Innovation MIA – 100% of the Shots Your Business is Missing

Innovation MIA – 4 Wins Your Business Won’t Get Because You Just Didn’t Try

The clock is ticking! If your business is sitting on the sidelines when it comes to innovation in any of these four areas, you could be ceding big wins to competitors or failing to thrive, simply because of a failure to try.

When you think about some of today’s most successful businesses, those that come to mind are also those that are doing a lot of things right beyond the operational functions that are necessary to actually run the business. In many cases, that meant innovations – trying things that other businesses had not tried before and creating competitive advantages in the process.

A great example of this type of innovation is a company that started right in our own backyard, Starbucks®, and the risks taken by its founder, Howard Schultz. He risked everything on an idea – an idea that American consumers would enjoy a new kind of “third space” built around a neighborhood coffee café. When his peers and business partners didn’t buy in, he left his 9 to 5 in order to launch his vision in 1986. Fast forward a mere 13 years to 1999 and you find Schultz as the nation’s no. 1 specialty coffee retailer, head of a company with sales nearing the $2 billion dollar mark.

The thing about “the greats” whether in sports or in business is this: The best of the best are never satisfied, and never quit trying to improve. Innovation is the air they breathe, each and every day.

The master of innovation, Schultz continues to take “shots” at new things within Starbucks, including making investments in order to improve conditions for employees as well as implementing new training and operational standards that have dramatically impacted customer relations.

source: Fast Company – Will Starbucks Leap of Faith Pay Off? 

Not every risk taken produced a win; but that isn’t stopping the company from taking “shots” to continually improve. Notably, a few years ago, Starbucks underwent a company-wide re-training which initially produced negative results. Acknowledging the problems publically, the coffee giant ended up with one of the great turnaround success stories of the last decade.

“Whenever I see someone carrying a cup of coffee from a Starbucks competitor, whether it’s an independent coffee shop or a fast-food chain, I take their decision not to come to Starbucks personally. “I wonder what I, as Starbucks’ chairman and ceo, might have done to keep them away and what I might do to encourage them to come back or to try us for the first time.” Howard Schultz Source: http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2014571394_schultzreview23.html

4 Shots Your Business Should Take if You Want to Win – Innovation in Action

1. Ask employees what they want.

It’s hard to find a business success story that does not point to an organization that invested in its employees in some significant way, whether it comes down to compensation, culture or environment.

Why not:

• Ask employees about what is important to them
• Ask employees where they want to be in a year, five years or at the end of their careers
• Ask employees what type of benefits are most important to them
• Ask employees how the working environment could be improved
• Ask employees if there is anything they need to do their job better
• Ask employees if there is anything you could do to do your job better

2. Find out what (really) matters to customers.

It’s easy to believe that you know what your customers want and what matters most to them instinctively, especially if you have been in business for a while. However, as mega-retailer JCPenney proved in the past few years, it’s possible that you might not know what your customers want after all. As a result, you run the risk of eliminating things that are important to them or wasting resources to add products, services or brand changes they don’t want at all.

Why not:

• Include key stakeholders in change planning, including customer opinion using surveys, polls, focus groups and participation
• Invite customer opinion through a variety of channels including in-store suggestions, social media, email, and web forms

3. Build a referral bridge between satisfied customers and your sales pipeline.

How many satisfied customers walk in and out of your doors (or arrive on and leave your website) every day? Every week? Every month? Compared to those figures, how many times are you asking for referrals, reviews, ratings and feedback?

Why not create a post-sale customer engagement marketing strategy in order to:

• Generate a quantity of positive online reviews, company and product ratings
• Re-engage customers at the point in time when the buying cycle is likely to begin again
• Request and incentivize referrals that produce new customers

4. Turn your website into an engagement hub.

Back to our coffee success story, Starbucks. One might wonder whether a business model that can only work with brick and mortar stores would bother with tactics designed to drive web traffic. However, Starbucks actually “pays” its store evangelists to visit its website and register so that all of their purchases and other activities can be rewarded.

Starbucks led the way in allowing patrons to buy gift cards on their website that are actually customized with their favorite artwork, and where businesses can order cards for employees, for corporate gifts, for drawings and contests, etc., and even add their own logo.

Even if all of your sales are made in-store, you can set yourself apart from competitors and increase engagement with prospects earlier in the buying cycle as well as with customers by turning your website into an engagement hub.

Why not:

• Ensure that your website is optimized and has adequate content to help you move up higher in search engine placement, so that you can attract more visits among prospects at any stage of the buying cycle
• Design your website in terms of the journey a customer or a prospect would take (where do they arrive, what do they do next, what questions are they most likely to be asking, etc.)
• Forego corporate jargon, lingo and personality and infuse a real “voice” into the content visitors find on your website, blog and social networks

***

We are in the business of helping other businesses innovate, take risks and win.  Our financing tools could be an ideal way to fund innovative ideas and make business improvements in your organization. Request a free no-obligation quote to find out more about our working capital and cash flow solutions: