How to Come Up With Big Ideas That Will Make Your Business Succeed
Posted By Co-Pilot on December 16, 2009
If you want to be important to your business, make the goals of your business important to you.
Don’t wait to be given the challenge. Take it upon yourself to figure out how your company can grow its profits — and how you can make a contribution to that goal.
This is what good business leaders do. They face problems, seek out opportunities, and take responsibility for moving the business forward. If you are “just an ordinary employee” right now, don’t let that stop you. A fundamental rule for success is this: Do the work today that you hope to be doing in the future.
So how do you — a mere cog in the machine — contribute to the future of your business?
Start small, with a single problem-solving idea. Like a way to fix a machine that keeps jamming. Or a better way to report your marketing results. Or the name of a cheaper vendor to print your marketing literature.
Start looking for ideas in your own area of expertise first. If you are in accounting, look for bookkeeping or reporting ideas. If you are in product fulfillment, look for shipping or packaging ideas.
You’ll eventually notice something that is not as good as it should be. When you do, ask yourself, “How could this be better?” Chat with your colleagues. Refine your idea. When it feels right, write a memo to the person who would be in charge of executing it. If the idea is positively received, push to make it happen.
Then get on to another idea. And then another one.
Meanwhile, get in the habit of documenting all of your suggestions in writing. That way, when one of them changes the company’s future and everyone else is trying to take credit for it, you’ll have proof that it was yours.
You’ll notice that each time you present another small-but-good idea, two things will happen:
1. It will be easier for people to accept it as good.
2. It will be easier for you to come up with your next one.
Now, try a medium-sized idea. Maybe one concerning a problem with a process — answering customer-service complaints, dealing with late shipments, overcoming the objections of a perennially cranky but important customer. Bolstered by the success you’ve had in solving small problems, you’ll have little difficulty finding a good idea at this medium level of difficulty.
After your first medium-sized good idea is communicated, come up with more. You can still suggest the occasional small-idea solution — but not as often. At this point, you will have moved yourself up on the ladder of company problem solvers. Most of the smaller problems should be delegated to smaller thinkers. Don’t say so directly. Just imply it.
Once you’ve secured your position among the medium-level thinkers, you will be ready for a major challenge: your first Big Idea.
Coming up with a Big Idea is a big task. It must be important enough to make a difference in your company’s bottom line. It must provide significant benefits for your customers, your employees, and yourself. It should also be cost effective.
Recognize that some people will resent you for your chutzpah. Those who do will be from every tier of the business: your subordinates, your colleagues, and even your superiors. But you will win out over them in the end, because what you are doing is essential for the company’s long-term profitability.
To become (or maintain yourself as) the Big Idea man in your company, focus your thinking on the two or three areas that are critical to your business. For most businesses, these are:
1. generating efficient new sales to produce growth
2. creating vertical, back-end sales to boost profits
3. improving product quality to ensure customer retention
Each of these areas demands a different approach.
1. To come up with new selling ideas, you have to become a student not only of your own company’s selling strategies but also of the selling strategies of your competitors.
When I consult with a business, I make it a policy to study every advertising campaign they have done in recent years, how it performed, what kind of customers it brought in, how much they spent, how much they refunded, etc. I do the same thing with their primary competitors.
In the process, I begin to see the invisible links that support the most successful efforts. And ideas come to me. I wonder what would happen, for example, if A company used the pricing strategy of B company but with the copy approach of D company.
2. To come up with ideas for possible back-end products, focus on the initial advertising campaign — and try to understand what, exactly, the customers responded to.
Were they interested in something that allowed them to work more productively? Or did they want a product that would project a certain image — powerful, professional, or creative? Once you’ve discovered the foundation of those initial sales, you have a psychological basis on which to create many back-end products.
I begin with the premise that what a customer bought once, he’ll buy a second time. And what he bought a second time, he’ll buy again. So I create back-end products that have the same general appeal as the lead-generating product but are different in respect to other factors: pricing, packaging, size, quantity, frequency, etc.
For example, a book that promises to make you feel better about yourself can be repackaged as:
- a $79 audiocassette program
- a series of $15 lessons
- a $599 home-study program
- a $1,950 two-day seminar
By constructing a simple grid with different prices along one axis and different packaging formats along the other, you can often come up with a dozen or more good back-end product ideas in a single sitting.
3. Coming up with good ideas for improving your products is relatively easy. All you need to do is ask.
Ask your customers by phoning them, writing them, e-mailing them, and surveying them. Keep in mind that sometimes they will give you answers that they think are “good answers” rather than truthful answers. So read between the lines.
Ask your customer-service people, too. They understand the major gripes, nagging issues, and market trends that influence your customers’ decisions to buy (or not to buy). And ask the people who make your products, especially those on the manufacturing line. Ask them, “What are the three best things about this product?” and “What are the three worst things about this product?” What they say might astonish you — but also inspire you.
By doing your homework in these three critical areas — front-end sales, back-end development, and product improvement — a constant stream of ideas will keep popping into your head. Run these ideas by trusted colleagues to get their support before you announce them publicly. Based on their feedback, do some refining. And as soon as you have the wrinkles ironed out, present them at company meetings.
Standing up in front of the company and making an argument for change takes guts. And wise men derive their courage from thinking, planning, and testing.
So don’t just shoot from the hip. Carefully plan what you’re going to say. Memorize the first and last sentences of your presentation. Make sure you have impressive and persuasive data to support your claims. Explain how the customer will benefit from the idea — and then explain how the company will too. Summarize your main points succinctly.
Be prepared to have your Big Ideas rejected when you first suggest them. (Almost every one of the Big Ideas I’ve come up with has been.) But if you can be open to criticism and flexible enough to make sensible modifications, your Big Ideas will get better and better — and your critics will eventually become your supporters.
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