Business Review article by Vijay Govindarajan and Srikanth Srinivas, “The Innovation Mindset in Action: 3M Corporation,” for insights into their continuing success.

Innovation tools help us to generate ideas, but why not also review what “innovative” businesses are doing, so you can extract ideas and successful concepts to try and replicate or modify to suit your own business. With a little research, you can find lists of ‘innovative companies’ to study, and then pick successful concepts from among them that would seem best suited to replicate or modify to suit your business. With sufficient research and a comparison of ideas from competitors and/or companies outside your industry, you will have an abundance of options from which to choose.

See what Fast Company offers in its recent lists, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2023,” “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies 2022,” “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies 2021,” “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies 2020,” “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies 2019,” “The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2018.” The lists go back to 2008 and appears to keep going forward (simply change the year in the URL to find the year).

Or, Explore the 50 Most Innovative Companies Over Time interactive chart from the Boston Consulting Group.

‘For profit’ organizations are sustained by … what? Profit. So, profitable sales are a fundamental goal. And, for all but the no-growth-by-choice ‘lifestyle’ businesses, profitable sales ‘growth’ is also a goal … and ideally not sales volume growth at the expense of profits, but growth with at least stable, if not increasing profit margins.

So, in the remainder of this post, I offer a basic (certainly not exhaustive) outline of areas where innovation in sales and marketing can help, while setting aside ideas for improving business support areas (e.g., HR, Accounting), perhaps for a later article. May you find this useful to your ‘innovation’ efforts.

Ansoff’s Matrix is a valuable tool by which to organize growth strategy ideas, and I segment the outline below by the two verticals … Existing Products (or services) and New Products (or services) … while addressing the horizontal elements — existing markets and new markets — within each vertical to simply the task.

Achieve Profitable Sales Growth with Existing Products or Services

→ Create and implement “innovative” sales incentives to:

• encourage your best current customers to buy more or buy more often
• win customers from competitors (ideally higher-margin ones)
• win new, first-time customers to your product or service category

→ Encourage and reward your sales teams to find new and better, more cost-effective ways to achieve sales.
→ Create new, cost-effective ways to improve how well you retain your better customers.
→ Develop new and ideally higher-margin channels and territories where customers can buy your product or service, e.g., distributors, partners, resellers, franchisees, licensees, alliances; other locations (far and wide if possible, exporting), new points of purchase.
→ Experiment with new ways customers can buy from you … e.g., mobile location purchases, trade-in, layaway, online; subscription.
→ Improve your current offerings by adding what customers want in new features; new elements that improve quality, dependability, delivery; newer technology they will appreciate … driving up their loyalty and repeat purchases.
→ Create complementary products or services customers are willing to buy from you.
→ Offer new bundles of products or services that customers find useful.
→ Find and develop a new niche market you can dominate, one where the application of your product or service is unique and not served by competitors.

Achieve Profitable Sales Growth with New Products or Services

→ For your current customer segment, develop a new product or service that includes current or newer technology.
→ For a new customer segment, develop a new product or service that includes current or newer technology.
→ Develop your own ‘alternative,’ ‘replacement’ or ‘substitute,’ offering that essentially does the same thing as other similar products or services you find in the market.

Perhaps it goes without saying … successful new product development is customer-focused, not engineer- or designer-focused. And, ideally, you will also understand the number and strength of competitors and competing alternatives, replacements or substitutes, along with the realistic number of potential users and the price they will pay.

Finally, have fun with your innovation efforts. Inject playfulness to stimulate ideas. And, don’t fear ‘failure’ but simply re-position it, as Thomas Edison did.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
– Thomas Edison

(For a more serious study of innovation since the Middle Ages, see: “Innovation: the History of a Category,” Benoit Godin, 2008.)

Feel free to contact me directly on anything with respect to this topic:
chris@christopheranacker.com.  You can also send me an email with the Subject: Marketing & Sales Assessment Worksheet, and I’ll send you a .pdf version of the assessment worksheet.

Photo attributions:

• Business Graph Photo: Image courtesy of jscreationzs at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
• Business Graph on Chart: Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
• Light Bulb With Drawing Business Plan Strategy Concept Idea:
  Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG at FreeDigitalPhotos.net